RandomStranger wrote on 2024-12-30, 13:47:

Since that day this became a habit of the RCD, but only between 9AM and 6PM for some reason regardless if I was at home or not. […]
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RandomStranger wrote on 2024-12-12, 15:47:

A circuit breaker went off at around 10 AM and when I got home around 4PM the UPS was still on.

Since that day this became a habit of the RCD, but only between 9AM and 6PM for some reason regardless if I was at home or not. Really weird pattern. I've been looking for the issue for days since then. Now it seems that one of my power strips, a Hama 137239 with built-in overvoltage protection started acting up. Even if it's plugged in and nothing else connects to it so probably it's the overvoltage protection that causes the issue.

The bright side, it allowed me to really test out all 3 of my UPS-es.

Still, I can't fathom how can it be that the leaking current only happens during daytime, even though there is no difference in the devices being plugged in/used between me being away from home or me being asleep. It should happen randomly whether it's day or night. This initially lead me to believe that it's some transient coming from outside during business hours, but I was away from home for a week and just happened to unplug that along with some devices I already checked out.

I'll look into the power strip after new years and probably take out the overvoltage protection downgrading it to a regular power strip.

Quite often it's a simple MOV/Varistor in there that has degraded by taking too many hits, I went near crazy for a month or two back in '95 tracing intermittent reboots on my Amiga 1200, until I figured out my surge protector had gone faulty 🤣 . Somewhere here there was a good multi post discussion on replacing MOV in retro power distribution centers and such, but that's not coming up on my searches. One thread that's tangentially relevant with a couple of posts that give us some clues is Is it SAFE to plug a surge protector strip into a UPS .... anyway, as they degrade, quite minor voltage spikes can trigger them, until they start going short long enough to burn up.

I'm not really interested in fixing the surge protecting part. There is an APC Smart1000 to cover that. If it works as a power strip where I can turn on and off each socket individually, that's enough. Out of the two power strips I have the problematic one is the one that worked directly off of a wall socket most of its life and only went behind an UPS a couple of months ago. The other one that still works always ran off of an UPS.

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-12-30, 13:47:

Since that day this became a habit of the RCD, but only between 9AM and 6PM for some reason regardless if I was at home or not. […]
Show full quote

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-12-12, 15:47:

A circuit breaker went off at around 10 AM and when I got home around 4PM the UPS was still on.

Since that day this became a habit of the RCD, but only between 9AM and 6PM for some reason regardless if I was at home or not. Really weird pattern. I've been looking for the issue for days since then. Now it seems that one of my power strips, a Hama 137239 with built-in overvoltage protection started acting up. Even if it's plugged in and nothing else connects to it so probably it's the overvoltage protection that causes the issue.

The bright side, it allowed me to really test out all 3 of my UPS-es.

Still, I can't fathom how can it be that the leaking current only happens during daytime, even though there is no difference in the devices being plugged in/used between me being away from home or me being asleep. It should happen randomly whether it's day or night. This initially lead me to believe that it's some transient coming from outside during business hours, but I was away from home for a week and just happened to unplug that along with some devices I already checked out.

I'll look into the power strip after new years and probably take out the overvoltage protection downgrading it to a regular power strip.

And it looks like I was wrong. While I was away from home for Christmas for a week I turend off everything on my entertainment wall and unplug the UPS that supplied it and the RCD didn't go down once. Yesterday it went down multiple times without the UPS so it's not the UPS and calmed down after I unplugged the power strip. This morning just after 9:30AM it went down again without the power strip.

Now I'm back to thinking it's some sort of outside interference during business hours that leaking into my place and I was just lucky during Christmas that whatever it is, it went away.

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-12-30, 13:47:

Since that day this became a habit of the RCD, but only between 9AM and 6PM for some reason regardless if I was at home or not. […]
Show full quote

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-12-12, 15:47:

A circuit breaker went off at around 10 AM and when I got home around 4PM the UPS was still on.

