Category Archives: Opinion

Lego! For adults?

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When I was younger, I was fortunate enough to get to play with a fair amount of Lego. An older brother meant I started out with a decent sized selection and was able to grow that as I too grew up. I would occasionally get new sets, but mostly made do building all kinds of things with the variety of Lego I had. I was usually encouraged to put money I received for birthday’s and things into my savings account, but remember winning some money in an art competition (go figure), and my Mom allowing me to buy a new Lego set. A special treat. I’m quite sure I used the whole amount R300ish to purchase the Res-Q Hovercraft 6473 set.lego6473That’s probably the last set I can recall receiving. It would have been 1998 some time. And while I enjoyed building the set; once it was completed and played with, it got torn apart for scraps, to be used in other developments. I can’t recall any set I received since then. My parents stocked me up on miscellaneous blocks for the various fortifications I built, and I continued to build occasional Lego items through high school. But little thereafter.

20 years later, I have money I can spend. The money was a gift, so with minimal effort I can convince my wife that it’s okay for me use it to buy Lego. But what to buy? The selection is truly huge, with wonderful NASA creations, various vehicles, the whole Technic selection. How does one decide? Eventually I settled on set 42043, a Lego Technic set of a Mercedes-Benz Arocs 3245. Partly as an homage to my previous employer, partly because it was close to 3000 pieces and reasonably priced, and partly because I have a fascination with trucks and large vehicles in general.

lego42043Little could I contain my excitement when Amazon delivered my first new Lego set, me in my late 20s. I knew this was a fairly large build, but was still amazed by the weight of the box, coming in at over 4kg. The build took a fair amount of time, but I was able to complete it in a few days in my free time. It was a hard battle between wanting it to be finished and wanting the build to take as long as possible.

Instructions are mostly clear, and I only made a few minor mistakes along the way. The instruction book has over 460 pages. But it was fun. It’s not especially difficult, you just follow instructions, but it was a nice way to shut off after a long day at work. Building is a methodical balance between reading the instructions, searching for the part on my limited work surface, and then fighting some of the parts to fit.

Looking at the Lego 42043 set itself, I was quite impressed with some of the technical implementations. I had previously built a much smaller technic set, whose most advanced feature was a piston block and a rack and pinion gear train for steering. This truck has independent suspension, two differentials and two-axis steering. Additionally there’s a battery powered DC motor that supplies power to a number of devices. Under the drawbed is an array of gears and gear selectors, similar to those in function on a manual gearbox.

These allow you to separately actuate:

  • the lifting and dropping of the drawbed
  • the extensions and retraction of the stability arms
  • rotate the boom arm
  • power the pump for the pneumatics.

The pneumatic pump then (although obnoxiously loud) supplies pressure to four pneumatic actuators on the boom arm that allow you to:

  • lower and raise the boom arm (two separate sections)
  • extend and retract a section of the boom
  • open and close the scoop.

Along with this are a number of other smaller features. What impressed me the most was the attention to detail and how all these features come together.

My least favourite part of the whole build, was putting the tires on the wheels. There are 12 wheels, and 12 tires, and you have to push the tires over and get the seals to line up. Not hard, just not as fun as the rest of the build.

My only disappointment of the set, is the pneumatic system. It’s really cool, and was fun to play with. It’s impressive what they’ve achieved, but the boom arm is heavy, and the pneumatic pump is small, so trying to lift the system is slow. In reverse, when gravity is helping, the system will drop instantaneously (yeah compressible fluids). I know why this is, and once you get the hang of it, you can kind of control how fast the boom lowers by limiting how much you adjust the lever.

Having built this set, I’m sure I’ll get another set at some stage, I think I value part count the most, as I want a longer build time, so I’m interested to see what my next set will be. It’s fun, and relaxing to build. I haven’t yet found a place to display my truck, but online there are instructions provided for alternative builds for the same parts. So I see myself tearing this apart and building something new. Also, they provide extra pieces in the set, like spares. Which is concerning when you’re used to building something and left over pieces implying you did something wrong.

Through all this, I’ve not yet answered my title question. And yet I think the answer is obvious. Yes. Lego, for adults. Much like a jigsaw puzzle, I think people of all ages can derive joy from the process of building, and with the huge selection that is on offer, the result can be a model of something you have an interest in. In some ways it reminds me of the ‘adult’ colouring in books that were notably popular a few years ago, albeit more expensive. I think the building can be as therapeutic as colouring in, not requiring much thought, but with a visible result at the end of the day.

Fake News makes me sad

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While some of the blame for the surge in fake news belongs with organisations such as Facebook; it seems unfair to put it all on them. It’s up to us to do something as well. Mainly educating those around you who may inadvertently share such material.

Over the last few months I’ve come across a few articles to trigger this post. I don’t post much to Facebook, but tend to scroll through my feed several times a week. And with the amount of messed up stuff happening around the world, it’s making it harder and harder to discern what’s fake and what’s real. For whatever reason, it seems to be on Facebook where I notice most of these articles. Whether it’s just because of the number of ‘friends’ I have, or another reason, I see less such posts on other sites I frequent.

The first article I came across had the headline: “Your baby in you can also get pregnant if you have sex while you are pregnant – Minister of Health warns SA women on women’s day”. Now are ministers take a lot of flack for a lot of reasons. Often warranted. But some statements are too unbelievable to be true, which is generally my first indication.

The article is published by a website called “News at Last”. If you really want to check them out, their current domain is newsatlastsa(dot)online. Not believing this could be true, I checked out the website, and did some googling and searching of other news websites. No one else was reporting this. Based on this information, and the lack of any credibility or supporting evidence on the News At Last’s website, I deemed this fake news. Their only contact details are an email address on a domain that WebAfrica have listed as suspended.

