This generic SATA to USB bridge adaptor will be the last one I’ll be reviewing for a while, unless I find another more suitable one. I’m already very happy with my JEYI X6 adaptor, but I picked these adaptors up because they were just a tad smaller than then JEYI X6 and I wanted to find out what chipset it used. I picked these up on AliExpress from a seller called SimpleStone, however they no longer sell the item. There are other sellers that sell this item, however, it lacks a model number and thus you must search for it with generic search terms such as “NGFF USB 3.0”. You can pick one of these up for around $8 US.

The Sintech ST-M2U3-A is the third SATA to USB bridge I’ll be reviewing. I got this model mainly for comparing the chipsets available and not for the device itself, as it is pretty chunky and doesn’t look very nice. This item is available from Sintech’s official website and eBay store.

The Arlec NL0009 is a mains powered, dual sensor (light and motion detection) LED night light. This product is available at Bunnings for $15.

I have one of these lights plugged in the hallway in motion mode to light up the hallway and stairs at night. It does a great job, but one of the downsides of this light is the really short light on time after being triggered by the PIR sensor. 1 minute is just not enough time to boil the kettle to get a hot cup of something. This would be the perfect product if Arlec had integrated a knob or two to adjust the light on time and maybe even the PIR/LDR sensitivity.

The JEYI X6 is the second SATA to USB bridge I’ll be reviewing, since the Sintech one died on me. I picked this one up on AliExpress from the seller JEYI Group for just over $9 US including delivery.

The Sintech ST-M2U3-U will be the first SATA to USB bridge I’ll be reviewing, until I find a suitable bridge for my personal preference. Read on to find out why there will be more devices coming up…

My Corsair Voyager GT USB3.0 has been serving me well for the past few years, but some traits of USB flash drives have always been quite annoying to me. Although the drive (and almost all other performance USB3.0 flash drives) have very fast sequential read/write speeds (e.g. copying large files), they suffer when it comes to smaller operations such as 4K byte block read/writes (e.g. copying lots of small files). This is presumably to do with the controller that manages access to the flash memory chip.

As an example, my Corsair Flash Voyager can do around 240MB/s read and 90MB/s write sequential, but can only do a measly 8MB/s and 0.8MB/s for 4K operations.

HD is back and better than ever.

Channel 9 revived its HD channel back on the 26th of Nov 2015 and Channel 10 revived its HD channel on the 2nd of March 2016. Channel 7 was also planning a HD simulcast of channel 7 in time for the Australian Open, but that didn’t happen. It’s also unlikely they will have it ready in time for the footy season. ABC is also planning to simulcast in HD, while SBS is planning an upgrade to its HD simulcast.

Broadcasters are also shifting to the more bandwidth efficient MPEG4 standards instead of using the ancient MPEG2 standards, though MPEG4 was announced in 1998 and implemented in the early 2000s. The new HD channels take up more or less the same bandwidth as a sdandard definition 576p MPEG2 channel, yet offering much improved definition and quality.

I was sorting though some old junk when I found an old but unused laptop battery pack for the 1st Generation DER laptop (Lenovo s10e). It would have been a waste to chuck out an unused battery pack, but the laptop it belonged to was more than obsolete now (and we didn’t have any of them left). So I thought maybe I could use the cells inside for something. The size, shape, voltage and capacity certainly suggested that it contained six 18650 lithium cells. After cracking the case apart, it revealed six high quality Panasonic NCR18650 cells rated at 10.73Wh (2900mAh).

I’ve been using the A4Tech KV300H Isolation Keyboard for the past four years and for the most part, it’s performed solidly. For around $30 you get a full-sized 104-key low profile chiclet style keyboard.

Recently I’ve acquired the need for a backlit keyboard to work when the room is dimly lit. So I had a look at what a local computer store offered. I’m one of those people that have strict requirements for things I buy, and for keyboards they are:

The DER (Digital Education Revolution) lasted 5 years starting in 2009, with the last generation of laptops handed out in 2013.

The first two models were pretty rubbish laptops. They had tiny screens and the S10e had unacceptably small keys. All models except the X131e had an SSD, and the DET SOE image was horrendously slow. They had a plethora amount of software installed and they didn’t make much of an effort to prevent useless services and startup entries. The login process was unbearable… at least for me (I’ve been made impatient thanks to SSDs).

The laptops have a BIOS supervisor password and was locked until the owner of the laptop finished year 12 or the school uses it as a T4L device. The BIOS was configured to boot from the internal HDD only. When a student finishes year 12, the laptops are It’s the school’s decision who gets to keep the laptop after year 12, but most schools allowed students to keep the laptops unless they didn’t want it. When a student is graduating, a new entry should show up in SCCM to Unlock the BIOS and image the laptop to a clean install of Windows 7.

NFC is becoming the de facto standard for contact-less systems. For the convenience, we are potentially giving up some privacy and security.

Contactless payment technologies such as Mastercard Paypass and Visa Paywave are designed for maximum flexibility for merchants, not maximum security for customers. Some merchants may choose to have transactions processed immediately, while others may choose to process them in batch after hours. Whatever the reasons, the designers of the protocol have chosen to make the following information readable in plaintext through NFC.

• Card Number (First four digits indicate the type of card)
• Expiry
• Date and amounts of the last 10 transactions

While writing the DER Batch Reset Tool, I was forced to investigate how the DETNSW handles its SSO. The original plan was just to obtain a session cookie from the browser and use the cookie in the reset tool, but it was rather tedious copying a cookie every few minutes while coding up the script. The batch reset tool uses the Python requests module, which has session support to store cookies between requests.