Since that day this became a habit of the RCD, but only between 9AM and 6PM for some reason regardless if I was at home or not. Really weird pattern. I've been looking for the issue for days since then. Now it seems that one of my power strips, a Hama 137239 with built-in overvoltage protection started acting up. Even if it's plugged in and nothing else connects to it so probably it's the overvoltage protection that causes the issue.

The bright side, it allowed me to really test out all 3 of my UPS-es.

Still, I can't fathom how can it be that the leaking current only happens during daytime, even though there is no difference in the devices being plugged in/used between me being away from home or me being asleep. It should happen randomly whether it's day or night. This initially lead me to believe that it's some transient coming from outside during business hours, but I was away from home for a week and just happened to unplug that along with some devices I already checked out.

I'll look into the power strip after new years and probably take out the overvoltage protection downgrading it to a regular power strip.

how many ups-es do i need? perhaps i should get one for the isp wifi router, unless if power goes out the end office goes out. Remember how phone lines used to work in power outages because the main battery backup at at the end office separate from the mainline. Why cant we go back to that?

twiz11 wrote on 2024-12-31, 18:29:

how many ups-es do i need?

For home use? That depends on the household. I use 3. 2 as mentioned in one of my previous comment and a third for my daily driver PC+active duty retro PC.

If you have solar panels with a large battery pack of which you can run your whole house off of than I assume that alone is enough.

So as many as you need for the devices that are annoying if they turn off or reboot.

twiz11 wrote on 2024-12-31, 18:29:

Remember how phone lines used to work in power outages because the main battery backup at at the end office separate from the mainline. Why cant we go back to that?

Classic analog CB land line is a different beast. Today even land line is a VOIP solution most of the time. You need an active device on the consumer end even if it's running on some sort of DSL solution and you get a pair of copper wires instead of fiber optics.

Today I looked at the SSD that was in my wife's laptop.

A bit of backstory: Computer is HP Victus (gaming laptop) and it was working pretty normally. One day (month or so ago) it tried to do a Windows update and then was never able to boot again, getting stuck in boot-loops and recovery modes that just crashed some more. It was covered under warranty, so she took it to Micro Center. They said something about corruption, blah blah. They "fixed" it with no parts. It was back to broken HOURS after she got home and really screwed her work schedule up fierce. She needs that thing to work on the go. I tell her to use the warranty as much as possible, so she took it back.

This time they said something about the drive not being OE (the laptop was only shipped with 512G) and bitlocker something-something. We never replaced the drive. The seller she got it from must've stolen the drive (she got it from amazon). Anywho, they said replacing the drive will fix the problem, but it was NOT covered under the warranty because it wasn't OE... Super sucks, but she NEEDED it working, so she approved replacement (SK Hynix P31 2TB) and it is working as of this moment. I told her to bring me the old one, which I'm working on now.

The drive is a Kingston NV2 2TB, and indeed, when I plugged it in, I immediately got "ACCESS DENIED" bitlocker going on about its bit or whatnot. I tried opening it in My Computer and it opened a window looking for a 48-digit PIN. Damn. But hold on.... You know what happened??! I right clicked, formatted it and now the bitlock was gone (much wow, lots of sarcasm) I copied some stuff onto it and it was working normally. I was going to use Steam to fill it to see how it acted with some capacity used, but steam kept giving me "disk write error". I formatted it AGAIN, but with 4096 default allocation size. Steam was now able to write to it and it's now being filled with EVERYTHING I can put on it, to give it a real-time stress test.

I don't think this drive is bad. I have to wait until she uses the laptop more to find out if there is a problem again. I'm probably going to install this drive into her desktop and tell her to use it for Steam-crap/games incase it DOES cop-out.

On another note, have you ever hot-swapped a M.2 drive?! It's pretty neat that it's do-able, but doesn't seem very safe, 🤣

I got a Thinkpad Yoga X1 1st Gen.
Works perfectly but had a Wifi issue (not recognized).

I went to reseat and:
1. screw is butter and almost couldn't remove it
2. when I removed the 2 antennae cables, one socket came clean off; I jostled quite some time to take out the ring from the female plug and it was faster to just buy a new adapter.
Reseating solved the problem.

