Internal usb flash drive conversion (aka DIY USB DoM)

For a low-cost alternative to a commercially available USB Disk on Module, I made my own out of a regular USB drive and a 0.1" 5x2 pin header (ebay, like 20p each)

Retail: £50 (GBP) + postage  (e.g. [link])
DIY: £4 (GBP)

USB drive that I used: Transcend JetFlash 350 [link]

I did manage to get hold of a "vintage" Windows Vista ReadyBoost(tm) Module (same thing, with a silly name)... but even that was significantly more expensive!

There isn't anything complicated here, but some tips if you're doing this:

• Get the pinouts the right way around (it's mirrored)
• Insulate the reverse of the PCB (the header has *two* ports). Kapton tape works well.
• Solder the the NC pin to something - just to strengthen the connector
• Melt a bit of plastic into the NC hole on the connector
• If you use this exact same drive - there's 1 tiny plastic tab you'll need to snap off, and the "connector hole" needs (carefully!) making about 0.5mm wider for it to all fit back together. I opted for widening the casing, and filing the connector top+bottom; for a neater finish.

Here's some pictures:

These are annoying to dismantle without damaging the plastics

The "Vista" module I bought

If you're careful, you can save the USB connector for a future project. I was not:

 Hey, it works too!

 "In use"

The finished mod, and a side-by-side comparison with the one I bought:

 

P.S. yes, the cap still fits :)

"Zoostorm Desktop PC" - cheapo ebuyer i5-4460

I bought this a few days ago because it was cheap (£326). I couldn't find much about it beforehand, so planned to write stuff here... except they've stopped selling it :( That's probably why it was such a good price. Oh well, this will probably still apply to its replacement.

Here's what's inside it:

The motherboard is a Gigabyte H81M-DS2V
Western Digital "Blue" HDD
Corsair RAM
Akasa HSF
Generic Chinese no-name case and PSU

I was pleased to see it built using mostly branded stuff, and it runs almost silent when idle; and doesn't sound too bad under full load.

So, what's wrong with it? Just these (minor gripes):

The power light will burn your retinas off. Typical of cheap stuff, it's far too bright, and blue. Why are they always blue?! It was "cool" when the Playstation 2 first got released...

And this is what the horrible Gigabyte monstrosity of a bios looks like. Also it was Revision F2 out of the box... and they're up to F5 as of a couple of months ago.








Or you can switch it to "Classic"
(which is just as bad)

And if you want to use this for a diskless PXE client or something, pick something else. It comes with this "feature":

Finally, the SATA HDD came plugged into a 3Gbps socket rather than the 6Gbps one sat right next to it. Would it make a difference? Probably not, but still!

Linux Stuff

I've been messing around with various Linux-y things recently... anything that might be remotely useful to anyone else will appear here:

GitHub (stevenhoneyman)

...or maybe here: Arch Linux AUR packages (stevenhoneyman)

...Also, over a year since I last updated this blog/site...oops! 

Fujitsu AH532 (+dual SSDs,linux,not UEFI)

I bought another laptop last week in the eBuyer sale. Fujitsu Lifebook AH532. It's pretty unique in that it has an expresscard slot... but I chose it due to it meeting my other requirements: 3rd gen i5, integrated graphics, 3x USB3 sockets, and gigabit LAN (can you believe lenovo's cheapo i5 laptops still have 10/100?)

http://www.ebuyer.com/411438-fujitsu-lifebook-ah532-laptop-vfy-ah532m35a2gb

I had no intention of keeping the RAM, Disk, ODD, or OS so ignore those stats. Anyway, after I'd ordered it I then found some horror stories of how it comes with the evil UEFI BIOS replacement. If I installed linux, I'd need to short out pins on the motherboard to get it booting... hmmm...

http://www.linlap.com/fujitsu_lifebook_ah532

Easy to upgrade (original ODD + HDD below)

Got it, clicked in 16GB of RAM, two Sandisk SSDs (one in a 2.5->ODD adapter), and it starts up fine. No screwing around with UEFI or GPT or anything, it even happily continued to boot from the RAID1 linux install I had on those SSDs (MBR not GPT!)

You need a torx screwdriver to take the mounting bracket off the factory fitted Sony DVD writer - no idea why they used torx (the drive is held in with a single Philips screw), but really - who takes laptops to bits and doesn't have a set of torx screwdrivers? The hard disk doesn't need a caddy or any special brackets, one screw holds the plastic cover on, then 2 screws hold the disk in place (Mine came with a WD branded disk). I think it's quite funny that the Win8 sticker is on the bottom of the laptop. It's almost as if they were embarrased about it!

It consumes 12-15W on the mains, fully charged, and idle

Moral of the story: don't believe everything you read on the Internet!

My first day using Android (as an iOS user)

I sort of impulse-bought a Nexus 7 tablet today. I'm a long time iOS user, going from iPod Touch, to iPhone & iPad. Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone & iPad, but Apple are really starting to annoy me with some of their decisions recently (we need Steve back!)

