totm nov 2023 Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

[NSEP]

I tried to see  NEOWISE but clouds are always in the way. Even on sunny days, clouds seem to pop up at the exact moment i am trying to see it.

[IncongruousGoat]

About a week ago, I got a second degree burn on my dominant hand while making breakfast. Left me with a 1/4" blister on my palm, a bit below my pinkie. For most things it's not so bad (proper moleskin bandage, etc., etc.), but it makes doing dishes a pain in the neck since I have to do all the washing with the bandage off, since otherwise the water & soap destroy the glue on the medical tape holding the bandage down and soak through the moleskin. Keeping pressure and heat off an un-bandaged blister in that particular spot while trying to do something that involves both hands and hot water is not exactly fun. Especially given that I cook a lot, which means there are always lots of dishes to do...

Edited July 19, 2020 by IncongruousGoat

[richfiles]

Remember my incident on the Fourth of July... You know, taking a long walk off a short retaining wall?

Well, 12 days after my phone engaged in high velocity lithobraking, my phone's battery decided to rapidly swell up. The swelling is so bad, that it has pushed the rear glass 3mm away from the phone's frame (about 1/8 inch). You can see below just how much flexing is being done to the rear glass. Surprised it didn't crack again! I already have parts on order, including a new battery. Once everything arrives, no external part of my phone will be original, and it'll have a higher capacity battery than stock. In the meantime... I'm carrying this thing around like Jack Bauer trying to keep the bomb from blowing on "24"... tick-tick-tick... 

Edited July 19, 2020 by richfiles
Apologies for the potato quality image... It was taken with my 2012 vintage phone, which very much still works, though in slow motion, and is decidedly less likely to detonate than this one is!

[Chemp]

On 7/19/2020 at 7:42 PM, richfiles said:

Once everything arrives, no external part of my phone will be original

Props to you for repairing a phone these days! Most people just throw them away

[StrandedonEarth]

13 hours ago, Chemp said:

Props to you for repairing a phone these days! Most people just throw them away

I’ve gotten second and third lives from a few phones by taking them to a nearby repair business. They also sell used “corporate return” phones with new batteries. 

One thing ive noticed is that it seems some batteries are discontinued. They can replace the battery, but it’s already a few years old and naturally degraded even though it was never used. Or so it seems. 

Edited July 21, 2020 by StrandedonEarth

[richfiles]

Okay, so I lied... The camera lens bezel and the side buttons, plus the fingerprint sensor are all external, and moved off the old phone. The new back glass had a new camera bezel, but it was the black one, and not the blue one, and even though my old one has some minor wear to it, it looked nicer, color wise, so I stuck with the old one... Other than those few parts... All the rest of the exterior is new.



My complaint... Darn glued together phones...

15 screws...

They had 15 screws, and they STILL glued one board down! It's not like there were no screws holding it. It had a robust cover piece too, with 7 screws just for itself... WHY!?!? Anyway, the board was very thin, and so of course it flexed, and a chip popped right off. Combine that with a screwdriver slip while trying to pry up the headphone jack, and OOPS! I now have a whole missing chip and a cracked inductor in the USB-C/Audio driver board. Last I checked, the... checks notes... USB + Audio driver board needs it's chip to do USB and audio things with.

Also note, due to the size of the images, I will spoiler all following images, to save page space, as well as to offer a mild element of surprise upon viewing them for the first time! Enjoy!
Unfortunately, that surprise will be much subdued for subsequent viewings. Don't let that stop you from viewing them all you like, however. 

Spoiler

So, lets start with the chip. It's 3mm square. That massive, hulking metal thing... That's the USB-C port The cluster of six vias (holes in the circuit board) mark the middle of the USB-C port. That's how zoomed in I am! I had to liberally apply liquid flux to this, and try to reflow the chip using my hot air rework station. This process appears to have been a success. It was also the easy step. Things escalated to a much higher difficulty after this point. I can also affirm that for the first time in my life, I was faced with a repair that I ran into a hard physical limitation visually... This is the first time I NEEDED to use the microscope to proceed in performing the repair. I've done some pretty small repairs before, but this was next level, and I legitimately could not resolve the level of detail necessary with my nekkid eyes! 