Without one cable it goes half the speed, from 250mbit/s to 125-130 download, and 140 to 70 upload.
Yes, it just used my thumb to make contact.

I also have a 5th gen and it works wonders. Yoga's are nice machines.

Building my new NAS. Switching from QNAP 2-bay NAS to a Jonsbo N2 case running UNRAID.

The hardware part is (I think) done.

Specs:
- Jonsbo N2 case (5-bay)
- CWWK "Purple" mainboard with N100 CPU and ASM1166 SATA controller
- 2 x 512 GB NVME SSD (1 from ADATA and 1 from Kingston)
- 16 GB RAM
- 10,5 TB of usable storage (17 TB raw) - may grow to 16,5 usable in the near future
- Be Quiet SFX-L PSU, 80 Plus "Gold" - could not find any PSU that is less than 500W, way overkill (my setup draw 17-20 W a idle)
- Noctua NH-L9i for the CPU and Noctua NF-A12x15 for the case

So far I am quite happy with the setup. The only down side is that the board has no PWM module so I cannot play with the fan speed in software...

UNRAID is also quite interesting. I am still learning but I can see its potential.

Apparently I killed my M4A785-M board somehow by letting it idle on the desktop with chrome open for like half an hour.... had my back turned to it, heard the fans ramp up, and screen was blanked, didn't respond, hammered keyboard, nothing... tapped power, shutdown... huh... touched sinks, cool... tried powering back on and it hits the LS-120, almost does a full seek and resets over and over. Wall power off, leave it sit 5 mins, plug it back in, same thing. Doesn't even seem long enough before it resets that it's wanting a bootblock recovery, and what the hell would suddenly wipe the bios, I think it's dual BIOS too. No smoke or smells either. Everything unplugged external but the monitor, still does it.. gah... too late for this crap, I guess I'll have to tear it down to minimum in the morning and see what it does. Anyway seems really bizarre it would just quit while idling like that, I know the CPU goes down to like 20W and the GPU below 5. Unless that fan ramp up was something suddenly demanding power, but I've had it balls out max consumption for hours to burnin/test before. Computers are stupid.

Had the dumb thing down to just GPU, RAM, CPU and it's still not doing anything, can't tell it's resetting or just catatonic now because monitor doesn't turn on quick enough. Had the battery out for a bit and put it back in, did nothing. I wouldn't have thought a dead battery would have gone like that, fine to boot it, run half an hour, in which case it would have warmed up a few degrees and picked up 0.1V maybe, then been too depleted to immediately restart... if it had been dead from cold I would have suspected it. Anyway, done all I can do without taking it to the bench and stripping it alllll the way down, testing diff RAM, CPU, GPU etc and the bench is occupied. Hope it's not that Sudden Asus Death Syndrome shit again (Where an Asus mysteriously dies, offers no clues/codes/beeps and is fix resistant.)

Edit: Jan 10th PM... I pulled more out of it, down to onboard gfx, one mem stick, no drives, still nothing.... though I realised it has changed behaviour.... it no longer shuts down on a long hold of the power button... I am sure I have the case speaker connected too and no beeps. Thinking last time I had a no shutdown thing on the button, the CPU was not seated right.... so maybe I need to reseat it, or maybe the socket is falling off.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-10, 02:45:

Had the dumb thing down to just GPU, RAM, CPU and it's still not doing anything, can't tell it's resetting or just catatonic now because monitor doesn't turn on quick enough. Had the battery out for a bit and put it back in, did nothing. I wouldn't have thought a dead battery would have gone like that, fine to boot it, run half an hour, in which case it would have warmed up a few degrees and picked up 0.1V maybe, then been too depleted to immediately restart... if it had been dead from cold I would have suspected it. Anyway, done all I can do without taking it to the bench and stripping it alllll the way down, testing diff RAM, CPU, GPU etc and the bench is occupied. Hope it's not that Sudden Asus Death Syndrome shit again (Where an Asus mysteriously dies, offers no clues/codes/beeps and is fix resistant.)