Anyway, I thought I'd note a few things (mostly irritating) that I've discovered so far in using Android on this tablet. I really do like this device, and it does have some features I've thought "Wow, that's better than on my iPad", but as always, the good stuff gets forgotten, and people remember the bad stuff :)

So here goes (in no particular order really):

• The power button is a little bit too far around the back of the unit in my opinion. It doesn't "click" as well as an iPad button either
• Encrypting the device made it heat up to the temperature of thermite (well, maybe a little under, it got very warm at least) - guess that comes with it using 100% cpu for an hour or so
• The button bar thing at the bottom (you know, with back, home, and the other one on it) - what a waste of valuable screen space. Even more so in landscape mode. Give me back my pixels dammit
• Why is there no standard easy way to exit apps (fully)?
• The Android eBay app (at a first glance) is AMAZINGLY better than the shitty iOS "Fisher Price" version they've just vomited out
• Why allow apps in the marketplace that require root access, and then do not provide an official way to get root access? That's retarded.
• Speaking of which, not providing an easy way to do a full backup of the device to a PC is also stupid. (apps that require rooting DO NOT COUNT)
• Also, what kind of a stupid name is "Google Play"? Sounds as unprofessional as the OS names. "Hey I'm using Jelly Bean Magic Sandwich Icecream Pie edition"
• PROTIP: when the Google man tells you the weather in Fahrenheit and you have no idea what that is in English - to change it to degrees C, you need to go into the Google Cards thingy rather than settings. Yeah, it took me an age to find as well.
• Where is "Copy Address Location" on the 'right click' menu in firefox? It's not there. Fix your browser Mozilla!
• Entering an IP address in (chrome at least) is like near impossible! Every key you press it seems to swap out the keyboard for a different one (letters --> numbers and back). When you're on the 2nd block of digits and you're just getting the hang of it swapping, it stops swapping! What?!
• Connectbot (SSH client) is the best thing ever. Best clearest teeny tiny font. Way better than iSSH (iOS). I'd pay money for this app but it's free. Also note: You need to get Hacker's Keyboard to go with this (also free)
• On a related note, if you don't want Hackers keyboard always on, but can't be arsed going all the way into settings to swap them over - the secret hidden way is in the notifications area once you've given focus to a text area.
• Finally, Google's "Recommended for you" apps list sucks. It tried to tell me to buy football scores apps and stuff. Maybe it'll get better once I get a few hundred more apps or something. We'll see...

Despite this list of minor gripes, I really am starting to like Android & the Nexus 7. Buy one.

Marksman Electronic Tester - Teardown

Here is a quick 'teardown' of the "Marksman Multi-Function Electronic Tester" available on eBay for a few quid. It promises to do pretty much everything! I bought it as a cheapo NC voltage detector - I don't really know why, it wasn't going to be an improvement on my Fluke. I did like the idea of its continuity testing feature though.

Here it is in its original packaging. Exciting stuff. Free batteries!

Here it is as a size comparison with a Fluke VoltAlert 1AC-E II. It's a little bit thinner, but squarer. The yellow cap on the Marksman is just a cover. It unclips to reveal a metal screwdriver tip for poking stuff.

Here's the "instructions". I especially like: "The perceptibility of the indication can be impaired......on wooden runged ladders etc"

Here's it disassembled. The board is soldered on to the screwdriver tip with a bit of uninsulated solid wire. The cover is glued on (you can see the blue bits of stuck plastic on the yellow top cover.

Now here's where it starts to get interesting; and the reason I took it apart in the first place. These are the legs of the PCB mounted slide switch to toggle the sensitivity. Red lines are showing solder/track joins, two circles for the switch casing solder tags.

I couldn't get it to be any more/less sensitive - it was either in contact mode, or non-contact mode. Red light, or green light. Anyway, I drew the schematic out to see exactly what was going on -->
As you can see, there is nothing at all variable, both of the switch positions for Non-contact mode connect the exact same pins!

For the rest of it, there's a darlington pair and a couple of resistors with the red LED, and a 4069 CMOS hex inverter for the Green. Two gates to detect, two as an oscillator to make the speaker go BEEEEEEEEEEP (a little under 4KHz with those component values if you were wondering)

Just to make it even more clear, here is the pinout config of the switch (but upside down compared to the photo above). Pos 1 = Contact RED led mode, Pos 2,3 GREEN led mode, soldered together on the PCB.







Maybe I got a fake one or something, maybe it is just typical Chinese crappy electronics that shouldn't be allowed to be sold.

ASUS U36SG Review / Setup

After 2 years 11 months I decided it was time to upgrade my aging Macbook Pro to something a bit newer and less Appley (no ethernet port on a "pro" laptop - are they having a laugh?! Bring back Steve!). I bought the ASUS U36SG from Amazon. I had free money to spend on Amazon, and it was  £120 cheaper than ebuyer! The other reason I had to upgrade now was the fear of being shoved in the direction of the hideous monstrosity that is Windows 8. Yeah I'm a Linux user, but if I'm forced to buy a Windows COA you can be damn sure it aint going to be for Win8.

http://uk.asus.com/Notebooks/Superior_Mobility/U36SG/

This had everything I was looking for (except a backlit keyboard, but still...)