I absolutely required the microscope for this repair. I annotated this image with a copy of the relevant working space, and added a scale for reference.

Spoiler

It's ugly, but I had to use a tweezer and x-acto knife to find the broken end of the inductor's wire, unwind it to reach the solder pad, and solder it. My needle point micro soldering iron tip looked like trying to poke around with a baseball bat, at this magnification! I have never worked on anything as insanely tiny as this before! You can see this portion of the board visible in the rightmost cluster of parts, in the top image of this post. It's a miracle I didn't actually lose any of the parts, or break anything further.

Initially, I had the repair to the point where the headphones and USB-C port was fully working, but I had no notification sounds coming through the loud speaker... Eventually I realized I had to connect the loud speaker first, for it to be able to generate noise... Simple repair! Turned out to be an ID: 10-T error! 
 
So where am I now then... Well, I wasted no time in ordering a replacement board. While my fixes got it working again, they are most indubitably janky. The inductor underwent a lot of stresses, and the core was cracked, plus I had to unwind a quarter turn to get the leadwire to resolder it. The chip's solder job is truly in the realm of "good enough for a week". Even though I'm SO CLOSE to having my phone TOTALLY restored, I've opted to leave the back cover only lightly bonded, so I can easily remove it. I'll have to tear down the whole dang phone, again, to replace that board with the new one when it arrives. IF the old board manages to survive removal, I'll keep it as a spare backup, in case I damage the USB-C port again. When the new board arrives, It'll be the THIRD USB/audio board I've installed into this phone!

Finally, there's the battery. I posted the earlier photo of the rear glass bowed out, and pushed away from the frame... Well, here's the bloated battery! Stock thickness is 0.155 inch (3.937mm). The thickest part of the battery measured 0.32 inches (8.128mm) with my caliper. The battery more than doubled in thickness! That was one sick battery! 

 

Spoiler

 

[TheSaint]

Our Kitchenaid mixer died over the weekend. We had a little 4.5-quart tilt-head that we bought when we first got married many moons ago. But we haven't be happy with it for a long time, and it was especially bad at making large amounts of bread dough. So my wife found a used 5.5-quart bowl-lift on Craigslist, so she picked that up. It lasted five months. Which, may lead you to say, "Well, duh, Craigslist!" But the serial number was high, and the lady we bought it from was a senior citizen who was selling it because she didn't use it enough. It was practically new. I'm going to take it apart and look, but it seems like the planetary gear failed, which is not the sort of failure you expect. My diagnosis is not, "This wore out," it's, "They don't make them like they used to." So we're back on the 4.5 for now, and I talked my wife into buying a new Bosch mixer, I've heard really good things about them.

[tater]

Kids start stupid, online school Thursday. Had a Zoom with my son's advisor this morning. I assume that they've learned from spring, and it might be better, but they have a long way to go since my daughter described online school as "_________ useless." (I'll leave the modifier as an exercise for the reader)

Anyway, advisor is a nice guy, and my kids will have better than most get online, but I'd send them to regular school Thursday given the option. Not "distanced," mask wearing school, regular, unmitigated school.

[richfiles]

On 8/10/2020 at 1:08 PM, TheSaint said:

Our Kitchenaid mixer died over the weekend.
My diagnosis is not, "This wore out," it's, "They don't make them like they used to."

F... 
I will vouch for this assessment. It is a tragedy that we have grown to settle for such garbage in retail. The lure of low prices up front has a long term price... Low build quality, premature failure, lack of repairability (or even desire to bother repairing such trash tier products), and more e-waste. I'd trust a crusty old appliance from the 1980s or older, sometimes more than I'll trust anything modern.

On a side note... I just got up, and I read that first line as "Kitchen aide", as if you were an employer at a restaurant that just lost an employee on your cooking line... 
My morning brain delivered a much bigger oof than was intended! ... Of course, then once I was hit by the oof, I realized... Oh... OH! That's an electric mixer. 


As for my life... I got the replacement circuit board for my phone. Installation went without a hitch, and I even extracted my hastily repaired board without harming it...
The complaint... 
The adhesive isn't perfectly adhering the rear case, so one corner keeps popping up. I am SO CLOSE to being DONE with these fixes, but for whatever reason, the adhesive is just failing me! I have more strips I can try, but it means removing the rear glass (without breaking it, removing and cleaning up the old (new) adhesive that did stick, and trying again... I think I have three more sets of adhesive. I can only hope one of them actually sticks properly this time... I'm so tired of tape on my phone. I want it to just be water tight again, so I can use it and not be paranoid if there's a rain drop.

