Dryer Trouble!

A few years back we were stoked to buy a dryer, and functionally it’s done what we wanted it to. We don’t have to think about the weather before doing laundry, and it’s cheap enough on electricity that unless you’re silly enough to run it at night, it’s largely “free”.

But mechanically? Oh what a piece of shit this thing is. It’s a Fisher and Paykel DH8060P3, bought because Sabriena searched for reviews and most of them at the time appeared pretty good - the chief complaint appeared to be that the “sheets” setting would roll the sheets into a ball that would then not dry correctly, but we figured we could work around that.

We’d not had it super long and it developed an irritating squeal, and since it was still under warranty we called up the place we bought it from… who directed us to Fisher and Paykel, who then fucked about for a bit before realizing we were outside the metro area and directed us back to the retailer. Who then came and picked it up, and it took six weeks to get parts for it!

We got it back and it was mostly smooth sailing until about a week ago when it started making a terrible ruckus during use. I described it as “a vibrator on top of an empty vending machine”, like an incredibly irritating medium-frequency rattle throughout the entire cycle.

There are several videos of other people having the same issue, with no resolution. A lot of YouTube videos of folks taking apart and fixing the DE model equivalent, which is cosmetically the same unit but instead of a heat pump it’s an electric element with a condenser… but in practice these are built very differently and the videos are not all that helpful.

Looking into it, it’s properly outside warranty now, and I’m not going to live without this thing for six weeks, so fuck it, let’s have a peek.

Taking the back cover off, the first thing I notice is a wobbly wheel on the belt-driven (hah!) squirrel cage fan for the heat. Removing that belt squelches the noise, so it’s obviously related to that. Crack into further and I notice two things:

First, the rear-drum bearing appears to be made of some high-temperature plastic bushing, rather than a bearing, and it’s chewed to shit. There doesn’t appear to be any play with it though, so I’m thinking this is just a “wear item” - though the front drum bearings (that look something akin to rollerblade wheels) are a common complaint with folks on reviews these days, those appeared to be fine too.

Popped the fan out and got it apart, and the bearings… feel fine? Like they’re a tiny bit dry, and I considered repacking them but I don’t know what lubricant they need and putting the wrong stuff in would probably do more harm than good. So after thoroughly inspecting everything, I put it all back together and…

… would you believe the fucking noise is gone? I have no idea what I did.

I think if it comes back I will just pay someone competent to look at it, but for now I’m going to just be happy it’s shut the fuck up for a time.

For future reference, there are several models of this unit, judging by the serial number ours appears to be a 93281-C, which they helpfully provide a parts diagram for (of which I saved a copy to my Google Drive). Relevant part numbers for ours which I will likely want in the future are:

I cannot stress enough the aforementioned reviews - checking different consumer reports type websites and it’s basically a cacophony of “these things eat the drum bearings just outside the warranty period”, which is rather irritating. As with everything, I will get as many years out of this thing as I can but when we go to replace it it will not be with a F+P (or a Haier, which appear to be the same make but badge engineered).

Horsham, VIC, Australia

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Ace Combat 7

I played one of the Ace Combat games on the PS2, primarily because I’d just gotten a neato surround-sound system and whichever one it was was apparently one of the better examples of surround sound on the Playstation 2 (and it worked as-advertised, the effect absolutely blew me away long enough for me to get good enough at that game to beat it).

I remember playing another one later in Australia, but I don’t recall which, and then I largely forgot about them, until recently when the internet started going batshit over the female character in the new one that’s about to come out, which made me remember that they’d “just” released one not that long ago I never checked out. I had a look, and yeah, the current one - released in twenty-fucking-nineteen by the way - was on sale at a significant discount (80% off if memory serves), so I bought it.

I then spent three goddamn days off and on trying to get my HOTAS working with it, because they only support one type of HOTAS and the rest of them you have to edit a .ini file to make it work.

I have a pair of VKB Gladiators, but I replaced the left one with a STECS last year, and it’s the STECS that doesn’t work. I even tried manually specifying it using the GUID of it robbed from Star Citizen’s profile, and it still would not respond.

After some effort, on Sunday evening I found the reason buried in a GameFAQs post of all places: the game flatly refuses to acknowledge devices with less than three axes on them. I had turned off one of the main axes, because I play nothing with independent throttle control at this point and it was confusing things, and VKB’s god-awful software lets you do that.

But I had a slider and two thumbsticks on it, surely that’s more than three axes? Nope, afraid not. Sure enough, I turned the X axis back on, and it detects fine. I got to play the first two missions before jumping on to a different game to play with someone else.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

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New laptop dock

I don’t appear to have written about it, but ages ago when my beloved 2015 MacBook Pro was running out of support, coinciding with $WORK switching away from BYOD to a company-owned laptop policy, they bought and sent me an M1-powered MacBook Pro… which subsequently did not have two display ports for my two monitors.