Edit: Jan 10th PM... I pulled more out of it, down to onboard gfx, one mem stick, no drives, still nothing.... though I realised it has changed behaviour.... it no longer shuts down on a long hold of the power button... I am sure I have the case speaker connected too and no beeps. Thinking last time I had a no shutdown thing on the button, the CPU was not seated right.... so maybe I need to reseat it, or maybe the socket is falling off.

Basic troubleshooting will take at least a couple of hours in total. It's pretty shyddy when it's not obviously a burn. 🙁
Hope it's faster than that.

Yeah, it's in a bad position to work on and the bench is buried in 2 other dismembered corpses, so I poke at it a bit, get pissed off and stiff and leave it alone again before I klutz something or deliberately maim it. Otherwise as you say, thorough work up would take just a couple of hours. Think I gotta find the inspection mirror, as the PCI slot is too close to the bottom to see a POST card display. Though it was cycling quick enough before that I dunno if that will show anything useful yet. Is making me a bit unreasonably grumpy though, it's interrupting the "fun stuff to mess around with" by being a chore, and also because it was filling some tweener support roles, so I can't forget about it for a bit, because I go "I just need a file from.." "I just need to make a disk on.." AAAAARRRRGH stupid shitty shitbox that died for no sensible fricking reason. Yeah there's other ways to do that, got the files on other machines etc, but just from being the "go to" it keeps coming to mind and doesn't let me calm down about it 🤣

Evening Edit: Had another attempt... had CPU and RAM out, hosed with contact cleaner, pulled plugs, nothing. Checked batt, voltage was down under 3, fresh batt in case, no improvement/change. Noticed CPU fan pulsing a bit, that seems consistent with it resetting over and over though. Put a USB stick on it, no attempt to read, so it's not looking to bootblock recover. Realised case didn't have a speaker, the header plugs didn't include it, and put a speaker on, but no beeps anyway. Checked PSU voltages, all look good. Tried different RAM sticks different slots, nope. So it is seeming like it's gotta be a full bench workup, checking for clock to CPU and core voltages etc etc, all the nitty gritty, and fine tooth comb inspection for hairline cracks and dodgy solder. Great, practically another project. Maybe this PSU just sliiiightly too marginal for fussy board and it's flipping out on a real small voltage variation, but IDK. Also might suspect one or two of the "poly" caps, they haven't got the flattest flat tops, but they also ain't bulgy bulged, just real slightly convex.

However, cluttering up the bench is a FM2 board I was still investigating, mATX, so might divert efforts to that, see if that can be got going, then put that in that system, and go back to this stupid damn thing when I got more patience for Asus BS.

editII: it was this one if you are curious, appears to have more life in it than Asus at the moment. Re: Bought this (Modern) hardware today though I just realised I can't hook the LS-120 to it, boooo.

edit yet again: so I am seeing similar models to this Asus board listed for parts/spares or repair with burned aux 12V sockets... like it's a common design flaw or cheap socket problem, so guess I better take a close look at that just in case.

edits that never stop: Fifth thoughts, it might get my DG965SS in it with a SLACR native floppy controller, PATA, better for purpose prolly.

Sun edit: I poked at the 4 pin aux ATX 12V again, actually seems a little wobbly, not sure if it's just the shell loose. Anyway, when I futz with that, the ability to turn off on the button comes back. Hanging the DVM on the 12V2 seems to see it waver a bit also. Maybe this PSU ain't so good either, reviews from way back say it might be a bit weak in the 12V department. Maybe I should try diff PSU... hard to get one close where it is tho...

I had a flash drive that Windows wouldn't read, but after trying to boot from it out of curiosity, it suddenly became readable and contained a Windows XP installer. I thought it would be a reliable software archive drive for my old stuff since it seemed to be more reliable than my huge USB 3 drive.

