Writing tagged "hardware"
Are ceramic key caps as awesome as they sound?
I’ve been watching Cerakey’s products for a while. The sheer idea of mechanical keyboard caps being made out of ceramic sounds intriguing.
The stock caps on the Keychron K6 I use at the office or when traveling haven’t been doing well for a while:
- Multiple keys’ paint started coming off. Less of an issue for finding the keys (I know where they are), more of an aesthetic issue.
- The G key’s switch stem broke off and got stuck in the G key cap. After failing to extract the broken part from the cap, the cap was essentially lost and I replaced it with a generic translucent cap from a switch tester.
Are ceramic key caps as awesome as they sound?
I’ve been watching Cerakey’s products for a while. The sheer idea of mechanical keyboard caps being made out of ceramic sounds intriguing.
The stock caps on the Keychron K6 I use at the office or when traveling haven’t been doing well for a while:
- Multiple keys’ paint started coming off. Less of an issue for finding the keys (I know where they are), more of an aesthetic issue.
- The G key’s switch stem broke off and got stuck in the G key cap. After failing to extract the broken part from the cap, the cap was essentially lost and I replaced it with a generic translucent cap from a switch tester.
Post mortem: vendor-agnostic non-invasive washing machine monitoring
The washing machine ETA is a lie.
Everyone agrees, nobody has solutions. No, a washing machine that needs WiFi to do its work is not a solution, just a larger collection of points of failure.
I wanted something that works with any basic, repairable washing machine, and doesn’t void the warranty. So, attaching to traces on the PCB wasn’t an option.
In the end, the computer vision route worked pretty well until the ESPCam I used for it died. That’s why this is a post mortem.
A mysterious drop in Ethernet speed
At some random point in the past few weeks, Ethernet speed on my couch dropped from just under 1 Gbit/s to less than 100 Mbit/s. Besides feeling like I was back in the early 00s, this frustratingly ruined my low latency streaming performance.
Reinventing my rack cooling solution
Most of my computers have been sitting in a noise-insulated 19“ rack for 6 years or so. Although I’ve been administrating real servers for more than a decade, I still get a kick out of cosplaying as sysadmin with machines that I can actually touch, rather than being located in some rented data hundreds of kilometers away.
The rack I bought came with a temperature-controlled fan that pulled air through the whole box (just tall enough to fit under a desk), but could only run at 0% and 100% speed, because the temperature control was just a binary switch. That kinda defeated the point of the rack being noise-insulated, because even Noctua fans make some noise at 100% speed.
Working around a broken SD card slot on a Raspberry Pi
While moving a cable, I violently ripped the SD card out of my Raspberry Pi by accident, breaking some of the slot’s plastic in the process. I was certainly careless, but using flimsy plastic for a component that can receive quite a bit of physical stress is probably not the best idea.
Suspicious disk failures
The disks in my home server have been acting up lately: Two of them (which I bought at once a few years ago) deliver different results when I hash a file multiple times, another just randomly hangs sometimes for a few minutes. The SATA and power cables seemed fine, replacing them had no effect on the problem. So, why not check what wisdom S.M.A.R.T. has to offer?
So I bought one of those fancy South Korean IPS monitors...
Recently, people on the Internet have been talking about (comparatively) cheap 27“ monitors from South Korea with a glorious 2560x1440 resolution. Jeff Atwood and Scott Wasson wrote about it, and summarized their critiques fairly positively.
For something around €300, you can order a monitor like this from a South Korean ebay vendor. Shipping and an international power adapter are included. The monitors are of brands I’ve never heard of in the West, so I guess they mainly supply Asian countries.