So I bought what was highly-recommended at the time, a Dell D6000S USB “universal” dock, which would let me hook up those two monitors, and let’s just say… this thing was the bane of my existence. DisplayLink (basically compression software to let you drive high-resolution graphics over a pipe too small to carry the full uncompressed signal) was an utter piece of shit, the software crashed all the time, it routinely forgot about the orientation of my portrait monitor, they would disconnect constantly, etc. Utterly irritating.

But I put up with it for ages until upgrade time rolled around and they sent me another machine, an M4 one this time that’s by all accounts a very nice machine. But by this time I’m sick of DisplayLink, so I ask work if I can use my budget to replace my two 1440p screens with a single 4k monitor, reasoning that maybe I can do the thing without two monitors and avoid the pain of it.

This turned out to be a bad idea - first of all, without the DisplayLink software the best that the dock can do at 4k is 30Hz… utterly intolerable. Second, the M4 Macs are really picky about display cables, so while I could plug the monitor straight into the HDMI port on the Mac, it wouldn’t work with my fancy 3-meter long HDMI 2.1 cable. It did work, with only the tiniest of issues, with the cable bundled with a Nintendo Switch, so that’s what I put up with for ages.

Anyway, $WORK’s IT folks have been on me for a while now about replacing that dock with a Thunderbolt one. Thunderbolt 4 has enough bandwidth and then some to run uncompressed video over the cable with everything else, so there’s a lot less headaches with it. I snoozed on it for about two years now, and finally after some of my remote expenses budget expired unused, I decided it was time. I bought a Lenovo 7500 Thunderbolt 5 dock, and it arrived on Thursday. I plugged it in quickly on my desk, and it just worked.

Alas, I paid for it on my credit card, and despite Lenovo’s assurances that if I did a guest checkout I’d be able to sign up later, I appear to be unable to get the invoice for it… so we’ll see how it goes getting $WORK to pay for it. I think I’m going to hit them up for a second monitor (my old ones since diposed of) so I can finally stop relying on Apple’s “mission control” to find things.

The best part though? I unplug the work Mac and plug my laptop in, and it Just Works too… I’m typing this entry up on it. So far the only issue is opening up the sound widget thing in KDE Plasma results in the dock disappearing and then coming back… not sure what’s going on there, but I’m not particularly convinced it’s the dock’s fault.

So far, I’m pretty happy with it.

Update: 2026-05-27: I bought a second monitor and some appropriate cables, which came today. For some reason, this dock simply will not light up two monitors at once on my work Mac. I originally blamed the dock, but the funny part is that if I connect it to my personal laptop, it’s perfectly happy to drive both monitors at 60Hz (it freezes up if I have them set to 144Hz), so I know it’s not the dock.

I’m running one of them with the HDMI socket on the Mac so I have two monitors again, but it’s mildly annoying. On paper this is supposed to work!

Update: 2026-05-29: Upon the advice of both $WORK’s IT team and someone on Mastodon, they said that apparently this is a MacOS software issue, created on-purpose by Apple for who knows what reason. Apple refuse to support multi-stream transport, so it just doesn’t work. The docks that do work apparently either use multiple thunderbolt cables, or they have internal USB-C adaptors instead of one adaptor with several monitors.

The solution is to buy a USB-C to HDMI cable, so I did so… another A$60 out the door and I was not really expecting it to work… but it does! Everything runs through one cable, as intended. I do wonder if my old dock would have had the bandwidth to make this work as well if I’d just bought two USB-C to HDMI cables?

Fucking infuriating though.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

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Last wisdom tooth out?

It was 11 years ago now that I had three of my wisdom teeth out, with the last one potentially requiring surgery to remove. I was sent down to a surgeon in Melbourne for a consult, who basically concluded that because it was completely unerrupted and a top tooth, the resulting cavity would be dangerously close to my sinus and thus until it starts giving me trouble we should leave it alone.

Last week, during a routine checkup/cleaning, my dentist noted that it was potentially interacting with the molar next to it, and it better come out. Welp, back to Melbourne I guess? No, she’s pretty sure it would come out in the chair, but it may not even need to come out. I mentally missed that last part, and just prepared for it.

The appointment was today, numbed up and a quick incision for a sneak-and-peek and she was able to fill the molar without removing it… but we’ll have to have another look in 6 months, I might not be out of the woods yet.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

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Sabriena’s Speakers: In Surgery

I don’t appear to have written about it, but nearly ten years ago when I bought my 7700k desktop parts, Sabriena got a nice set of speakers as well. They’re AudioEngine 2+, what’s now known as the A2+, but there have been several iterations since she got hers, and they’re basically “budget-friendly audiophile” grade gear, though they were still what I considered shockingly expensive at the time. Still, my wife let me spend a stupid amount of money on a desktop PC build, I wasn’t about to quibble over a set of speakers.

Truthfully? They’re pretty fucken nice. I’m aspirationally audiophile - I like gear, I like things that sound good, but honestly my ears aren’t good enough to tell things apart in a lot of cases, unless something is truly dreadful (that perhaps makes me about the only audiophile on the planet honest about my capabilities though?), but they sound pretty good to my ears. The most common conclusion drawn by anyone talking about these speakers is “amazing vocals, not enough bass extension” but for the sort of stuff I listen to I find the vast majority of stuff has way too much bass anyway, so these sound pretty damn stellar to me, particularly for the money.

