More Dryer Trouble!

It’s been barely four months since I “fixed” our dryer, even though I was fairly sure it was not a permanent fix… I was still disappointed yesterday morning when we noticed it making a horrific squeal, the telltale noises of a bearing gone wrong. At first I rang the local mobile repair guy who’s pretty highly rated, but he didn’t get back to me (not sure if he’s on holidays or what). So today after work I popped the back off it, cracked into it, and sure enough one of the bearings (the front one, which kept marching out of it’s hidey-hole previously) is very chunky inside when spinning it by hand.

These look like standard bearings (in fact they look exactly like the ones used in vacuum cleaners?), so into Wimmera Bearings to get some newies to get me out of the woods today. A$8 each or thereabouts, but also while I was looking at it I noticed a suspicious ring on the dust cover where it looks like something has rubbed on it. That’s not supposed to be there, and likely explains why the thing has died prematurely, so a hypothesis began forming.

The outer bearing shell on both bearings (front and back) sit in a plastic housing, not held in particularly well in any direction except the permiter (so they’re not really retained front-to-back at all). The bearings are located front to back by the pulley pressing against the inner bearing shell, a shim between the inner bearing shells of both bearings, and then the squirrel-cage fan is supposed to be pressing against the front inner shell, which holds everything together against the center shim (I would post exploded diagrams, but there aren’t any - the Fisher and Paykel docco is missing components on it).

That’s the plan anyway, but when I look at the rear of the fan on mine, it doesn’t look like any of the photos of new spare parts… it actually looks like a piece is missing. Indeed there’s a telltale wear mark that looks suspiciously like a mirror image of the marks on the front bearing?

So I bought a small M8 washer to act as a shim to hopefully get the fan away from the bearing dust cover and let us continue to use the dryer, but I think the “real” solution is to buy a new bearing housing (so I have the proper F+P bearings, in the event that they’re not just standard) and a new fan, because I’m fairly sure that the one that I have is in some way deformed and that’s what’s been bothering the bearings.

So now we’ll see how it goes ordering parts from F+P, and hopefully we’re nearly at the end of this saga.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Author:

fwaggle

Published:


Modified:


Filed under:


Location:

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Navigation: Older Entry

Laptop: Busted, won’t boot

My new(-ish now) laptop has mostly performed great over the just-over-a-year I’ve had it, and surprisingly I hadn’t managed to ratfuck my Linux installation in that time. Well, no time like the present, because on Monday I ran pacman -Syu tcpdump, it installed a pile of packages including a kernel update, I thought nothing of it and shut the machine down. Yesterday when I went to use it, and I was faced with a dreaded message: Please enter the recovery key for disk BLAH BLAH BLAH

Whoops.

I figured that something had failed to sign, but it took me a bit to figure out. First of all, I couldn’t get into the recovery immediately, because I was typing the key wrong. Note to future self: the hyphens in the recovery key are part of it, they’re not optional for aesthetic purposes.

But I managed to boot from a USB key after turning secureboot off, but then I was unable to decrypt and mount the disk, so I figured it was maybe because my USB key was too old (from ~2025) so I made a new one. It was at that point I figured out the hyphen thing, got into it, and no, it looks like everything worked correctly?

I started thinking about what the hell could have happened, noting that it was exactly 451 days since I installed it and maybe something expired. I checked sbctl verify and everything is signed, everything should be happy, but in the end re-enrolling a new key into luks and the TPM worked:

systemd-cryptenroll --tpm2-device=auto --tpm2-pcrs=7 /dev/sdX

I rebooted, flipped secureboot back on, and it’s straight into it without needing the key, happy days. But what caused it?

I was racking my brain trying to work it out when Avi came through today with the release notes I didn’t read:

Starting with package version 42-1, the mkinitcpio systemd hook now includes systemd-pcrosseparator.service (as intended by systemd v261).

This affects the measurements of PCR values 0-7, 9 and 12-14. If you configured the systemd hook and unlock LUKS partitions, that depend on these values, you need to re-enroll the TPM2 in use.

I checked my pacman.log and sure enough, I upgraded mkinitcpio to that exact version right before the shit hit the fan, so problem solved I guess? Operator error.

