Category: rant

Samsung TV custom USB jacks from IKEA? Nope. (#R18F1)

Super quick update on the Samsung USB port with the additional retaining pin: Although I usually don’t watch Youtube Shorts, especially not the ones from BigClive since I just watch the regular video, I recently stumbled upon this:

It’s a review of the smaller IKEA Smahagel USB charger (the one with just a single port). In there, he mentions an anchoring pin of the USB port that he doesn’t really talk about in the main video:

Around 5:44 where the PCB bottom side discussion starts, the USB layout can be seen. I’ve added a couple of arrows to the four regular USB pins and also the USB retainer (next to the L-shaped PCB cutout). […]


RIP Cadsoft/Autodesk Eagle (#R20)

Oh well, looks like we got another piece of software to mourn for…good ol’ Eagle is no more!

Autodesk announced in a recent blog post:

Effective June 7, 2026, Autodesk will no longer sell or support EAGLE. Moving forward, we will continue to invest our energy in Fusion 360 Electronics.

(Note that it says 2026: That’s the end of the support. However, nobody sane will buy into that package from now on and switch again with all their projects in less than three years…)

Sure, the announcement itself was a surprise, but the path was clear once Autodesk tried squeezing out money. […]


RIP RS DesignSpark Mechanical (#R19)

Well,

It looks like RS has pulled the plug on the free Designspark Mechanical 3D modelling software. I’ve only been using it for about three years, starting right on the transition from DSM4 to DSM5, but I spent countless hours with it, making or editing probably close to 100 models, plus opening hundreds more, e.g. recently checking electronic component STEP files before importing them into Altium. OpenSCAD doesn’t really work for complex geometries, and Sketchup, later Google Sketchup, was quickly dismissed when I tried DSM – it’s simply inferior software, at least, it was back in ~2019/2020, plus Google als tried monetizing it at that point. […]


Samsung TV custom USB jacks (#R18)

Dear Samsung,

here’s a random thought: If you already know you’ve fucked up a device design, and you know it so well that your own folks have decided to create a custom solution because it’s obvious the end-user will tear apart a standard part in no time…then maybe (just maybe!)

  • don’t make that special part and fix your impractical design? Reaching inconveniently placed ports with minimal clearance for cables and devices is a terrible user experience in the first place?
  • …or

  • make that part available to everyone (you’re a big company, you can handle that!)
[…]

The WHL Director of Human Resources (#R17)

We at Wan Hung Lo Enterprises have grown considerably over the years. Our new director of HR (so high up he doesn’t even need a name) now sends out strange mails to the peasants that also don’t have a name, not even a number…

Wait a minute, it’s still me running the whole show, TF is that?

Well, looks like Titan Technology (the cooler and fan specialists that were pretty popular fifteen years ago – still in business!) might have lost a bit of their customer database. I think I enquired a long time ago for a datasheet and needed to provide an email address for that; it’s not the one shown below, this mail was received by the catchall option that typically categorizes those mails as spam right away. […]


The 2022 Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo and another useless FLIR video (#R16)

Do I rant too much? I probably do.

Is it unfounded? Probably not.

So, I’ve done a slightly insane yet enjoyable trip to Scotland and covered 2000 miles in 8.5 days, thanks to the wonders of free lifetime supercharging on my Tesla. End point of the trip was the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo show on 25th of September, for which getting a single ticket on the desired “7” block was a bit tricky, but worked out in the end. And while literally hundreds of the crowd of around 9000 people had their phones up quite a lot of the time (does anyone watch those hour long videos of wobbly footage?), […]


The bk Group supercharger lounge revisited (#R15F1)

Well, told ya I’ll be visiting the strange bk world supercharger lounge again. I actually did a month ago, but here we are.
So, the good news first: It’s actually working now. It did require re-registration, but after a couple of minutes of fiddling on the smartphone, I finally got a barcode that unlocked the doors! Let’s just hope this isn’t required ever again, e.g. due to killing inactive accounts or a system migration…

The outside of those two wooden cubes was already featured in the original post #R15, so let’s start inside. […]



ioBroker adapters and Raspberry Pi hardware pricing (#R14)

A quick service post for this week: RPis are pretty expensive nowadays because of “the chip shortage” (and people cashing in) – and maybe you don’t even need an upgrade when just running a couple of ioBroker things on your 1GB unit.

Well, I’ve upgraded my 3B+ from stretch to buster to bullseye earlier today, broke a few things (php8.0-mysql…not a database upgrade issue on ioBroker despite (null) values everywhere), changed swap size from 512M to 2G, and finally installed a docker image (why…) of teslamate. […]


Smartbroker / DAB BNP Paribas have upgraded from papyrus (#R13)

All the Corona troubles make it a slow week for cheapo electronics…again. So here’s something outrageous that I just found out while recycling server parts, fitting and amending the most recent rant nicely.

I got several (snail mail) letters with the recent opening of a banking account with Smartbroker, who somehow use BNP Paribas as their backend and just provide a more fancy user interface with their branding. One contained the password, one contained the user name, one contained the general IBAN and whathaveyou stuff, one even was packaged in two envelopes as it is just transferred from BNP to Smartbroker to me, all for the sake of security (the mail man doesn’t care anymore about the tons of crap that I receive via mail…). […]