Dishonest, scammy AliExpress games – and a towel from drippy dick (#R21)

AliExpress occasionally does have some great promotions, and they’re usually linked to their games in the subpar phone app. Often times, some base promotion is available to everyone, and additional discounts can be gained by game progress. I’m not sure why that is, since advertisement inside the games is limited, shopping is clunky and very limited, and one is generally better off picking items outside of the games. Nowadays I’m just assuming it’s a time waster for western people paid for by the Chinese state, that seems to be the most reasonable explanation of the whole shebang. […]

26th May 2024 27th May 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

Refrigerator Odor Eliminator Air Purifier Deodorizer USB O3 Ozone Air Purifier Food Preservation Deodorizing Fridge Freshener (WHL #99)

Ozone generators – the heroes of fart neutralization :D
(or something along those lines…)

I recently got a portable ozone generator that is powered from a single 18650 lithium cell, at a whopping 6.39€ from AliExpress. I already own two of the units BigClive once described as “Twinkies“, due to the fact he recommended this style of unit because of its circuitry. Unfortunately I ordered the wrong ones with 4x AA battery supply instead of a 18650 cell – it wasn’t clear in the description and I couldn’t be bothered as the units were 4.82€ back in late 2021. […]

12th May 2024 12th May 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

Tecknet TK-WD004 doorbell 230V AC to USB conversion (WHL #98)

A while back, the landlords decided to toss the old doorbell system. It was fine for ringing, but the audio part was troublesome (50Hz hum of some transformer supply), plus the physical call buttons were mashed multiple times by some brutes and beyond repair. I never used the phone system, it’s just two meters away from the actual front door. The landlords also didn’t bother, because opening the actual door (plus their apartment door) can’t be done electrically, so someone still needs to dash down. It’s a bit of a granny flat situation, so live on ground level and they take up the rest of the building. […]

28th April 2024 29th April 2024 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

Improved OpenSCAD battery holder script (BigClive) (WHL #97)

A while back, BigClive used to share OpenSCAD snippets in a lot of his DIY videos, allowing viewers to print (and modify) things that he figured out for the specific video. One of those was the battery holder script, a simple array of square-packed cylinders that were hollowed out from one side, in order to, well, hold things like batteries, or hex bits, or screwdrivers, or …

I recently had the urge to store a bunch of batteries in a nice way and began modifying the simple 33-line script. Couple of viewers already suggested changes like center holes, and since OpenSCAD scripts are just plain text, they were able to share their modifications in the comment section. […]

14th April 2024 15th April 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

MicroSD speed comparison – genuine cards and a Chinese fake (WHL #96)

Since I don’t want to become the BigClive of the text blogging world, I pretty much have to stop rambling about fake flash drives (NVMe, SATA SSD, USB drives and SD cards) from China. Clive himself knows that too much ozone content makes his audience yawn ;)

So, as Easter (read: the couple holidays around it) is a great opportunity to run some backups and digitally clean up the place, here’s a quick speed test comparison on the history of MicroSD cards. It all started with my troublesome RPi4 having high iostat values all the time, leading to a new card for my laptop backup drive, which in return handed down his MicroSD to the Pi. […]

31st March 2024 16th June 2024 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

Brand New Portable SSD 1TB 2TB External Hard Drive Type-C USB 3.0 High-Speed External Storage Hard Disks For Laptops/Desktop/Mac (WHL #95)

AliExpress and their stupid game rules finally made me (inadvertently) buy* something that I heard about at least 13 years ago…a full-sized USB hard disk that only houses a tiny USB stick!

*Ackchyually, that is not quite correct. Like with the NVMe drive of WHL #92 that took me a long time to get refunded (and it only happened via PayPal, since AE to this day strongly believes in returns to fake warehouses in Afghanistan), this one also ended in a dispute and now I get to return it in exchange for a full refund. This time, though, to a warehouse in Germany, so I unfortunately cannot keep it, but now that I know how to find these…

But first things first, this is the fake USB drive that I remember seeing all over the interwebs:

Funny back then, but it probably consisted of a fully working USB drive, just a very small one compared to the expected HDD. […]

17th March 2024 18th March 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

The Ender 5 PlusPlus and some toasty PETG (#E21F5)

Time flies…

Six months and I think 3 spools of matte PLA later, the Ender 5 Plus is now pretty close to shape I want it to be. There’s a fully custom panelized and gridded bottom section now that carries all electronics above and the 230V input below the 80×40/40×40 extrusion layer. There’s an optimized holder system around (left, right, back) for the 60cm LED panels. There’s stiffening triangles on every corner now, except for the front top extrusion that is moved down a couple centimeters so the bed/nozzle is visible during setup. […]

3rd March 2024 7th July 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

NEW LSI 9300-16i 12Gbps SAS-3 PCIe x8 HBA P16 IT mode ZFS TrueNAS UNRAID (WHL #94)

Here’s a quick and simple one: Cooling advice for 16-port SAS cards.

The LSI 9300-16i cards have gotten surprisingly cheap over the past months. Dirt cheap, in fact. All-16 port SAS cards are traditionally pretty pricey, even though they are “just” two 8-port cards on one PCB. In the past 10, maybe 15 years, there was never a time when buying a 16-port card (used or new) was cheaper than buying two 8s. Sure, sometimes people needed a single-card solution (availability of PCIe slots, PCIe lanes, or space in general), but the usual recommendation for 16-bay chassis like my Supermicro 836 was always to buy 2×8 instead of 1×16. […]

18th February 2024 18th February 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

Kautschuk Platten Dämmmatten selbstklebend Isolierung XT | 32mm Dämmdicke (WHL #93)

Back to 3D printing for a bit – still lots of changes to the printer, but this one might be interesting to a wider audience: Thermal insulation of the print bed (hard data at the very end of this post!).

You see, the stock Ender 5 Plus printer bed comes pre-“insulated”:

Soo…that is a 3mm mat of black foam material that is glued down with some obnoxious acetone-soluble gunk, and garnished with a bit of aluminium foil on top. Yup, certainly better than nothing, but it doesn’t even cover the entire area, it’s just inside of the mounting frame. […]

4th February 2024 5th February 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

2023 New Original SSD 990 PRO M2 2280 Nvme PCIe Gen 4.0X4 2TB 4TB Internal Solid State Disk SSD HDD for Laptop/PS5/PC (WHL #92)

Fake flash from China today!

Fake drives have been around for quite some time now, it started out as USB flash drives emulating 2.5″ regular hard disks, scamming some tourists into buying worthless drives (and a pair of hex nuts, to simulate the weight). While classic spinning rust is basically dead for most people’s data transfer needs, fake flash has evolved. Nowadays, a lot of trash flash seems to end up in super-high capacity drives for pennies. There are legit 1 and 2TB USB flash drives, but those are 50€+ and 150€+ respectively, while the Chinesium ones stack up to 128TB and cost less than a tenner (more fake capacity still costs more money, obviously). […]

21st January 2024 22nd January 2024 By Bzzz In 1 Comment