If you’re looking for a high-power charger/power supply that can also make toast and confections, the SlimQ 330W laptop power supply might be for you! I actually purchased this to use with a Starlink Mini and a USB-C laptop, and it should suffice for that. It seems like a really high quality unit, except that they’re trying to dissipate about 22W of power from this relatively small plastic case (at full load). Though it is around 93% efficient, that extra 7% has to go somewhere.
I make a really ugly cable/adapter thing to test battery charge capacity using a BK Precision 5335B (the actual battery tests will be in a different video, though). All it does is interrupt the VBus current path and provide a couple of voltage monitoring lines on a pair of USB-C connectors that are otherwise in parallel.
Taking a look at a Dell-branded LTO Ultrium 8 external SAS tape drive that I got new in box from eBay. (It’s actually an IBM drive and enclosure, as it turns out.) Paired the drive with an HPE MicroServer G10+ v2 that was also a NIB eBay find. Turns out it’s not the right machine with which to use this, but at least was enough to get the drive tested.
I laboriously go through the process of unboxing and testing the new-ish Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K G2, or BMMSC G2 as it’s slightly more easily said. It’s kinda a combo of the old BMMSC G1 and the Micro Cinema Camera. Also got two Mini Converters to apply LUTs to both cameras over SDI, also from Blackmagic Design, of course.
In this video I try to test out the Icy Dock ToughArmor M.2 NVMe Mobile Rack for PCIe slots. It supports 2 removable NVMe drives placed in the included sleds, and (almost) fits an x8 or x16 lane PCIe slot that supports bifurcation to get 4 juicy lanes to each of the SSDs. I test it out with Samsung 990 Pro and Western Digital SN850X 4TB drives. That being said, it turns out that not all bifurcation implementations are created equal, nor are all PCIe slots. Hence the frustrating aspect. Buy it with a generous return policy in place, if you buy it at all. Just to be 100% clear: This is not sponsored in any way. If you couldn’t … Continue reading
In this video I repair a Raritan Dominion LX-108 IP KVM in a very professional manner using wood. It goes on for quite some time, but that’s at least more appropriate for YouTube than other platforms. No biggie, you can always skip around using the chapters. For posterity, here’s a transcript of the video in case you’d rather read than listen. But beware! It’s as transcribed by YouTube and so may include some errors and lack of punctuation (and etc). well hopefully it’s repair time today I have here a Raritan Dominion lx18 8 Port IP KVM switch which has served me well for many years now it customarily sits in a rack at an off-site Data Center and obviously … Continue reading
In this video I create a new backup server from a Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 with 18x 20TB Seagate Exos refurbished drives. Also there’s some more ranting about backups in general. But idk, there are chapters so you can skip to whatever. And it’s not technically a server, in that it doesn’t serve files. It’s really more of a client that takes files from other servers and holds onto them. But I call it a backup server because hardware-wise it’s a server. Anywho, that’s the description. It’s probably not optimal for the YouTube algorithm, but hey, I’m not an influencer even though I have a TikTok account that I don’t use. For posterity, here’s a transcript of the video in … Continue reading
I just got my most expensive single computer ever. It’s an already-outdated Precision 7865 with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 64-core CPU, direct from Dell. RAM upgrades from the manufacturer are always a bit of a rip, so in this video I upgrade it to 512GB. Also, I find out for the first time whether a consumer graphics card (PNY / NVIDIA RTX 4080 16GB) will actually fit inside the moderately-sized chassis. Oh, and fit two Western Digital Black SN850X 4TB SSDs to replace the woeful 256GB el cheapo card that came with the system from Dell. Absolutely nothing in this is a paid ad. It was paid for by my wallet. Buy Dell, HP, Asus, even Razer for all … Continue reading
I got this LeCroy WaveRunner 64Xi-A-N Oscilloscope from eBay because I needed a faster scope than my best 200Mhz Siglent model.
On eBay it looked super clean and in good cosmetic shape, and was shown and claimed to be working. When I received it, it would kinda start up, but the display was blank and overall it was unresponsive. When I went to make this video showing the investigation, it powered right up! Strange.
So I figured I’d just be replacing the RTC battery and upgrading the HDD to an SSD. Turns out it already had an SSD and a new battery. The problem was that it would reboot every time the USB ports were even slightly jostled.
After getting the motherboard out (which is standard-ish mini ITX style), it turns out that the PCB is really badly warped. That’s probably leading to cracked and/or damaged traces, possibly in internal layers. I’d wager that’s the cause of the reboots.
I posted this video more for posterity and in case anyone wanted to see an albeit slow teardown. Apologies for the rambly nature, but this really didn’t go according to plan.
This is pretty much a re-post of something I put up on the Plex forums, but I wanted to archive it here for reference. So if you have any comments or questions, please add to the original thread! Server Version#: Last few years of updates through current stable build. Player Version#: Last few years of updates through current stable build. TL;DR: The orange play icon in the middle of the screen when paused causes burn-in on OLEDs. Solution at the bottom if you’re using your own server and not opposed to manipulating CSS. I need to preface this by saying that I love the Plex web player. I primarily use that to consume my media, and it puts browsing/playing from … Continue reading
