Computers have always been hard.
It’s not always the cable
A week ago (or so) I debugged the kitchen clock which is doing this:
I tried swapping out everything else except the screen itself, but no dice. And then a commenter confirmed that these screens are indeed flaky (or at least some production runs are), so I got a new one.
Which arrived a couple days ago:
Unboxing:
Lots of little doodads…
And the screen.
Yes! It’s the same as the one I had — Waveshare have many similar ones, so I wasn’t 100% sure I was buying the right model.
The inside view of the old one.
OK, the old screen is just fastened with double sided tape, so using a prying kit should do the trick…
No! Man, this tape sticks hard. Gotta use a screwdriver to bend it off.
Done! Look at my expert jigsawing skills…
I should probably check the new screen before I mount it… seems to work? And no flickering:
Yay.
So the lesson is: It’s not always the cable.
Dude
Capitalism Failure
I wonder how this happened — it’s a cheque from CD Universe from 2003 that I found while rooting through some old boxes. It’s TWENTY TWO AND 25/100 DOLLARS and I didn’t cash it, probably because the fee for cashing it would have been more than that…
I don’t really have a recollection why CD Universe would send me a cheque in the first place, though. Probably some referrer thing? Did the eyesore web site use to have referrer links to shop albums, perhaps? That’s the only thing I can imagine… Let’s see…
Heh, yup — still in the HTML (but commented out now).
Oh, well.
Totally reasonable behaviour
Hey! Paper jam on the scanner.
OK, I’ll remove the jammed paper and then press the stop ❌ button.
So what do you think happens when I press the stop button? I’ll give you a chance to guess…
Yes, exactly! It starts passing all the remaining sheets in the feeder through the machinery, but without scanning.
I’m sure that’s totally reasonable behaviour.