Secondary complaint, is just tired. Lot of late nights, that lead to me sleeping past my "I'm ready to sleep NOW point"... If I fall asleep then, I go out in minutes. Problem is, it's a weird brief window that comes in fast, and goes fast... If I'm in the middle of something, and I don't take advantage... I'm toast. I'll lay there for hours, trying to fall asleep. Combined with some late work nights, late entertainment nights, and several days where I've needed to get up earlier... I just wanna sleep a week to catch up on lost sleep!

This is driving me nutty though, as I finally have the new 20-pin magnetic connector installed into the trim of my custom mechanical keyboard, and am literally just a soldering session or two away from being 100% hardware complete! Since the 20-Pin connector gives me the pin count to essentially "brute force" the numberpad matrix in hardware, I no longer need to deal with a second controller and serial communication that I would have had to rely on with the old 5-pin magnetic connector. It's not that the keyboard controller firmware doesn't support serial communication with a satellite controller... It does... It just didn't support hot connection of a satellite controller. The software expects the controller to be attached at power, and to never detach. Any change would crash the firmware, and for a keyboard where the prime target is the fact that it's number pad can be magnetically attached and detached... This was a game stopper... My coding skills are "copy & paste from Googled solution" grade... Not good enough to build hot connect robustness into the code. The 20-pin connector makes things simple... 2 wires to deliver power and ground, 1 wire to deliver LED brightness PWM signal, and 15 wires to wire the switch matrix (a 12x3 configuration, representing a 6x6 grid). There is no second controller anymore, no serial communication. Once wired up, it's a matter of using one of the simple online macros to lay out my key arrangement, and compile the firmware to run my keyboard... It'll be done! 5 years of planning and designing, and ordering and building... and it'll be done...
But I'm busy and tiiiiired... 

Edited August 14, 2020 by richfiles

[kerbiloid]

59 minutes ago, tater said:

"_________ useless." (I'll leave the modifier as an exercise for the reader)

Probably, "pretty".

(Example: "Take your pretty car from my way!")

1 hour ago, tater said:

advisor is a nice guy

But useless and eats a lot. The cat and dog are not better.

Spoiler

 

[Delay]

Our dishwasher is dead. Something went horribly wrong and a resistor gave up... along with my replacement.
Theory: The resistor didn't blow up for no reason.

And looking for a replacement part, namely a chip whose apparent purpose is to take a wide-range of AC voltages as input and give out 6V DC (?) managed to make the house of cards that is my knowledge of electricity collapse yet again.

[TheSaint]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Kids start stupid, online school Thursday. Had a Zoom with my son's advisor this morning. I assume that they've learned from spring, and it might be better, but they have a long way to go since my daughter described online school as "_________ useless." (I'll leave the modifier as an exercise for the reader)

Anyway, advisor is a nice guy, and my kids will have better than most get online, but I'd send them to regular school Thursday given the option. Not "distanced," mask wearing school, regular, unmitigated school.

One of my friends was telling me that some folks are actually hiring teachers away from the schools and forming their own private co-ops. And that the teachers wind up better paid.

26 minutes ago, Delay said:

Our dishwasher is dead. Something went horribly wrong and a resistor gave up... along with my replacement.
Theory: The resistor didn't blow up for no reason.

And looking for a replacement part, namely a chip whose apparent purpose is to take a wide-range of AC voltages as input and give out 6V DC (?) managed to make the house of cards that is my knowledge of electricity collapse yet again.

These are my go-to folks for appliance parts:

https://www.appliancepartspros.com/

They make it fairly bulletproof.

[tater]

Just now, TheSaint said:

One of my friends was telling me that some folks are actually hiring teachers away from the schools and forming their own private co-ops. And that the teachers wind up better paid.