Other than that, I'm still totally confused by the world we live in today. As the song says, I'm too young to feel this damn old (I grew up in a place where country music was everywhere and at a time when it was just starting to die). I've also been really tired, and I'm concerned about driving from work in that condition. Sitting in a cubicle and staring at computer monitors all day really wears me out, but it's getting worse. I'm also permanently seeing spots and cloudy patches, and I think it's from driving at night and being surrounded by modern LED headlights (factory-installed ones, not just those "upgrade" bulbs where the DRLs blind you in the daytime).

I tried to help my parents with computer stuff last week. My mom got one of those badly-scaled "buy a new computer, loser" messages from Microsoft. It was so broken that she had to shut down by pressing the power button. Then the HP printer/scanner she has started requiring an account to scan, but I found that it works with the Windows built-in scanning program (which looks like a leftover from Vista) before getting out the baseball bat and Geto Boys. Of course, Windows tries to help out by automatically installing and updating the HP bullshit software, and my dad's computer constantly pops up UAC prompts asking to run it (along with constantly complaining about not having enough free space to upgrade to Windows 11 - yes, he accepted the upgrade). My parents seem to perpetually never have money, so I wonder if I should get a new computer and hand them my old one (which still works perfectly except for being horribly unstable when running Linux - the thing with the Linux Foundation openly supporting a Chromium browser monopoly makes me want to find a different alternate OS anyway). I don't know what to do with the old one because it's 7th-gen and has exactly zero M.2 slots (thanks, Dell). That statistic of 240 million computers becoming e-waste in October seems a little optimistic to me. As I've said before, people are just going to accept it, buy some sub-$300 piece of shit because that's all they can afford (which will likely cost about 40% more soon, but everyone will say that prices went down instead), and then come to me because it's so slow or the tiny eMMC failed from the massive amount of virtual memory writes caused by only having 4GB of RAM.

Of course, new hardware sucks. The only motherboards with decent expansion and onboard peripherals are from known problematic brands. Maybe it's because I only searched for socket AM5, and motherboard manufacturers have never put any effort in AMD boards. Even when AMD has better CPUs, you have to go with Intel if you want a motherboard that works.

Designed and printed a couple simple tool holders for my small workbench.

This is what I love about 3D printing. Being able to create one-off items to solve specific problems. 😀

lti wrote on 2025-01-19, 01:34:

I had a flash drive that Windows wouldn't read, but after trying to boot from it out of curiosity, it suddenly became readable and contained a Windows XP installer. I thought it would be a reliable software archive drive for my old stuff since it seemed to be more reliable than my huge USB 3 drive.

"Flash" and "reliable" strike me as mutually exclusive.

lti wrote on 2025-01-19, 01:34:

Other than that, I'm still totally confused by the world we live in today. As the song says, I'm too young to feel this damn old (I grew up in a place where country music was everywhere and at a time when it was just starting to die). I've also been really tired, and I'm concerned about driving from work in that condition. Sitting in a cubicle and staring at computer monitors all day really wears me out, but it's getting worse. I'm also permanently seeing spots and cloudy patches, and I think it's from driving at night and being surrounded by modern LED headlights (factory-installed ones, not just those "upgrade" bulbs where the DRLs blind you in the daytime).

I'm also pretty exhausted from having to stare at the screen at work, more often than not needing a nap after work. I was always more on the low-energy side. Driving I can manage, the route is easy enough and at least I'm done before the night falls. I feel like a prisoner in my own body all the time for unrelated reason. It all seems such a waste.

Are you sure your vision problems aren't combination of both work and driving at night? My eyes feel pretty heavy after work. Yeah, I look away from screen regularly, blink frequently enough I think.

lti wrote on 2025-01-19, 01:34:

I tried to help my parents with computer stuff last week. My mom got one of those badly-scaled "buy a new computer, loser" messages from Microsoft. It was so broken that she had to shut down by pressing the power button.

I'm tech support for my family, prefer to just turn off Windows auto-update.

Something borked in Win10 installation on my computer, I was test-driving Win11 for half-year, returned to Win10 during summer and it started to BSOD during transition to hibernated state (hybrid shutdown) after 2 weeks to 1 month since last clean boot. Win11 was running stably, just being more cumbersome. The only changes I could think of, I installed cheap 2 GB DDR2 stick at the end of 2023 to increase RAM capacity to 6GB (Memtest86+ 7.00 found nothing) and started using DWMBlurGlass.

