After moving to a new place, I had to put my ADS-B handling Raspberry Pi 2B into a cupboard far from any network connection. So I’ve plugged in a cheap USB WiFi dongle and connected it to my WiFi. However, I don’t know whether it’s the dongle or something specific to the RasPi2’s USB implementation,… Read More »
I’m using a ConBee II Zigbee stick by Dresden Elektronik but switched from their own Phoscon/deCONZ software to the Home Assistant ZHA integration. While I didn’t have any issues with my few Zigbee devices, today, I’ve noticed that there’s a newer firmware available for my ConBee stick. Usually, the firmware update is handled by the… Read More »
Back when I bought my Nintendo Switch, I made sure to buy an unpatched one – turning all the different boxes in the store upside down to read the serial number on the bottom and compare it with the list I had on my phone. However, apart from some experiments with SX OS and later… Read More »
In April 2023, Reddit announced that it will start asking for money to use their API for commercial purposes. This also included 3rd party apps, e.g. the famous iOS Reddit client “Apollo”. While there was hope it won’t get too pricy at first and the other changes looked manageable, that hope got crushed when Reddit’s… Read More »
Modern heads for Sonicare toothbrushes come with a small chip that records not only the type of head, but also how many seconds you’ve used it – so the head unit can remind you that it’s time to swap the head for a new one. This isn’t purely for monetary reasons, especially as the unit… Read More »
In December 2011, I bought a Philips Sonicare DiamondClean Smart 9400 toothbrush set, product code HX9917/89. This included a HX992B handset – that offers Bluetooth connection to their app and also has a LED in the bottom to show when you’re applying too much pressure while brushing. The handset transfers your brushing info to their… Read More »
Google introduced its location tracking service Latitude in February 2009. A year later, in March 2010, I bought my first Android phone: the Google Nexus One. A few days later I’ve enable Google Latitude on it and my first checkin was on 31 March 2010 at 16:20:48 CEST. And apart from when I was without… Read More »
A while ago I was fed up with Android Wear smartwatches and bought a Garmin Fenix 5 Plus. After using it for a while I started to explore the possibilities beyond the manufacturer specifications. This lead to a firmware patcher based upon work from Alex Whiter (who sadly passed in 2019). That patcher modified the… Read More »
When I got my Spectre x360 back in 2016, I booted it into the Windows 10 it came with, played a bit around and then decided to put Linux on it. So I took a backup of all partitions, repartitioned the whole SSD and went on with Linux. Of course, I found a way to… Read More »
A while ago I’ve acquired an old Tektronix TDS784D oscilloscope. Originally, it came with these enabled options: While this already is a lot, there’s still option 2C (Comm signal analyser) which is a pure-software option. (In later production runs, the device might also already contain the necessary hardware for the bigger memory option 2M. Check… Read More »