Could do that, I suppose, but it's not just education, there is a social component to school as well that is being ignored. For nothing, kids will get a cold (if they have any symptoms at all). Since teachers are around kids all the time... they are similarly protected (looks like T-cell cross reactive immunity is very high, and goes a long way to explaining part of why kids are at less risk to this than they are to seasonal flu). We're protected as parents the same way. Kids get colds, we get colds. There are 4 HCoV colds, those of us around kids have likely had all of them recently. Doesn't provide antibody blocking immunity, but mitigates severity (often to the point of zero symptoms).

I got sick of the other thread, but it's looking like my guestimate based on R₀ and doubling times was right. Outbreaks seem to end at ~10-20%, it never doubled as fast as the R0 numbers suggested because those models require a 100% susceptible population, and 40-60% of unexposed people already have some cell mediated immunity.

I'm totally for any geriatric high school students staying home, though, they are at serious risk (and if they've been in HS for 50-60 years, maybe the "in person" model was never right for them in the first place).

[richfiles]

26 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

One of my friends was telling me that some folks are actually hiring teachers away from the schools and forming their own private co-ops. And that the teachers wind up better paid.

That actually sounds kinda amazingly smart! Small private groups with a controlled environment, with the teachers focused on just said group, and they actually get paid decent!
You know, if we get more smart ideas like this, than the pass the test and advance grade factories that kids are subjected to these days... maybe something actually good might come out of 2020.

[kerbiloid]

13 minutes ago, richfiles said:

Small private groups with a controlled environment, with the teachers focused on just said group, and they actually get paid decent!

Spoiler

 

[Jacke]

On 8/10/2020 at 12:08 PM, TheSaint said:

Our Kitchenaid mixer died over the weekend.  ....  My diagnosis is not, "This wore out," it's, "They don't make them like they used to."

Sometimes it's just things wearing out.  Most often, I'd say.  But considering we reached peak toaster over 70 years ago, at least in this case, they really do don't make 'em like they used to.

 

[TheSaint]

17 hours ago, Jacke said:

Sometimes it's just things wearing out.  Most often, I'd say.  But considering we reached peak toaster over 70 years ago, at least in this case, they really do don't make 'em like they used to.

Well, to be fair, it could be a fluke. But I've read a lot of accounts online of people having failures with newer KitchenAids, so I tend to think it isn't. Our 4.5-quart has been going strong for 17 years now. My in-laws have a KitchenAid that has been going strong since the Johnson administration. So, all things considered, I think I'm going to give the Germans a crack at it.

[TheSaint]

So, I have a screw loose.

<Insert obligatory comments here.>

I had my ACL repaired 17 years ago, and the screws have not bothered me at all. Until this week. Apparently one of them has started to back out, which from what I have read is not an uncommon occurrence. It looks like I'm trying to hide a marble under the skin on the front of my knee, and it's quite uncomfortable. Made an appointment to see an ortho here in town, hopefully will be able to get it removed sooner rather than later.

[richfiles]

59 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

So, I have a screw loose.

My poor mother is having to deal with a similar thing, except on her ankle... Screw is protruding so far, that she's developed a callus over it, and it hurts her a lot. She's trying to also get scheduled to have it dealt with.

[RealKerbal3x]

Warning: rant about Apple and its products ahead. If you're an Apple fanboy for some reason, this post is not for you.

My brother originally got a second-hand Macbook just over a month ago for his birthday, and a couple of weeks later the screen completely broke. Random stripes of coloured pixels all over it, which means that either a connection to the screen or the screen itself broke. Fortunately it was on guarantee, so we didn't have to spend any money for the people we bought it from (I think it was on Amazon) to take a look at it. But guess what? Thanks to Apple being the king of flagrant consumerism, it was actually more expensive to replace the entire computer rather than just replace the broken part. I'm not really sure what else I expected, to be honest. At least we didn't have to pay for the replacement.

Great job Apple, a computer you made maybe a couple of years ago has just now broken in a manner that makes it uneconomical to fix. I applaud your dedication to quality products and definitely not thin, shiny fashion statements that must be replaced every year or two. No, it's definitely not the case that most of your products are literally glued together. It's not like they require a dongle to connect a flarping USB drive, absolutely not!

I'll be sticking to my durable, reliable and easy-to-fix ThinkPad, thank you very much. I'd take its functional black plastic and Windows' slightly annoying interface over a computer that sacrifices durability and the most basic of functionalities (*cough* USB ports *cough*) to be fashionable. Form over function doesn't really make sense for computers.

