After I’ve now had the second device with some design flaw that causes it to fail just slightly outside of the warranty period, I wanted to write down my experiences. Synology DS415+ and the Intel Atom C2000 clock signal issue Back in January 2015, I’ve bought a Synology DiskStation DS415+. It came with 2 years… Read More »
By now I have 2 of those Ugreen M.2 NVMe USB 3.2 SSD enclosures. One of them is attached to my DELL monitor which is attached to my MacBook Pro M1 for TimeMachine backups and just works™ for almost 4 months now. I’ve recently bought a second one (and also the same SSD as in… Read More »
I’ve recently started buying M.2 drives instead of traditional 2.5” SSDs. For USB enclosures I went with a UGREEN M.2 NVMe USB3.2 Gen2 enclosure that comes with all the bells and whistles. They have a Realtek RTL9210 chip which does support the “discard” or TRIM operation to mark unused space on the SSD. However, some… Read More »
A while ago, I’ve bought the ISDT C4 EVO USB-C-powered battery charger to replace my MAHA C9000 (of which there seems to be a new “Pro” model available). The ISDT charger gets regular firmware updates which add new features and optimises the charging modes for different battery chemistries. Up until firmware 1.0.44, everything worked fine.… Read More »
After moving to a new place, I had to put my ADS-B handling Raspberry Pi 2B into a cupboard far from any network connection. So I’ve plugged in a cheap USB WiFi dongle and connected it to my WiFi. However, I don’t know whether it’s the dongle or something specific to the RasPi2’s USB implementation,… Read More »
I’m using a ConBee II Zigbee stick by Dresden Elektronik but switched from their own Phoscon/deCONZ software to the Home Assistant ZHA integration. While I didn’t have any issues with my few Zigbee devices, today, I’ve noticed that there’s a newer firmware available for my ConBee stick. Usually, the firmware update is handled by the… Read More »
Back when I bought my Nintendo Switch, I made sure to buy an unpatched one – turning all the different boxes in the store upside down to read the serial number on the bottom and compare it with the list I had on my phone. However, apart from some experiments with SX OS and later… Read More »
Modern heads for Sonicare toothbrushes come with a small chip that records not only the type of head, but also how many seconds you’ve used it – so the head unit can remind you that it’s time to swap the head for a new one. This isn’t purely for monetary reasons, especially as the unit… Read More »
In December 2011, I bought a Philips Sonicare DiamondClean Smart 9400 toothbrush set, product code HX9917/89. This included a HX992B handset – that offers Bluetooth connection to their app and also has a LED in the bottom to show when you’re applying too much pressure while brushing. The handset transfers your brushing info to their… Read More »
A while ago I was fed up with Android Wear smartwatches and bought a Garmin Fenix 5 Plus. After using it for a while I started to explore the possibilities beyond the manufacturer specifications. This lead to a firmware patcher based upon work from Alex Whiter (who sadly passed in 2019). That patcher modified the… Read More »