The only normal people are the ones you don't know that well...
I bought this Zigbee light switch many years ago and recently had to disconnect it temporarily. I noticed there was a switch marked SW1 but had lost the instructions years ago. First I tried Googling it but nothing turned up. I tried keywords such as XN-1-3WKG-GBZB-SB T1.1 2019.08.10 which were marked on the circuit board. I also tried HGZB-41 which is marked on the back of the device. I also…
I recently powered down my Brother MFC-L3770CDW printer after it had been on probably for a year. When it came back up, I had a NO TONER error (not a "low toner" error). The toner was definitely nowhere near empty, but the printer simply didn't recognise the toner. I pulled the cartridges out and put them back in, but that didn't help. These toner cartridges are not the genuine Brother brand…
I had to do this and then spent way more time Googling it than just writing it from scratch. Everyone seems to want to do the reverse (parse an ISO 8601), but in my case I want to create it from the current date. Here it is: =TEXT(NOW(), "yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss") & "+10:00" NOTE: You need to manually adjust the "+10:00" at the end of that to your actual Time Zone. I think the main issue is that Excel…
While the Abarth is a car meant for spirited performance driving, sometimes you do need to go from A to B where B is far away and cruise control makes that much more pleasant. The last time I did a cruise control retrofit was in 1996 on a 1994 VW Golf LE which also oddly didn't come with it. The VW retrofit used official VW parts, but I haven't come across an official FIAT retrofit kit. Instead I…
It's about the time now that the oldest of the UVC-G4-Doorbells are running out of warranty. I've had two of them so far fail and one was just within warranty and one just fell outside. The failure mode is a momentary loss of power when someone rings the bell. The Doorbell has an unusual (for network equipment) power arrangement where it is fed by 16-24VAC. This is to maintain backwards…
Installing a rear facing camera is not a hugely difficult task on an Abarth 595 / Fiat 500 and there are several Youtube videos on the topic, however I found they all seem to gloss over a few key items which I will cover here. 1. Fuse taps / orientation / polarity / series vs. parallel - it's an important thing 2. Partial headliner removal - how to take out the coat hook (don't just pull it!) 3.…
It seems like a fairly common problem that these cameras can fail due to the RJ45 port on the back pulling up off the circuit board. Symptoms include flashing green light, unstable Unifi Protect application (keeps crashing) or the camera simply doesn't power on. There are several threads out there on this topic and it seems to affect other models such as the UVC-G3 and others. There is a good…
The right-hand side number plate light on my 2017 Abarth 595 was intermittently working and most annoyingly it would randomly trigger the warning light on the dash. This post is about my debug/repair and I uncovered a few things that might help others in the same situation. Since only 1 of the lights wasn't working, my hunch was that the issue was in the handle somewhere rather than in the wiring…
Did a bit of an impulse buy on the weekend and flew down Monday to MEL to drive back to SYD the same day in this 595 Comp. Hard to find around here with red / sunroof / manual transmission. The next day it was time to get it registered in NSW. The standard NSW plate is about the same size as the VIC plate, but I wanted something to cover up those white grommets so I went with the "Euro Style" NSW…
I've had my mountain bike with the stock Altus A20 (Shimano part # ST-AT20) shifting mechanism since I bought it new in 1993 and now finally I experienced the "doesn't shift" issue for the first time (in 2021 - not a bad run!). There are plenty of YouTube videos (like here ) that show you how to fix it by squirting WD40 through the hole in the back, but I wanted to dismantle and clean it up.…
TL;DR Version: You would think that sending an e-mail with an attachment using only cURL in a shell script would be a simple exercise, indeed it's a native feature of cURL. One day I was looking for a quick bit of info for a shell script I was writing and became frustrated at the lack of a fully working example. The documentation has a few ambiguities which made putting it all together not just a…
I recently found a LED panel on the street with no documentation, cabling, power supply, etc. I thought it would be a fun project with my son to see if we could get it going. The only markings were a model number Y5207. It turns out this is a widely available and very generic device that is also known by other part numbers such as the Maplin N00GA , Amplus AM03127 , Velleman MML16R , and many…