That install has some unexplainable bugs from before, I have no idea where the heck does empty registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ServerKey come from, it's created by itself after few days of runtime, ExplorerPatcher's weather widget crashes Explorer if I have auto-colorization turned on (desktop background change changes title bars accordingly) and policy setting for always showing crash dialog stops working after a while, so I use WerTweak to force it to always appear.

Software sucks because it's always in some perpetual unfinished state.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-01-19, 20:49:

"Flash" and "reliable" strike me as mutually exclusive.

That flash drive is an old 8GB SanDisk that's about 15 years old, but it seems more reliable than my big 128GB drive. The 128GB drive will get close to saturating 5Gbps USB in both directions (it appears to have pSLC cache, even though the controller press release doesn't mention it), but I've run into a few slow spots. I also have a 512MB PNY flash drive (the one I got when I first learned that they existed) that still works and is faster than any of my other USB 2.0 flash drives.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-01-19, 20:49:

I'm also pretty exhausted from having to stare at the screen at work, more often than not needing a nap after work. I was always more on the low-energy side. Driving I can manage, the route is easy enough and at least I'm done before the night falls. I feel like a prisoner in my own body all the time for unrelated reason. It all seems such a waste.

Are you sure your vision problems aren't combination of both work and driving at night? My eyes feel pretty heavy after work. Yeah, I look away from screen regularly, blink frequently enough I think.

The combination might be the problem. With my boring office job, I'm only driving at night when the days get short in the fall and winter. I still have to drive about half an hour each way. I'm tired all day, though.

I looked at modern hardware some more after my post. The situation really sucks in general. Motherboards are over $200 once you get to the point where they have PCIe x4 slots instead of x1. The cheapest power supplies you'd actually want to use are $75, but a good 80 Plus Gold model in the same power range was $50 when I built my current desktop in 2018. For a case, I should look up InWin distributors because they still have some "boring" cases (and even put 20Gbps USB-C on a case that looks like it's from 2004).

I would like to find a better place to buy computer stuff than Amazon. Newegg has an extremely limited selection that isn't from a shady marketplace seller, and the nearest Microcenter is in Denver (an hour down I25).

Got to my first stable version with .Net project!

GitHub: https://github.com/ByteAether/Ulid
Announcement blog post: https://byteaether.github.io/2025/announcing- … n-applications/

Along the way, i had to learn a lot of new things that i had never touched before. And all of it is mostly *not* related to the functionality of the package itself. New stuff for me:
* The whole GitHub Actions DevOps world. (I'm not a DevOps person at all)
* Eleventy static page generator for GitHub Pages. (+ GitHub Actions related to that!)
* Packing a project into a NuGet Package with all the "metadata" necessary.
* All the "paperwork" stuff for open source projects, from readme files and licenses to issue templates.

Has been fun and really happy to give something back. 😀

Upgraded Mint from 21.3 to 22.1
Hassle free and it is even snappier.
Unlike frame-with-a-glass it didn't degrade.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-01-21, 11:26:

Got to my first stable version with .Net project! […]
Show full quote

Got to my first stable version with .Net project!

GitHub: https://github.com/ByteAether/Ulid
Announcement blog post: https://byteaether.github.io/2025/announcing- … n-applications/

Along the way, i had to learn a lot of new things that i had never touched before. And all of it is mostly *not* related to the functionality of the package itself. New stuff for me:
* The whole GitHub Actions DevOps world. (I'm not a DevOps person at all)
* Eleventy static page generator for GitHub Pages. (+ GitHub Actions related to that!)
* Packing a project into a NuGet Package with all the "metadata" necessary.
* All the "paperwork" stuff for open source projects, from readme files and licenses to issue templates.

Has been fun and really happy to give something back. 😀

Congratulations!!

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-11, 15:17:

Any news? Power zone can either be worth the price or just whatever works.
It's just more work and more time.