Samuel Pinches

It has been a tough few years for photobucket’s reputation… In 2017 they launched their new paid “P500” plan, holding millions billions of images on the web to ransom and demanding $400 per year, which unsurprisingly, didn’t go down well… For a recent website, I needed to use photobucket because they offer an email-to-upload service … [Read more…]

If you’re looking for replacement parts for your Xiaomi Robot Vacuum cleaner, just be aware that there are a lot of fake (3rd party) replacement components for sale on the market. I am not sure if the quality is measurably worse, but the genuine components sell for 3x to 4x the price of the aftermarket … [Read more…]

Over the last couple of years, there has been a new category of home appliances that has started to appear on the market – the rise of the robot vacuum cleaners! Like a new kind of kitchen gadget, I was immediately interested if Robovacs could live up the the hype and promises they claimed. In … [Read more…]

Just a quick one: If you’ve previously used Divi or another Elegant Themes product and getting this error recurring in your wordpress debug log: PHP Notice: register_sidebar was called <strong>incorrectly</strong>. No <code>id</code> was set in the arguments array for the “Layout Builder Widget Area 1” sidebar. Defaulting to “sidebar-9”. Manually set the <code>id</code> to “sidebar-9″ … [Read more…]

The Promise of USB-C World peace…. one ring to rule them all… one connector for everything. Fits right in doesn’t it? Unfortunately, things are never as simple as they may seem. USB Type-C, or USB-C as it is commonly called, promises a lot, but also brings along a lot of compromises, confusion, and catches. For … [Read more…]

In my JGAurora A5 printer, it is run by a pair of MakerBase modules. The printer is run by a Makerbase MKS Gen L motherboard, which runs the open-source Marlin firmware. The printer LCD screen is an entirely separate component, and here JGAurora have used the MKS TFT28 LCD module, which is an entirely proprietary … [Read more…]

I generally like troubleshooting. The juicier the problem, the more rewarding is the feeling of having solved it. Of course, solving other people’s problems is often lot more fun than solving your own – they are grateful, and you get to feel good about having done something nice for someone else. Possibly the best part … [Read more…]

Thrift shopping for old tech to pull apart is a fun hobby of mine. As far as hobbies go, it’s a relatively inexpensive one too. I picked up an AVLABS AVL340 – bascially a hifi with a screen and an iPod dock. I paid $30, which I still think was too much, but was far … [Read more…]