Whoops.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Author:

fwaggle

Published:


Modified:


Filed under:


Location:

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Navigation: Older Entry Newer Entry

Frenzal Rhomb again - Barwon Heads

It’s still going fairly slow as far as shows go, so we saw Frenzal Rhomb for the third time, and bought tickets for the fourth! You see, we originally bought tickets for the show in Melbourne many months ago. Sabriena liked one of their openers ages ago, Sick Visor, and we were optimistic that they’d be opening for them again as they’ve been collaborating a bit. Alas, they were not the opener for the show we bought. Aww well.

However, in the months between when we bought the tickets and showtime, two confounding factors became apparent. First of all, Sabriena had a local running event in Horsham on Sunday, and the show was Saturday night. That’s doable, but uncomfortable. Either we leave Melbourne immediately after the show, and drive all the way through and get home at about 3am. After a long day, that’s not particularly smart. The alternative is we stay the night in Melbourne, and get up really early (probably out of bed and on the road by about 6:30!) to make it back in time for the event. Either way is not particularly palatable.

But a few weeks back, Sabriena found out an interesting piece of information: Frenzal Rhomb were playing a show the night before, in Barwon Heads (down by Geelong), and Sick Visor were opening for them. The tickets weren’t expensive, so we made the decision: we’d buy tickets for that one, go to it, and I’d try see if someone else wanted to use the Melbourne ones. We tried pretty hard, but were unable to find anyone free to use them, so we just considered it a token donation to support live music.

Sabriena organized for us to stay in a cabin down at Barwon Heads, not walking distance, but not an obscene price either. We left fairly late, and got to check-in after the office was closed, but they left the keys in a lockbox for us. The cabin was pretty nice, in a golf course! Much too fancy for us!

In to the town proper, and we parked up in the parking lot of the pub so we’d not have any trouble finding a spot. I was apprehensive leaving a late-model V8 Commodore in public after dark as they have a tendency to come up missing, but it all worked out.

Wandered around the town, found a place to eat: “Tommy Gunns”. Pretty great dinner, nice neat restaraunt, loads of people eating outside but we were not dressed for it and ended up inside. Afterwards, went for a wander around to walk off the food-baby, including along the boardwalk across the river, and then it was just about time to go into the show.

Show was great, accoustics were good, band room is spacious (they’re apparently talking about getting rid of it?!), staff were very nice. Sabriena was feeling a little under the weather so we didn’t stay for the encore but it was a really good show. Despite being fairly close to the front (by no means in the pit) we didn’t get covered in beer.

In to bed, woke up bright and early, golfers fucking everywhere. Managed to get out, traffic through Geelong absolutely sucks, significantly worse than when Dad and I picked up my arcade machine in Cliffton Springs. Oh, and the roads suck arse, I thought people were just having a sook on Facebook but they really were absolutely terrible, dodging holes the entire way.

We spent Saturday chilling, went to bed in our own bed, and Sabriena had a very nice time at the running event without having to wake up first thing in the morning.

Barwon Heads, VIC, Australia

Author:

fwaggle

Published:


Modified:


Filed under:


Location:

Barwon Heads, VIC, Australia

Navigation: Older Entry Newer Entry

Can recycling bin: Success

It’s been not quite three years since Victoria released their “container deposit scheme” (California viewers would recognize it as functionally equivalent to the CRV, only a good bit more generous to the consumer as it’s not completely captured by private interests yet). We end up with a few cans, and were keeping them in garbage bags in the garage, which we’d then transfer into the car, and feed into the machines which read each can, make sure it’s had a deposit, and then pay you for it.

This is a pain in the arse, to the point where it had crossed my mind to simply give the cans to someone else so I did not have to deal with them. But in speaking to the person cleaning the machines, they mentioned if you have a lot, there’s another place you can take them where the machine is automated - you just empty your bags onto a rack and the machine sorts them all for you. So the next time we had a car full of cans (some months later) we went to have a look, and yes, as advertised, it’s much easier.

