The battery problem Unfortunately old, long term unused Cybiko Classics suffer from exploded batteries. Worse, the residue will eat away at the original battery contacts, and will even begin to damage the motherboard if left in for long enough. Get the batteries that are in there out as soon as possible, and clean the battery contacts as well as the Cybikos own contacts as best you can. You may also consider disassembling the Cybiko to clean any residue that may have gotten to the motherboard.

Tl;Dr: In this blog post, I discuss the problem I have with having an external DAC (cable clutter), and the hacky solution I came up with (putting a USB DAC inside the chassis of my computer and hijacking the HD-Audio solution built into most PC cases). The problem I recently became dissatisfied with my motherboard audio solution, so I investigated DACs and found the Fiio K3. The difference compared to the onboard motherboard audio was that the headphones could be driven louder (unsurprising) but the bass specifically seemed ’tighter' and more defined.

Firstly, you might want to check out the dashboard. I recently started a diet. One thing I decided this time around was to be heavily data driven in my weight loss, and therefore I decided to get some ‘smart’ weighing scales. I got the Eufy P1 scales which seemed to be reasonably well reviewed, and it turns out that Eufy is another name for Anker, another Chinese brand I’ve had success with in the past.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to reduce my dependence on cloud services. This is purely ideological, I have no real reason to distrust the cloud, nor am I going to attempt to convince you to. I just made a decision a while ago that all my mission critical/sensitive stuff needed to be moved off of centralised cloud storage. The stories of people losing their Google accounts for practically no reason scare me.

So, it turns out that a lot of smart gear from many manufacturers, including ones you’ve almost certainly heard of, comes from a company called Tuya. They seem to make all sorts of fun IOT gear, which all connects to the Tuya cloud. What Tuya seem to do is sell whitelabeled ‘versions’ of their products to various brands who then sell them as if they’d manufactured them themselves. Very interesting right?

Note: While the general themes in this post are still accurate, this blog post has predictably fallen out of date. I will eventually write a follow up for Pipewire, but for now, here be dragons. Yee hath been warned! Bluetooth Audio is generally considered convenient, but not ‘audiophile’. Any self respecting audiophile is probably connecting their fancy headphones to some Digital to Analog Converter/Amp combo which might be connected to their computer using some fancy gold plated USB Cable.

My trusty old USB 3 hub has failed. It was only around a year old, but it was cheap and it worked. It wasn’t powered, but most of the time it didn’t need to be. One day I began having very strange issues with USB on my computer. Devices randomly disconnecting, devices never connecting until the computer was rebooted and so on. I eventually narrowed it down to the hub. I tossed it out after a quick internal inspection had revealed nothing obviously wrong, and went shopping for a new hub.

The Finished Product - quite rustic! This article was recently featured in Hackaday and Diyode! I’m bored. I’m sure you are too. I’m personally very thankful that I can still work through this strange period - but there are still hours in the day to fill. I wanted a personal project, so I thought about remote working and the health impacts. Most offices here have air handling units, air conditioners, and fans to keep air circulating.

Like many people, I find it difficult to wake up in the morning. I want to automate some of the things I do in the morning in order to continue to hack away at my laziness. To this effect, I want my television to switch on and over to BBC news in the morning. Unfortunately, Hisense do not provide a way to control the television remotely as far as I can tell, and nmapping it doesn’t give me anything too interesting.

A while ago, I and a friend of mine got rather annoyed at a ridiculous propaganda attempt called “Not So Safe”, claiming that Electronic Cigarettes were extremely dangerous, so we countered it by parodying the complete lies with a website in the same shape, which contained well cited research. We called it Not So Educated. They’ve long since taken the site down, I suspect in response, but you can still somewhat experience it thanks to the Wayback Machine.