(On a side note, well done to Lenovo of 2011 for producing a laptop that has continued to function perfectly for nine years).

[TheSaint]

Apple: It just works. Until it doesn't.

1 hour ago, RealKerbal3x said:

(On a side note, well done to Lenovo of 2011 for producing a laptop that has continued to function perfectly for nine years).

We have three Lenovo laptops in the house, and I love them. Especially since we have kids. Very easy/inexpensive to find replacement parts and repair.

[richfiles]

It gives me great joy to see Apple is being sued in the most ironic fashion. Everything was set into motion in advance, and Apple took the bait. Now there is an anti-trust lawsuit filed against them over their monopolistic behavior. Epic even gloriously trolled them with the above video... I don't know if I've experienced anything quite so satisfying all year!

WHY THOUGH... Why is it Fortnite Money that's funding this Epic war against the Apple monopoly!?!? It HAD to be Fortnite... LOL

I might not like some of the things Epic does. I will give them credit... They seem to be one of the few companies trying to change things for the better (so both us... and yes, them, come out with a better deal... Oh, they absolutely want their cut of the pie too). What really impressed me, is they are not suing for any monetary damages. They seem to genuinely just be trying to break the Apple monopoly they hold over app distribution and payment systems that they hold over iOS. I haven't seen the entire court documents, but they're posted below, if anyone's curious. Obviously, what they gain, is a lower cost of operating, if they can have their own store on iPhones. Thing is, they actually were passing a portion o the savings onto the consumer. As much as Epic ticks me off sometimes... I can respect that.

https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/apple-complaint-734589783.pdf

[Jacke]

1 hour ago, richfiles said:

It gives me great joy to see Apple is being sued in the most ironic fashion. Everything was set into motion in advance, and Apple took the bait. Now there is an anti-trust lawsuit filed against them over their monopolistic behavior. Epic even gloriously trolled them with the above video... I don't know if I've experienced anything quite so satisfying all year!

It's also Epic suing Google due to be removed from the Google Play store for the same reasons.

These are all very rich corporations who are fighting over who gets all the money.  None of them are good.

 

[richfiles]

And as I said... I'm no fan of Epic, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend... For the time being. Yes, of course they want more of the money. Every business does. Money is their end game, but ultimately it does benefit the consumer if Apple's monopoly over App distribution and in app payment processing is opened up. If the force trying to make that happen is doing it for greedy reasons... Cool! Go for it! At least they actually have the financial resources to take a bite out of Apple. Epic knows that if they win, they financially gain. That's obvious, and is absolutely their primary driving force behind this action. The fact that they flat out stated that they are asking the court for no financial recompense from Apple for their actions, and have specified that they want the legality of Apple's policies reviewed for anti-trust violations, is the best possible scenario for this lawsuit. It's not a lawsuit about "Wah, Apple banned us for breaking the rules! Do something! Punish them for being mean and banning us!". They'd be laughed out of the court for that. What this is, is them basically stating "We have demonstrated that there is no way around Apple's monopoly. We want the legality of that monopoly reviewed and acted upon."

The number of people that fail to grasp either the importance of this, or grasp the difference between the suing over removal of the app vs suing over the policies that led to the removal of the app, quite frankly, disappoints me. Every youtube video or social media post is filled with comments that just deaden any faith in humanity... But then again, that's the natural habitat of that sort of thing... 

[Dan Kerman]

My phone suddenly decided it will no longer take pictures. It will in Safe Mode but not normal boot up. Deleted all the apps that use the camera... nada. Sigh. My wife says..  just get a new phone...  that ones like 4 years old!

 

On 8/13/2020 at 4:51 PM, TheSaint said:

So, I have a screw loose.

<Insert obligatory comments here.>

I had my ACL repaired 17 years ago, and the screws have not bothered me at all. Until this week. Apparently one of them has started to back out, which from what I have read is not an uncommon occurrence. It looks like I'm trying to hide a marble under the skin on the front of my knee, and it's quite uncomfortable. Made an appointment to see an ortho here in town, hopefully will be able to get it removed sooner rather than later.

Mine is still holding after 28 years... Never really considered the issue of the screw coming out.