More recently was an article published last week by HIN News – hinnews(dot)com. Apparently it stands for Happenings In Nigeria, but their logo looks like someone tried to poorly Photoshop the BBC News logo. Their Facebook page has a concerning million+ followers and likes.

I googled BBC news, and saved the first image. The HIN logo is a pixel for pixel copy of the BBC logo, besides the off-centred and off-colour text edit.

The article in question was titled “Breaking!!FARM MURDERS: US President Threatens To Intervene If South Africa Does Not Come Up With A Solution To Farm Murders.” Ignoring the two exclamation marks, the article was brief and ended with the author’s personal opinion on the matter. Odd for what one would suppose is an unbiased objective report on something that happened.

But it didn’t happen. Well not as far as I can tell. Nor can I find any reputable news site reporting anything related. While I’m about this, I’m going to throw Gossip Mill Msanzi, gossipmillsa(dot)com into this boat as well. They seem to be offering up the same garbage as the others, and whether intentionally or not, no credible news site should be posting articles without verifying the source.

The biggest problem, is these sites intersperse these fake articles with hoards of actual articles which they lift from larger news organisations, attempting to give them a credible appearance on first glance.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I implore everyone to take an extra look at those news articles. Especially the ones with the lovely clickbait titles. It’s hard to know for sure, but if you can’t verify it’s legit, rather don’t share it until you have reason to believe it’s true. On the same note, if you have friends and family posting articles which you know to be false, call them out on it. It doesn’t have to blatant and rude. Send them an email or PM, telling them you think an article they shared isn’t real and the reasons you think this.

I like to think that most of the people I know wouldn’t intentionally post false information, and approach them with that attitude. I want them to think twice next time a similar article comes up.

Logitech K750 ‘repair’

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tl;dr: Thought keyboard was broken, only needed battery replacement.

k750Since the Logitech K750 was first released, I was a fan. But the $100 price tag put me off. It’s most noticeable feature is the fact that it has a bar of solar panels along the top of the board which are used to charge the built in battery. This should mean you never have to replace the battery. A dream come true to me, who in general is disposable battery averse. Besides that it’s a standard wireless keyboard that uses Logitech’s unifying receiver, I additionally like the style and design of the keyboard.

So joyous was I to find it on a half-price special at some stage, promptly ordering it and enjoying it’s use. Two years later, on returning from a short trip, the keyboard no longer worked. Not registering keypresses, nor activating any of it’s notification lights. The battery is not supposed to be replaced, but is relatively easily accessible, so I popped it out and measured the voltage.

ml2032The battery used is a rechargeable coin-cell battery, similar to what is used on motherboards, an ML2032 3.0V battery. My battery measured 2.9V, so I assumed it was still fine, and something else had gone wrong. The keyboard had a 3-year warranty I was still within, so after the retailer rejected me, I contacted Logitech who were kind enough to send me a replacement that continues to work perfectly.

This was over a year ago; in-between a lot has happened, but Logitech didn’t ask me to return the old keyboard, and I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. I figured I’d salvage the solar panels or something. I found it the other day and decided to take another look. Although the battery comes out relatively easily, the keyboard’s faceplate is glued into place. So to disassemble it you have to pry that off, making reassembly difficult.

After that there are a number of screws to remove, and then the base separates, giving you access to the circuit-board. On the front are a few test-points. With my old battery plugged in, V_BAT showed 2.86 V and V_MAIN showed a steady 2.0 V. I tested some other components but couldn’t find anything notably wrong with the board. Solar panels provided a charge.

So I popped my battery out of my new keyboard, and lo and behold it worked. I measured the voltage and it reflects marginally over 3.03 V. Apparently a 0.15 V drop on this battery is enough to stop the keyboard working. I measured the V_MAIN on the test points, and it showed an match 2.0V, like with the ‘bad’ battery. This also meant my disassembly was completely unnecessary. So with it in pieces, I ordered a replacement battery.

Now I have two working K750 keyboards, although one is slightly disfigured.

April 2021 Update:
My original keyboard is still working after replacing the battery.
My second only somewhat works. If I try turn it off, it doesn’t turn off immediately, but only after a few minutes. Once it’s off, it can’t be turned back on. However, I’ve found that if ‘jumpstart’ it by shorting the V_BATT and V_MAIN terminals together for a few seconds, then it works again until it is turned off.

Shady Practices (Antera/DomaSchooner Phishing)

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I’ve recently gone through the process of moving one of my domains from one domain registrant to another. For a couple reasons, but cost and whois privacy are part of it. I’ve switched hosting providers a number of times, and that’s not an issue, but getting different domain registrants on the same page to ensure a downtime-free transfer isn’t a clear process to me, so during this time I was particularly susceptible to notifications about the transfer.

It was then that I noticed an item in my spam account titled “Domain Expiration SEO”. Now I didn’t notice the SEO in that title at first, and was immediately concerned about the terms “Domain Expiration”. The fact that it was in my spam folder at least made me immediately cautious, but the fact that they used my full name and postal address in the “invoice” confused me.

The email had a large title saying “Final Notice, your account is pending cancellation”, th email came from “info@antera.org”, a domain with no discernable website, and links on the page directed to “domaschooner.win”. What I don’t like is that the entire premise is that you’re about to let something that you had expire. In the meantime nothing could be further from the truth.

It seems they somehow identify domains that are being transferred, grab the whois data and then generate emails, in my opinion, hoping to catch people not paying attention into paying $86 for supposed SEO software.

If you pay close attention to the email, they do note that they “…do not register or renew domain names…” and their email disclaimer states “…This is not a bill or an invoice. This is a SEO purchase offer. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated unless you accept this purchase offer…”. So while they do a good job of telling the truth, the immediate implication of the email implies something worse. So while probably not illegal, very shady.