Month: December 2019

A pleasant Jetpack support surprise (#E11)

Now something wholesome from grumpy me – around two weeks ago, one of the many WordPress updates caused the subsequent Jetpack update to fail. Jetpack, for those who do not know, is to me mainly a stats extension to the whole WordPress shebang, but they do offer quite a bit more than that, especially in the paid plans (which I do not have). Login security, backups, SEO, you name it. When hosting on wordpress.com, that stuff is included by default, and for self-hosted WordPress installations, it’s basically the first plugin to activate. […]

23rd December 2019 23rd December 2019 By Bzzz In No Comment

12V Portable Auto Car Jump Starter Power Bank Booster Battery Charger 50800mAh (WHL #54)

Some random power bank, we haven’t had those for quite some time now, have we…

This heap of trash actually came from eBay, which nowadays rarely has the best offers for China-shopping. I bought this back in December 2018 for 22.99€ including shipping, and as far as I can recall, I arrived so quickly that it must have been sent from an European warehouse.

The reason for buying a “jump starter” type of power bank was that at the time I had some project running that needed a ~12V supply. In the end, we decided for a different solution, but a 3S lithium cell configuration would have done the job. […]

22nd December 2019 22nd December 2019 By Bzzz In 2 Comments

Brennenstuhl PM 231E power meter zero reading fix (#P19)

Quick fix today – a colleague recently complained to me about his Brennenstuhl Schuko power meter only reading a static “0.0W” regardless of the load that was connected to it. Display was fine, the outgoing Schuko was fine (we checked with a 2kW space heater), but the unit would display no power usage at all.

As there’s no long tri-wing bits (bastards!) at work, I took the unit home only to discover that my bits are also too short to reach the damn screws. He said he didn’t care and was ready to buy another unit (I kindly recommended the ELV Energy Master Basic 2, which will serve as comparison unit later), so I drilled into the case to widen access a little. […]

15th December 2019 15th December 2019 By Bzzz In No Comment

CAT S60 boot loop fix (#P17F1)

Good fucking Lord, that was a ride.
Last Sunday, my phone went out of juice and failed to come back to life. I had some issues with VERY high standby power consumption the entire week before, which caused the 3.8Ah battery to go flat within a work day. And so it did on Sunday when nobody was using it and nobody cared.

Long story short: A friggen weather app created an invalid (cron?) job, which caused the OS to reset indefinitely.

Long version: Boys and girls, root your phones. Even if some idiot banks (1822direkt, *cough*) will block you from running their apps “for security reasons”, having the option to fully backup and restore your phone outweighs that by far. […]

1st December 2019 1st December 2019 By Bzzz In 4 Comments