Starting with macOS 10.13 you can now escrow the FileVault recovery key with an MDM. This is useful if you are running a fleet of macOS devices and want to automatically store the recovery key. The problem is that once the key is generated, it is lost forever if you don't store it somehow. It also means that if you implement an escrow policy on a machine with FileVault already enabled, you cannot…
Ever wondered how to trigger a Mac to pull a DEP profile without rebuilding the whole machine? This is something I thought was totally impossible despite lots of searching. Then one day, I ran across t his thread in Reddit and it's possible! Someone just casually mentioned that you can do this with the following command: sudo profiles renew -type enrollment Sure enough it works perfectly? How was…
Apple has been using the same serial number format since 2010 on virtually all (if not all?) their devices. The serial number encodes a bunch of things such as the manufacturing location, the production week in a given year, the model number as well as a unique ID. There are many use cases for being able to decode the serial number and there are a few web sites out there that let you enter a…
As of this writing, it's been 3 years since Microsoft announced their Azure Information Protection (AIP) product. As recently as March of this year , they were touting ominously "When you use Azure Information Protection with Exchange Online, you get an additional benefit: The ability to send protected emails to any user, with the assurance that they can read it on any device ." What they don't…
Over a year has passed since my previous MOLGAN Hack to improve battery life, (see http://blog.ambor.com/2017/02/hacking-ikea-molgan-light.html ). I have modified several MOLGANs and the battery endurance in the modified lights is great (several months on rechargeable AAA batteries). Under the default timing, the lights come on for about 30 seconds which is fine for all of them except one which…
The IKEA MOLGAN is a great little product to provide motion-detected path lighting in the house at night. TL;DR version : To save battery life, you can make the MOLGAN more sensitive to light by adding 140KOhms of resistance in parallel to the light sensor. This will cause the MOLGAN to only trigger when it's much darker than the stock setting. I have a bunch of these mounted on the ceiling…
During a recent trip to Costco I bought my daughter a Boogie Board WT13087 (Jot 4.5) by a company called Kent Displays as a bit of an impulse buy. The way they are packaged, you can test them out in the store and the one my daughter picked was working fine. Within about a half hour of arriving home; however, the "erase" function stopped working. This is a fatal problem because it's the only way to…
I recently found this box of my Dad's old reel-to-reel audio tapes from the late 1950s to mid 1960s. They hadn't been stored particularly well and I doubted that I could yield anything interesting from them... I was wrong! The quality is actually amazing considering the circumstances. Some of it is incredibly precious commentary by relatives who are long gone, but there is also some music which I…
QR clocks are funny in their banal use of technology - but ever since I built my first one I was wondering if there could be a better use for them. This video shows my QR Fortune Clock concept which is like a fortune cookie (you need to "unwrap" the QR code with a QR reader to find the fortune inside). You basically fill an SD card with a text file that contains the quotes you are interested in…
When I bought my 2010 Audi A3 (8P body style, also known as "2010 face lift") it came with the standard Audi Concert II head unit (Audi part # 8P0 035 186 S) and a dealer-installed Kufatec FISCON 36429 "Basic" Bluetooth adapter. From the outset I wasn't happy with this setup because the Bluetooth never worked properly throughout multiple phone changes (iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, etc.) and firmware…
We are all familiar with CAPTCHA s which are used by web sites to make sure that a user is human (and to hopefully hinder spammers). Sometimes these images are computer generated, but often the images are from a service offered by Google called ReCAPTCHA which sources images from old books. This service can supply websites with images of words that optical character recognition software has been…
For a little project I'm working on, I needed to understand how to generate QR codes. Being the Excel junkie that I am, I thought it would be easy to create a proof-of-concept entirely in Excel. As a challenge, I set a goal of doing this without using any Visual Basic or other scripting. I will describe here the steps used to generate the code in Excel. Click here to download the Excel spreadsheet…
So the other day this pops up on my iPhone 5 and click cancel. Everything goes back to normal. Then I get this again a few more times over the next few days and if I click Accept or Cancel, I just get back to the normal screen and continue as normal. As this is a very benign screen I ignore it. But then curiosity gets the better of me and I do a Google search. Someone, somewhere must have had this…