Too Many Gadgets

I get annoyed with something, and then I go “I’ll buy/build this gadget, and that will make me less annoyed”. Which is true — I’ll be using the gadget for a while and almost every time I use it I’ll think “well, this really fixed that annoyance”. Success!

But then the gadget invariably breaks down, and I have to fix it.

And when you are so easily annoyed as I am; i.e., you have as many gadgets as I have, it seems to happen almost constantly.

Like this week — I had some electricians in to get some more juice in, and also replace some ancient downlights, and fix some issues, and etc etc. Which means taking the electricity for the apartment, and then flipping it on and off again a few times at random.

So I’m careful to switch all my actual computers off for real before they arrive, but I forget about some gadgets — like this box I have in the kitchen that plays music for me.

So after the electricians left, the screen was semi-dead, and after rebooting, the screen was totally dead.

*sigh* Time to do some debugging.

The thing is a Raspberry Pi 4, and after fishing it out of the box, it had a temperature of about 60C, which seems high? And it’s a Pi, which is notorious for having flaky HDMI, so is the problem the Pi or the screen?

The nice thing about Raspberries is that you can just put the SD card in another Pi and then boot up, and…

No, still the same problem, so it’s not the Pi.

But! Then it fixed itself!?

It’s alive! So it was the Pi!

And then rebooting again and…

So it’s not the Pi!

The screen is a Japanese Comics Screen 2, which was one of the very early small screens that were launched on Kickstarter, so…

But what if it’s the power supply? It’s USB powered, and powering via the Pi is perhaps just a tad too little juice? Even though it’s worked perfectly for two years?

So let’s get a USB wall wart in?

Yeah, OK, with the power directly from a USB wall wart it seems to work reliably?

Yes indeed — I’ve now rebooted it ten times, and it works every time.

So… either that was the problem, or it’s just something that’s going to reoccur in a couple of weeks.

It’s probably the cable.

I love debugging hardware!

In conclusion: I should probably get more gadgets to fix the problems I have with my gadgets.

Wires rule, wireless drools

So for about fifteen years this has been my TV/movie watching sitch — I’m over here, and the computer that plays the stuff is over there *points at bookcase*.

And I control this with this handy li’l keyboard.

Now, when I first started this thing, I went through about half a dozen keyboards until I found this one. Most mini keyboards have a pitiful range — like a metre at most. But this one (which is not Bluetooth, but uses a USB dongle) works pretty well.

That is, normally it has, like, a 98% success rate. Which would be infuriatingly low for a normal keyboard, but since I’m just using this as a “remote” — i.e., to stop/start movies and control the volume etc — it’s not that bad.

But! On random days, it drops to 70% or so. It does not seem to be correlated to anything I can find — not the battery charge, and not… well, that’s all I can think should affect this, because I’m stationary and the dongle is stationary.

A neighbour blasting a microwave for hours on end? Or a wifi AP gone wild that spams the entire spectrum? Comic radiation? TEH RUSSIANS?!?!?

So I’ve lived with this mysterious phenomenon for years, but like I said — it’s annoying, but it’s not maddening. Just push the “start” button once more. There you go.

But this week I decided to do something about it.

I don’t want to snake a … 15-metre-long USB cable (it’s only four metres as the crow flies, but I’d have to nail it up along the walls around the room), but I wondered whether a generic USB-over-wireless thing exists, and sorta — they used to, but not really any more. And… I’d be exchanging an unreliable wireless thing with another wireless thing of unknown reliability. And! This would presumably introduce more latency, which is something you don’t want in a keyboard, really.

But then a friend suggested using a USB->cat5 thing. But… do I have cat5 here?

I do! I’d forgotten! I have an extra one that’s not in use! (The two other ones in use there are for music distribution.)

And USB->cat5 things exist! Still! Several different ones, some powered and some bus powered. So I went with a bus powered one.

So you just plug your USB device in one end…

… and then the other end into a USB port on the computer.

And it works! I’m amazed. I mean, it supplies the power to the dongle via the cat5 cable! Sick!

I still have to tidy up some cabling in the bookcase, but other than that, seems like I’m done — the dongle receiver for the keyboard is now about half a metre from where I’m sitting, so it now seems to work ~100%?

At least today.

The future is here, old man!

It happened

I knew I had a Google Maps API key in a Microsoft Github repository publicly viewable, so I’ve been meaning to rotate it. Since 2017. Procrastination, eh?

But it didn’t really seem that urgent because I had a $10 spending limit on the key, so eh whatevs — I have more important things to do. Like washing my hair! Reading comics! I’m a busy man!

After nine years, it finally happened: Somebody started using it and ran up a $6 bill, so I disabled the key (and I guess I now have to push a new version of the CSID app; the map portions no longer work).

Eh, tant pis. But I’m idly wondering whether there’s any way to tell what the IP addresses of the API calls were? It would have been amusing if the usage came from some Openai LLM or something…

Merely Secondary Interests

I love this — this is what I’ve always been thinking, but said better: What’s important is what’s on the page (the prose with novels, the art and prose with comics), and the rest of the stuff is merely secondary.

Which is why I find 97.4% of reviews so frustrating — they talk almost exclusively about plot, characters, psychological insight and form, but not actually about the reading experience itself.

I do think that this lines up with what a lot of people are interested in — I sometimes get the feeling that people like reading recaps more than actually reading a book/comic or watching a movie.