soldier_ph

My favorite Lego kit from 2003, the international space station 
missing one piece, the 2x1 flat smooth top plate that goes on the tiny Endeavor 
the super annoying part is the original kit came with two of those and both are missing 

 

I looked up the PCB and all the replacement vendors mentioned that I would've had to swap the BIOS IC anyway. Since the board was pretty much useless the way it was, I tried soldering the wires from a sacrificial USB chord I had lying around directly to the PCB. The data pads were completely beyond repair, at least for my skill level, so I had to go for the traces. In fact, you can tell that I had to bypass that one surface mount components (I'm guessing it's a resistor) because I couldn't attach it from the port side and just hoped that it works. I'm terrible at soldering and I probably also don't have a soldering iron suited to working with small stuff like this, but I managed to wrangle the wires in place for the connection to stick and get all the data off of the drive successfully after securing it all with a bit of hot glue.
 

 

 

WD still does it... Seagate tends to have regular SATA drives.
 
But yeah, soldering wires and using a breakout as temporary connector the time to get the data out would be the solution. PCB replacement is much less trivial.

Bigwig: "Hey Avocado, I got this external hard drive. Someone brushed past it and dropped it off a table while it was plugged in. Think you can fix it? It's got some data on it that I need."
Me: "Maybe, depending on the drive I may have an adapter, if the drive itself has the typical SATA interface."
Samsung: "Hold my beer"

 
Yep, that's a broken off USB port that's soldered directly to the PCB of the harddrive. And this is why I keep telling people to ask me first before they go out and buy this stuff, because I would've told them to just buy an internal drive and stick it in an enclosure. But no, bigwigs need to just go out and buy whatever. And of course, the data on it is nowhere on the corporate network, because people still insist on bringing their shit on physical media and never back up anything. So yeah, time to buy a replacement PCB and pray to any deity willing to listen that there are no other security or lockout measures that prevent simple swapping.

Priciest PC component I've ever bought. But it's good.
Have to live off noodles for a few months I think. Just to recuperate.

As I'd mentioned, here's a couple of pics of my purchases:

 
The Gigaworks T40 Series II speakers, excuse the mess as I was simply testing it on my coffee table just to ensure that the speakers work. Sounds pretty good actually....

I love when people make fun of the genius ideas of the world's richest baby. Even his only good idea out of this whole debacle, which was to open up community notes (which already existed before he took over, so he doesn't get to take credit for that, because everything he touches already existed) to the public is used to make fun of him whenever he spews constant nonsense. Heck, even just the fact that it has been almost a year since the rebrand and everybody is still just calling it Twitter, with media publications doing the "X, formerly Twitter" thing is hilarious. We let Facebook get away with their Meta rebrand, and yet, Elon just can't manage to convince people that "no seriously guys, X is like the cooles letter of the alphabet, so we gotta use that as our umbrella". 

Summary
 X, formally known as Twitter forces url substitution to X.com, making users potentially vulnerable to phishing.  Twitter rolls back feature after community pushback.
 
Quotes
 
My thoughts
 This article is a few weeks old, but it would be a really interesting WAN Show discussion.  This is another example of Twitter/X making sudden decisions without much thought to how it would impact the platform.  At what point do users decide to leave the platform, in search of one with more stability?  I love how the user base has become unpaid employees of the platform, since they have reduced their workforce so much that no one seems to see issues with these features until they make it to production.
 
Sources
 https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/xs-enforced-url-substitution-to-x-com-domains-an-invitation-to-phishing-attacks/

Philips Fabric shaver:


 
I of course use my own rechargeable Batteries and not this green washing Scam of Single use Batteries:
 
For 30 Bucks this thing is amazing. Just tested it out on my LTT Underwear since I had a lot of those Stupid fabric pills on the elastic strap on all of my pairs and now they're like new. Handy little tool, glad I finally bought one.

Philips Fabric shaver:


 
I of course use my own rechargeable Batteries and not this green washing Scam of Single use Batteries:
 
For 30 Bucks this thing is amazing. Just tested it out on my LTT Underwear since I had a lot of those Stupid fabric pills on the elastic strap on all of my pairs and now they're like new. Handy little tool, glad I finally bought one.

Bought myself a Creative Gigaworks T40 Series II for laptop usage, as well as a PS5 + Stellar Blade preorder, I will setup my PS5 tomorrow and post some pics when it's done.....

The images with the lighting don't do it justice, the lighting actually gives it a very subtle orange glow that really goes with the wood on the front, makes it look super clean!
But anyways, specs:
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X Deepcool AK500 Zero DARK Gigabyte B650M Aorus Elite AX G.Skill X5 32GB 5600MHz RAM Inland Professional NVMe PCIe 3.0 256GB SSD 2x Inland Professional 1TB SATA SSDs Gigabyte Windforce OC 3X RTX 2070 Super Fractal Design North Thermaltake Smart Pro RGB 750W PSU Gigabyte M27Q monitor HP Omen 25 monitor Arzopa portable monitor Redragon K631 Pro (customized) Logitech G502 Hero

How old are these people?
I didn't think a lid latch is so incomprehensible.

Remove all of the italicised text before posting.
 
Summary
 tdlr: apple made headlines in Canada for using ontario based company GEEP for shredding old devices
 
Quotes
 
My thoughts
 Apple should have still sold them, its a waste of good hardware
 
Sources
 https://mobilesyrup.com/2024/04/19/apple-ontario-geep-destory-old-iphones-report/
 
 

*Precedes to receive French kisses from the dog:*

*Precedes to receive French kisses from the dog:*

*Precedes to receive French kisses from the dog:*

It's alive and well, got an entire aisle of them at the hardware store here....
 
https://www.stanleytools.com/systems-campaigns/stanley-systems/stanley-fatmax

A company overcharging for their parts and having their quality drop significantly in the past 4 years is struggling to do basic business things? Say it aint so!
 
Hopefully people start learning more of these companies are scummy. It will be interesting to see how the EKWB fanboys that try to defend them on this.

Watching a little of the video. It sounds like the owe the state of Texas money and the fact that some people havent gotten paid or had their time altered is a big violation of both state and federal labor laws. EK is going to get sued.

So confirmed? YouTubers destroying companies
 
 

So, Artesian Build ver 2.0 ?

Summary
Gamersnexus followed up on a LinkedIn post by a former employee of EK Waterblocks and uncovered significant problems within the company:
- Employee wages not paid on time
- Business allowances not paid or not paid on time
- Pressure from EK management to employees to sign inferior contracts (e.g. removing sales dividends) 
- Suppliers not paid on time
- US branch and HQ (Solvenia) fighting each other to the point where the US branch sourced some items from the supply chain instead of ordering them from HQ
- excessive inventory (of some SKUs) binding capital/liquidity
- EK has fired some manager(s)
- EK is confident that it can resolve the current liquidity crisis.
 
Quotes
My thoughts
The writings have been on the wall for a long time. Customer service quality has noticeably deteriorated.
 
Sources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b73xG1HlFhY
 

Regardless of being the best in the business, if you fail due your own incompetence then you fail. It sucks for us, but life moves forward. 

New PSU installed, and freshly dusted.. booted up first try 👌
 
😄