Not enough for me to have sprung for a set over the years mind, but yeah… nice enough speakers, have lasted fairly well, drivers are still in great shape. However…

Over the years, they started developing some nasty habits. When we moved into this house, Duncan and Sabriena’s desktops were in what can really be described as a sunroom - basically half windows and half open space, the only place to put their desktops was against the windows. This meant that lots of her stuff baked in the sun, the speakers included.

After being left on for too long, they’d begin to buzz. Not the general background hiss you’ll get from basically any amplifier, but an irritating roar audible from across the room. This progressed, until just before Christmas when she’d get about 10 minutes out of them, and so most of her gaming would be done with headphones, which she hates. She replaced them with the same cheap-shit ali-express tier speakers I’m running, and I can tell she’s not super happy with it. There’s also the issue of the volume control knob being scratchy as all get out.

But I’m a fiddlefingers with just enough electronics knowledge to make me dangerous to myself, we should be able to fix this right?

Crack them open, and from a cursory inspection everything looks nice enough. No caps leaking, everything looks in reasonable shape. A lot of it is globbed in either hot glue or epoxy, making service a bit more difficult, but a hypothesis began forming… the amplifier IC (a TDA7265) is bolted an alloy heatsink, which sits in the path between the woofer and the bass reflex port. The heatsink is then coupled to the metal back plate of the active speaker, though there’s no fins or anything on the exterior. But surrounding it is a bunch of globbed up thermal compound (I’m sad I did not take a photo before cleaning it), so I theorized that over time the thermal compound had marched out due to thermal cycling, and the IC was overheating, causing the buzz. This idea was reinforced by the fact I’d been beating the shit out of these things with 90s alt rock and shitty punk for two full days with the back cover off and it had not made any untoward noise once.

So after a long week at work on Thursday, I cleaned it all off with some rubbing alcohol. At this point I noticed plastic between the heatsink and the IC, and memories of people cooking their CPUs because they neglected to remove the plastic cover from the heatsink face came back. I peeled the plastic off, cleaned up the surfaces, smeared some of Jaycar’s finest transistor thermal compound it, screwed the IC back to the heatsink and let it have it again… cool as a cucumber this time!

Satisfied, I began to reassemble it, while still playing because I’m a neanderthal and whatever song was on was good, when it shot fire at me. Big sparks. Huh, that’s weird. I looked around for me having pinched a wire or something, when I simultaneously remembered two things: first, a line that my subconscious had clearly absorbed from the datasheet: “tab connected to pin 6”, and those fucking bits of plastic. Heading back to the datasheet for the amplifier, and yeah, pin 6 is -Vs, or -17.5VDC or whatever it is after any power conditioning in the circuit. Whoops, that’ll do it.

Sheepishly, I cleaned off the rest of the thermal compound from the plastic slices (there are actually two, so it’s heatsink->compound->plastic->compound->plastic->compound->IC), gooped the lot of it up, reassembled, and off we go.

At this point I’m starting to feel pretty good about myself as Mr Fixitman, when I went to adjust the volume and the noise came back. That’s weird, it’s never done that before. Sure enough, yes, the noise appears to be related to the fucking scratchy pot, I misdiagnosed the shit out of this thing, the thermals were probably fine. Well, not fine, it was definitely hotter when it’s making the noise, but I think the heat is a symptom rather than the cause.

Peering at the volume pot under a magnifier, the only markings I can make out appear to be B503, but by poking around on electronics sites and comparing specs, I’m fairly sure it is a Bourns PTR902-2015K-B503. It’s sealed up good, but in my desperation I gently drilled a tiny hole in the casing and fed contact cleaner into it, exercising the thing back and forth… not sure if I just can’t get it in the right place or what, but I think the pot is too far gone for my skills to salvage. It’s better, but still scratchy as fuck and still does the noisy thing.

I’m not 100% sure I have the make/model correct, but I couldn’t find anything that matched better. It’s weird that the B503 is a linear curve, I was under the impression that volume knobs normally use a logarithmic curve? But that’s definitely what’s stamped on it so it lines up with what’s on the datasheets.

Alas the PTR902s appear to be unobtanium now. I can find the exact same model number in a PTD, which is the same thing without the rotary switch. TT made a P092 which was similar but is also discontinued and out of stock everywhere. I just can’t find anything in stock that’s the same specs! So the following ideas have come to mind, and I’m not sure I’m good enough at electronics to work out which is the most sensible:

I’m not sure what to do at this point. I wrote AudioEngine’s support folks to pick their brains, and while they’re friendly they’re (justifiably, I suppose) not super forthcoming with information for someone who’s not an authorized tech, but what I can do is buy a replacement back panel, with an updated (USB-C!) amplifier board that’s a drop-in replacement for about $100AUD, so that’s an option too.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

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fwaggle

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