Where’s the dog?

n December of this year it’ll be 3 years of uptime (not just 1,000 days), so I am extremely pleased with the stability of Linux. It runs mostly on old hardware.

Yesterday we went to a store that used to be known as “Cash Generator” (it looked like it changed ownership) to assess laptops that are pre-owned (used) and understand the correlation between storage (disk space) and price.

It looks like the insane price surges did not spare the “pre-owned” space.

For now, thankfully, we have enough hardware and storage.

Mintro looks OK (can’t complain), but where was the dog that was inside when it was “Cash Generator”?

Mintro, bring back a (or the) dog. It attracts customers like us.

Is failure intentional?

o in mid-May they replaced all the major internal parts of our washing machine. We had paid a lot of money for warranty and now, only 3 months later, the machine makes odd noises. As if those machines are made to fail no matter what… and extended warrantees are a waste of money.

That is “on purpose as designed + built” according to a friend.

We’ll have to call them some time to schedule another visit. Are “modern” washing machines made to fail no matter what – to the point where more than a few components aren’t meant to last beyond 4 or 5 years? What components do last a decade or longer?

spent a few hours today in town and at one point checked preowned laptops out of sheer curiosity, expecting that their prices would be somewhat proportional to their storage capacity. Indeed, any laptop with about 1TB of storage was very expensive, all the cheap ones had internal storage of no more than 128GB.

The slop speculators and price-fixing a-holes got their way.

HIS short article recently mentioned the menace of ‘white elephant’ datacentres which serve little function, they help inflate the bubble that’s killing our economy

In attempting to find out how many “datacentres” per se are based in Manchester, I got this map:

What % of them perform actually useful functions? What % serve a foreign and maybe very hostile purpose? Should we mind?

Video download link | md5sum c505208eed2e0bfab27707477560abd2
My New Home Setup
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

HE video above is a new and very quick run-through, showing the changes made over the weekend and why I keep tweaking these things. In a nutshell, if you spend a lot of time in front of a computer, then investing a little time every week or every month optimising it for ever-changing workflows is worth the investment. Adding additional hardware is also more economic if you value time. Machines can be made or configured to automate/simplify many things.

Previously in this mini-series: Part I, Part II

few months ago BT broke my home network, using an automatic update that took over a month to correct/undo. I reported the issue to BT (over the telephone, so that took quite a while!), but they did nothing about it. They didn’t even get back to me. No follow-up. It was at that point that I considered just moving to a custom Free software router instead of these unpredictable BT hubs, which change all the time without users’ consent (remote updates). I wrote about this at the time; it was a breaking point.

Today I looked a little closer at the internals of the BT Hub, a “smart” (read: spy) one nonetheless, and decided to share something that might amuse geeks.

BT told me that they do not support OpenWRT in any way. Yet worse, one BT person told me I’d need to change to a new hub (for fibre-optics, the new modem notwithstanding), whereas another person from BT said the exact opposite. The person from Openreach, who had an appointment (in-person meeting) said it would not be necessary but regardless, I’ve decided to just keep the hub settings backup up (in case a restore is needed). It can otherwise take hours to reconfigure again (from memory/scratch).

So I’ve just made a full backup of BT Hub settings. This is what the corresponding section looks like:

When you press backup it should generate a .conf file but it is all garbled and messy when I tried it. Maybe to protect passwords? But who from? The person who made such a backup and knows those details regardless? Anyway, I’ve blurred some contents just in case something meaningful can be derived from them (the image below). Amazing:

Either way, this looks like awful engineering/design. The file is an unreadable mess. 4KB with something like pure binary (I did this twice just in case, but the same file was regenerated, not by mistake). No XML, no flat file with a setting per line.

Whose idea was this?

HO thought that a hardware company like HP cannot make a well-working low-budget laptop? Despite positive reviews, only 6 months after buying HP Chromebook 14 an entire section of keys stopped working or works intermittently (intermediately causing huge nuisance!), making it almost impossible to type sentences. This is the hallmark of bad connections/wiring — the hallmark of cheaply-made keyboards with lousy components (my Palm PDA keyboard only had this kind of issue more than a decade after I had started using it). HP’s hardware quality control surely is lacking, or maybe HP puts its brand on poorly made hardware put together by low-paid labour with cheap/shoddy components (which would cost a lot in the long term, if a buyer falls into it).

According to numerous responses in this first thread I found (didn’t search for any particular brand, but HP Chromebook 14 gets mentioned a lot), quite a lot of people experience the exact same hardware fault (same keys too) in months-old HP Chromebook 14. Rubbish quality seems to be the culprit. This sure sounds like a manufacturing issue that is systemic. Nothing gets spilled and the keyboards are treated gently. It’s just poor quality build and maybe — however sadly — this is where HP is heading. That’s s shame because a lot of computer equipment in our house is HP-branded (keyboards, mice, printer, tablet, laptops). We bought “HP” we because we though it would assure reliability. Only 2 weeks ago my HP laptop charger just popped and burned (smoke, no fire), necessitating an expensive replacement because HP has some kind of proprietary (hard to find) connector.

I have lost trust and am losing respect for HP.