The packaging was shoddy, I guess I've been too spoilt by Apple. It came in a messy looking box, and inside was just some wonky brown cardboard holding it all together. Two things I noticed that I liked, and two that I didn't:

1. Hard drive LED! We buy Lenovo at work, and the lack of a HDD LED bugs me
2. You can make the "restore DVDs" straight to ISO, no need to waste real life discs (who uses them anymore?) - again, Lenny doesn't offer this feature. Before someone goes "Herp derp Y U make restore discs when you use linux LOL!!!!11111oneone" - in case I sell it in the future. in case it needs to be sent back under warranty.

And the bad stuff:

1. The damn stickers! stuck all over the thing. Protective plastic. spam stickers. ugh. Luckily they all came off OK. There were sneaky ones on the underside of the hinges I didn't spot first time round:

2. As with my last ASUS (EEEPC900A - a netbook, remember those?!) there's no indicator LED to say the battery is finished charging. You've actually got to start it up and check in the OS. I don't get why they would miss off something as simple as that. The manual says when its on green and solid, its at least nearly fully charged - well thats useful.... NOT


Anyway, after making the restore discs (5 DVD ISOs - yep, that's (compressed) 17GB of crap they pile on to these things), it got flattened and a clean Windows 7 x64 installed. Seemed daft not to dual boot, in case there's a game I want to play that WINE doesn't like or something.

I like the ASUS driver page, they give the downloads meaningful names (*cough* TAKE NOTE DELL *cough*)

After taking a disk image, it was time for Linux. Arch went on without issue. Notes below. The only thing that took a little set up was the dual graphics card nvidia Optimus thingy using 'Bumblebee'. It worked first time though.

Arch installation:

loadkeys uk

cfdisk /dev/sda

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel

pacstrap /mnt grub-bios

genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

arch-chroot /mnt

    nano /etc/hostname

    nano /etc/hosts

    nano /etc/vconsole.conf

        KEYMAP=uk

        FONT=

        FONT_MAP=

    nano /etc/locale.gen

    locale-gen

    nano /etc/locale.conf

        LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

    mkinitcpio -p linux

    grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

    pacman -S os-prober

    grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

    passwd root

    exit

umount /mnt

reboot

Installed:

vim

cpupower lm_sensors wireless_tools yajl

alsa-utils alsa-oss alsa-plugins

netcat mpg123 wget

wicd
    gpasswd -a USERNAME network
    /etc/rc.conf    DAEMONS= dbus wicd
dhclient

(I had to install dhclient - wicd seemed unhappy with the Arch default of dhcpcd)

Fix the grub error message:

# cp /usr/share/locale/en\@quot/LC_MESSAGES/grub.mo /boot/grub/locale/en.mo

Installed Xorg and stuff:

xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-server-utils mesa mesa-demos xf86-input-synaptics xf86-video-intel openbox rxvt-unicode feh

~/.xinitrc

    exec openbox-session

Installed yaourt to get bumblebee:

$ wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/package-query/package-query.tar.gz
$ wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yaourt/yaourt.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf package-query.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf yaourt.tar.gz
$ cd package-query
$ makepkg
# pacman -U package-query-1.0.1-x86-64......
$ cd yaourt
$ makepkg
# pacman -U yaourt-blahblah......

Installed bumblebee and stuff, tested with glxgears:

yaourt -S bumblebee
yaourt -S nvidia-utils-bumblebee nvidia-bumblebee
    /etc/rc.conf   DAEMONS=bumblebeed

glxgears
optirun glxgears

Installed bbswitch to save power and turn off the nvidia card when not in use:

yaourt -S bbswitch

/etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf

    [bumblebeed]
    KeepUnusedXServer=false
    TurnCardOffAtExit=false
    ...
    [driver-nvidia]
    PMMethod=bbswitch
    ...
    [driver-nouveau]
    PMMethod=bbswitch
    ...

/etc/modprobe.d/bbswitch.conf
    options bbswitch load_state=0 unload_state=0

# rc.d restart bumblebeed


/etc/rc.d/functions.d/nvidia-card-enable
#############################
nvidia_card_enable() {
  BBSWITCH=/proc/acpi/bbswitch

  stat_busy "Enabling NVIDIA GPU"

  if [ -w ${BBSWITCH} ]; then
    echo ON > ${BBSWITCH}
    stat_done
  else
    stat_fail
  fi
}

add_hook shutdown_poweroff nvidia_card_enable
#############################

chmod +x /etc/rc.d/functions.d/nvidia-card-enable

Rebooted, and tested the power saving (it's off when it shows rev as FF)

lspci|grep VGA
    (rev ff)
optirun glxgears
lspci|grep VGA
    (rev a1)

Installed laptop-mode-tools to stop the drive from using whatever power saving settings it has as default (which makes it click every few seconds as it's too aggressive):

laptop-mode-tools
    /etc/rc.conf    DAEMONS= laptop-mode
    /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf
        #
        # Power management for HD (hdparm -B values)
        #
        BATT_HD_POWERMGMT=128
        LM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=254
        NOLM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=254

...and that was it really. I'm yet to test suspend and bluetooth, but they should just work.