We did still have the issue of bags full of cans in the garage, and the potential for drips in the car… but it crossed my mind: what if I just went to Bunnings and bought a wheely bin, and put it out with the other bins, and then dragged that to the redemption place when it was full? They can’t be that expensive I reasoned, and sure enough they were actually cheaper than I thought - A$139 for a 240L bin that’s fairly reasonable quality.

So we bought one, put the cans we had in it, and went “that’s very nice”. Until last weekend when we noticed it was starting to get a bit full - not desparately so, so we waited until this weekend.

I put the trailer on the car, pulled the bin up into the trailer (far easier than I thought, 240L of un-crushed aluminum cans weighs less than you’d think - the cans cannot be crushed so that the robot can read the QR code on each can), lashed it down and closed with some ratchet straps and off we went.

The place was hopping, so I had to wait a few minutes before it was my turn at the robot, but once it was, it was as advertised: lift the bin up onto the rack, up-end it, and walk out. 240L of uncrushed cans is about A$30 worth at 10c/can.

Hose out the bin when we got home and that’s that. Honestly the worst part of the whole thing is connecting the trailer (we put it around the back of the house, which means pulling it around several obstacles to attach it to the car), but I can mitigate that by scheduling things better to try coincide it with a tip run or something.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Author:

fwaggle

Published:


Modified:


Filed under:


Location:

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Navigation: Older Entry Newer Entry

MacOS: Monitor woes fixed?

A long time ago, $WORK decided to migrate away from BYOD, and I sold my beloved 2015 Macbook Pro (I literally could not afford to keep it, it was worth nearly a thousand bucks, I had no use for it, and it was about to very quickly tank in value due to MacOS support falling off for it). It was replaced with an original M1 Macbook Pro, whereupon I discovered the joys [pejorative] of DisplayLink.

I hated DisplayLink so much that I ended up getting rid of my dual monitors and switching to a single 4K screen just to avoid it. However a single 4K monitor doesn’t really lend itself well to my racoon-in-a-dumpster workflow, so earlier this year after upgrading me to a fancy M4 Pro Macbook Pro (say that three times fast), $WORK bought me two things: a Thunderbolt 5 (not DisplayLink) dock and a second monitor.

This led to much annoyance, because despite the fact that TB5 has more than enough bandwidth for two 4k60 monitors, and despite the fact it worked fine on my Asus laptop with fucking Linux installed, I simply could not get the dock to light up both screens.

It turns out this is an Apple driver limitation: they simply refuse to implement Multi-stream Transport. It’s never going to work. Every dock that does work in this configuration implements it via independent adaptors, rather than two outputs of the same virtual adaptor that my dock does (and I have to stress, this dock was not cheap, it’s a Lenovo one recommended by our IT department, I am glad I didn’t pay for it).

Apparently the solution is to just buy USB-C to HDMI adaptors, so I grudgingly went off down to Betta (because fuck Gerry Harvey) and bought one. This worked as advertised, both monitors came up, everything was fine.

Except I was still having the same trouble I’d had since I got the new dock: sporadically, the monitors would sleep for 5 to 10 seconds, most of the time they’d come back, sometimes one wouldn’t. Sometimes only one would sleep. Sometimes you’d have to unplug and replug something to get it to come back. Really fucking annoying.

Reader, I tried for a solid couple of months to fix this, to no avail. I tried lower resolutions (“oh there’s not enough bandwidth!”), I tried buying newer, fancier cables (“Oh Apple stuff is just picky about the cables you use, you simply must use decent cables”, I literally bought 8K rated cables), I tried everything.

I noted again, that my Linux laptop functioned fine - what the fuck is going on in the world right now?

Finally, after having it happen for the 8th time in two hours, I did yet another Google search. Unsure if it’s because the index rearranged itself or I just happened to Prompt It Right, but I came across an old Reddit thread about a different problem, with a solution that seemed worth having a crack at:

It worked all Wednesday, including through a meeting Wednesday night without an embarassing “going dark while my camera is still on” moment. And it’s worked all the way through to the weekend without skipping a beat.

Is it too much to hope it’s fixed?

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Author:

fwaggle

Published:


Modified:


Filed under:


Location:

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Navigation: Older Entry Newer Entry