Cable Box Supremacy

I’ve been rooting around in The Cupboard Of Mystery this week and getting rid of stuff that’s not useful any more (giving away, selling or taking to the recycling).

But what do you do with gadgets like this?

OK, the MP3 Sony Walkman is probably not going to be useful… but… it’s small and inoffensive and well…

The Nokia E72 — OK, I can trash that, but I should probably get it powered up enough to wipe it, I guess? But who has connectors to these gadgets?

Mua-ha! I HAVE! Behold my organisational skills! In awe!

Found both!

And they even boot up. The Nokia doesn’t seem to hold a charge, though…

(By the way, I used the opportunity to do some typing on that keyboard — it’s still, by far, the best keyboard for a gadget like this that I’ve tried. Better than Blackberry, and much, much, much better than all of the revival keyboard phones that have been Kickstarterered over the years.)

Man, that Sony Walkman is a good-looking gadget…

Anyway. I guess the moral here is — don’t throw out strange-looking cables until you’ve thrown out the gadget they go with.

Server Screens

I’ve got a few headless servers around the apartment (for normal stuff), and… I’ve gotten real fed up with the headlessness. That is, every five years when something goes critically wrong, I have to hook up a screen to the thing and see what it’s complaining about. (It’s usually “No keyboard detected; press F1 to continue.)

So I have to pull out a monitor from somewhere, and then find the cables, and then find an outlet, and all of that takes (at minimum) half an hour. Especially the “finding an outlet” bit.

So I’ve sworn to find some small screens and just sticky tape them to the machines so that I can spare myself this quinquennālis event.

There’s a lot of 7-9″ HDMI screens out there…

But the problem is that they’re all meant for mounting inside a self-made box/frame of some kind, and that’s not what I’m about here.

So I got this, and…

*sigh*

This 9″ monitor is really a sideways display, so it’s… it’s… Well, OK, I guess I can read “Press F1 to continue” on it anyway. So… mission accomplished?

Can’t somebody just make a normal li’l screen? C’mon.

(And I’m sure all those RAID errors are totally fine.)

The Pozidriv Outrage!!1

So, I’ve had these Pozidriv screws for a while, and I’ve never found a bit that actually fits them. They all seem “too pointy”.

And if you try to google this stuff, you find a gazillion pages saying “well, Philips is different from Pozidriv”. YES! I KNOW! Why isn’t there a checkbox on google that goes “no, I’m not a moron, filter out all answers to idiotic questions?”

But today I bought a new bits set, and it has several PZ2 bits.

They’re all marked S2 (which is the steel quality) and PZ2 (which is the shape).

But some of these PZ2 bits fit and some are totally wiggly! Just as wiggly as all the other PZ2 bits I have! But some fit perfectly!

And if you line then up by the widest “vane” there, you can see that the top one is like a quarter of a millimetre longer! Which explains why it’s all wobbly and unusable!

hgfhjfyudsgfsifkdagfyusadadausahdsj

WHAT IS GOING ON ISN”T POZIDRIV A STANDARD WHAAA

Is this necessary

I mean, seriously.

Why does an NVMe to USB-C adapter need all these lights.

C’mon.

And there’s too many screws and stuff.

TSK TSK

But at least it’s ridiculously slow. Instead of 400MB/s (which is what you’d expect), you get 60MB/s. And the enclosure gets ridiculously hot.

IcyBox gadgets, man…