I take a look at the HOPI-9800 from #Shenzhen #HOPI Electronic Technology, a meter that displays the supply Voltage and frequency (or “frequence”) as well as the Amperage draw, overall power in Watts, power factor, and annual power consumption.
It’s a somewhat dangerous contraption that’s not all that well put together. And I forgot to even mention the sketchy multi-national power socket.
I converted an older HP DL380 Gen8 (aka a StoreOnce 2900) from using a hard RAID controller to an HBA for software RAID. The conversion is simple, but the video is long af because I spend a lot of time discussing the “why” more than the “how”.
In this excerpt from the below video, I talk about the total cost of ownership of RAID arrays.
This describes why I created the RAID HDD TCO Calculator which helps you figure out the total cost of ownership of a RAID array, inclusive of stuff like electrical and cooling costs.
I take a look at the Teclast F7 Plus which I bought on a whim to see if a cheap laptop could compete with my similarly-valued X1 Carbon Gen 2 from 2014. Turns out it could not, except in battery life (spoilers).
I actually purchased the laptop about a year ago and started making a video about it, but the farked around without working on it in the interim. Hence, we are here now.
For some reason I did a full walk-through of the Teclast’s rather robust BIOS, which you can see here:
The reMarkable 2 hardware has a solid and pleasant feel. The software just seems to work as advertised. However, almost every feature of this product relies on a connection to reMarkable’s cloud — the future of which is uncertain, as with any smaller tech company.
I test out the new Amazon Glow device, and also completely destroy it via my incompetence.
I’ll admit I was charmed by the full-sized specs of this diminutive laptop (or netbook, as you will), and I have a thing for tiny laptops in general. So I couldn’t resist it when Banggood offered it up to me in a full-on tracking cookie assault of marketing. (That being said, I purchased it from Amazon to avoid paying duties.) It’s a solidly built little machine, and a solid performer save for one thing: It’s not what I would consider to be a gaming computer. Though it is indeed sold as one, what with it’s somewhat-included side controllers and advertising to that effect. Sure, it can play some games just fine, but without some kind of even halfway-decent (even mobile-optimized) … Continue reading
I’d been seeing a lot of different brands of rechargeable lithium ion standard-sized batteries on the market, and couldn’t decide which ones to buy. Hence, I bought many of them. Hopefully this helps you out of the same conundrum! I built a test “rig” (really just some plywood) which consisted of 5 each of milliamp-hour meters, 4-position battery packs, and 12 Ohm resistors. In all, I tested 7 brands of lithium cells, as well as 6 sets of alkaline batteries (as a point of reference for capacity), 1 set of non-rechargeable Energizer Lithiums, and 1 set of NiMH Panasonic Eneloop cells. The batteries were discharged until their aggregate voltage reached 3 (or 0.75V per cell) which I felt was a … Continue reading
The WAudio W-3900 Power Conditioner is a well-made PDU/power strip, with a couple of bucks worth of filtering components inside. If it were sold in the $50 price range, I’d definitely recommend it for its solid build quality, decent quality components, and retro looks. But at $180, the amount of power “conditioning” (it’s really just filtering certain frequencies of noise at low levels) doesn’t justify the price, IMHO. To be fair, the product can be found on AliExpress for $137 at the time of this writing. Though the marketing materials promise “the highest level of surge & spike protection”, in reality it is not what I would call a surge or spike protector. One weak PTC thermistor is presumably the … Continue reading
This is the prelude to a future project, wherein I stick an ancient Atom motherboard into an unpronounceable QILIPSU outdoor enclosure. (The enclosure seems to be pretty good, though!)
You can access the computer here for fun and no practical reason whatsoever: http://outdoor.s.co.tt
I purchased a Pyle PCO875 Power Sequencer simply to make a video about it, because I didn’t believe all of its claims. Though it does appear to be a somewhat-competently made power sequencer, the manufacturer’s statements about power conditioning, surge protection, spike suppression, filtering and so forth are all false. In the video I covered the Amazon listing’s specs for the device, but the specs are much the same on Pyle’s own website so it was no mistake in importing it over to Amazon. I’ll some screenshots here for posterity, because hopefully they’ll eventually correct their “mistakes”, and I want to have a record of what statements they were making at the time this video was created: I did manage … Continue reading
