Category: rant


The Contorion promise of precision (#R11)

A quick mocking rant to fill this week’s emptiness a little bit – slightly more enjoyable for those that speak German. Since German engineering was/is synonymous to precision and quality, often times really bad fixes caused by lack of time, materials (including tools) and knowledge/amount of residual fucks are ridiculed by linking them to non-precision materials such as expanding foam (“Bauschaum”) and sanitary silicone (“Silikon”). Both are applied in abundance, more is considered better(er), and of course no excess material is removed afterwards. […]


Kingston memory RMA packaging (#R10F1)

Okay, I admit, this is a cheap post this week. But Kingston asked for it.

After last week’s mail, I got two answers.
#1 from the RMA/tech support guy that I discussed the entire exchange procedure with.

Wir bedauern sehr, dass Sie den Ersatzartikel in einem solchen Zustand erhalten haben.
Das hätte nicht passieren dürfen.
Selbstverständlich werden wir Ihnen den Artikel umgehend ersetzen, denn verbogen sollte er auf keinen Fall verwendet werden.
Ich habe in dieser E-Mail die Kollegen der RMA Abteilung mit kopiert, denn nur dort kann etwas in dieser Sache unternommen werden.

[…]

Kingston memory RMA packaging (#R10)

We haven’t had a rant for over a year now and I just found the perfect topic to change that. Excellent! (change internal voice to Mr. Burns or Big Clive for maximum enjoyment)

A couple weeks ago one of the DDR3 DIMMs in my Fujitsu machine died. Not explosively or anything, and I probably even didn’t notice right away – I just ran low on free RAM and wondered why. The system uses 2x Kingston KVR16E11/8, so DDR3-ECC (non-Reg, just UDIMM), 8GB 2Rx8 1600 MHz CL11, but in 1Gx72 bit instead of 64 bit fashion, as it has that good ol’ parity chip. […]


Construction fails in networking gear (#R9)

Ah well, I’m too lazy to craft another post dealing with things currently in development – let’s rant instead.

A few weeks ago I bought this huge lot of “failed” networking electronics that finally led to having an 8-port PoE switch at home, which is a nice addition – the MikroTik wAP ac finally runs on PoE as intended, the four ports (2x1G, 2x100M) of the Fritz Box router are no longer overcrowded, I did have a good time repairing two of those switches easily and I didn’t even spend a penny on all that thanks to a few sellable items (plus brownie points for donating quite a few more). […]


Spam that made it through my filter (#R8)

Sven from yeah.net made it through my Thunderbird spam filter. Which is notable because all that 163.com crap (which hosts yeah.net as well) is basically dead to me because there is a 1-ε chance that it is spam.

Well, nice that this one came through. A jewel of advertising!

Dear ,

HooHa company is customize wire harness factory in China.

Factory : 17 years experience ,
Staff : 120 people ,
Engineer : 8 people ,
Certificates : IATF16949 , UL , ISO9001 ,
MOQ : 500 pcs ,
Delivery time : 3~4 weeks ,
Working customer : BYD , FIT , CalAmp , Blueview , etc.

If you have any project need customize wire harness, please feel free to let me know.

[…]

AliExpress order list aggregator script and more (#R7)

Things you might already know: AliExpress is a shitty website.

Don’t get me wrong, I shop a lot at AE. But the page is extremely slow due to massive amounts of JavaScript bloat, and aside from JS, it’s hacked together like I would do for a quick proof of concept. That shit would never fly with me, but for AE, it just does the job. When adding bling and JS spinners has priority over code quality…

It also annoys the fuck out of me for resetting to German translation pretty frequently. I. DO. NOT. WANT. YOUR. FUCKING. TRANSLATION. DC-DC buck modules are not money modules. […]


Bloody chip markings (#R6)

Geez. Just wasted half an hour finding a part number with the actual part in my hands. Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I should have slept more or less (noon isn’t too bad on a Sunday, is it?). Maybe chip markings are getting dumber with every nonsense package invented. Maybe I should purchase components on my own so that there’s some mail history about it. Who knows.

Care to find that on your own? Now’s the time.

Hints: That’s not TO-220, obviously. It’s also not D2PAK/TO-262 (available in DPAK, though)

It’s a N-channel MOSFET with LV-TTL compatible gate threshold voltage. […]


The SilverStone parts service is great – and terrible (#R5)

After the recent ingress of computer parts I had to sort, check and get rid of stuff before my apartment overflows. I donated quite a bit at the usual hardware forums, I sold a bit, and I trashed a bunch of older parts. One of the donated things was a SilverStone CFP52B 4-in-3 hotswap case (4x 3.5″ hard disks in a 3x 5.25″ form factor if your case can take such an unit)

Well, that was in use for quite some time. Wonky construction (we call it “lidschäftig”, which apparently is local slang straight from medieval vocabulary) with flexible plastic parts encapsulating the HDD, four rubber mounts each that get ripped apart upon insertion, and a total botch of the front “hotswap” fan assembly. […]


OJADE Mini Plastic 21-Cell Toolbox, Electronic Components IC Chip Storage Box Case (#R4)

I wonder if I should extend or split the “Rant” category? After all, there’s another thing to mock…this time on DX :mrgreen:

Haven’t bought it, but it appeared in my heavily filtered RSS. DX has a limited and apparently redactionally populated inventory, so somebody at DX has to have put this turd online.

What is it? Well, a plain storage box. SKU 504263. 21 cells. 7 per week (starting with Sunday), one for each evening, morning and noon. In that order. Whoever the fuck thought that was a proper arrangement.

“Gramps, did you take your four imperial screws and the one nut for breakfast yet?” […]