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Fedex loses your shipment, UPS roughen up your shipping boxes, and DHL (US) doesn’t care to ship.

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There’s no good delivery service in the US. Each one of them just suck in a different way regardless of how much you pay them.

Fedex

Fedex lost my $1700 shipment (oscilloscope) in 2018 by scanning the package they mis-delivered* as delivered, and the people in Memphis didn’t give a damn about finding it. Unfortunately, the seller gave me free shipping and he didn’t insure the shipment nor require a signature; because the package was scanned as ‘delivered’, the ball is at my court.

Fedex basically told me to suck up the loss and take the $100 claim (that’s the default insurance).

Fedex’s fail opened a Pandora box of complex legal liability issues about who’s responsible (I believe it’s whoever that made the shipping insurance decisions is responsible).

The unit has an upside close to $10k if I get a chance to repair it, so it wasn’t just $1700 that was lost! That’s why I always get angry when Fedex lose my purchases (either breaking it or losing it) because the purchase price is the max of what I can claim so it can never cover the upside (which is often multiple times of what I’ve paid)!

Since this incident, I often prefer having eBay sellers ship on my account (or I make the label for them) because it’s easier for the recipient to do the claim (as shipping companies takes the one who pays them much more seriously). Also it’s kind to the seller because they’ve fulfilled their duty and it’s beyond their control if Fedex breaks it, they might need the money and don’t have the capacity to reimburse me first and wait for Fedex to reimburse them.

I used to love Fedex because Fedex Ground was more gentle handling packages. I’ve witnessed a few times inexperienced sellers screwed up on the packaging so bad that it couldn’t have possibly arrive in one piece unless the entire delivery chain was very gentle with the shipment and Fedex Ground saved the day and the instrument arrived without a dent.

This comment do not apply to Fedex Express as they broke my shipment a couple of times. They paid the claims but I wasn’t happy because the shipping damages costed more than my purchase price and I cannot find a comparable deal because those were rare finds.

I met a Fedex old-timer at the hub picking up a thrice missed deliver and shared my experience about how well Fedex saved the poorly packed shipments with extra care and UPS shipments often looked like the boxes was chewed by a dog. He loved his job and passionately told me that Ground and Express are like 2 separate entities and Fedex is self-insured: if Fedex break your package, they pay your claims out of their pocket, not through a 3rd party insurer (like UPS) so they feel the pain feedback more directly. I could at least feel that Fedex has people who cares.

I had been a loyal customer to Fedex even if they charged more than UPS. However, this incident change my mind and I switched to UPS (despite they are rough on packages) for good. Having a damaged shipment is better than no shipment. Since then I use Fedex only if my customer provides their Fedex account. If I am the one who makes the decision, I won’t use Fedex even if they are cheaper (which they are not).

I emailed their CEO and told them that they cannot just trust their drivers to scan the packages without GPS cross checking the address and take their word for it. By 2021, a few of their drivers still have a habit of scanning the package at the truck or anywhere that’s not at my door! Do they know much panic and agony they’ve created for the customer when the customer sees a ‘delivered’ email and look outside and see nothing!?

* I knew for 100% sure that it was misdelivered (not lost to porch pirates) because 3 weeks later, without Fedex’s involvement, an unrelated apartment leasing office 2 blocks down called me and said they had my package but no phone number (eBay stopped providing it to sellers) so they had to Google stalk me to find my contact info.

UPS

Despite my incoming UPS frequently arrive in beaten up boxes, they have yet to create big losses for me. Having thick and robust padding might mean your package might arrive in one piece, but it doesn’t stop whiplash from happening.

I shipped a PC-based oscilloscope to a customer 1 hr away from me and the PCI card got bumped out of the PCI socket on arrival. From my customer’s description, I knew right away it’s a PCI card that got displaced during shipping so I didn’t bother to have them ship it back to me, reseat it on my end, just to have UPS whiplash it again, so I drove to their site and reseat the card.

DHL

DHL entered US domestic market in 2003 and withdrew in 2009. They tried to be the discount delivery to undercut FedUPS in price by not having properly staffed locations and rely on everything filled online and sparsely located drop boxes.

What they didn’t realize is that like a buffet restaurant, logistics is an economies of scales game. You can easily get into a death spiral that people don’t come because you cut corners, and you are tempted to cut even more until you are eaten alive by fixed costs. With FedUPS already established their network, a new competitor cannot expect to scale up organically. People are not going to live with huge inconveniences to use your clumsy network just to save 5%~10% on shipping.

DHL still has a little presence in the US and their ‘sales’ (account manager) called the most persistently out of the 3 companies yet the rates they offer for small business is far more pricey than UPS and not even better than my Fedex account. Even for international shipping, which is supposed to be DHL’s stronghold, is more expensive than UPS after discounts.

That aside, even in the 2020s, they still work like in the 2000s which they don’t have dedicated shops and have a minimum crew and tiny vans picking up packages from drop-boxes and mom-and-pop shops. There’s absolutely no good reason to use them as they have no merits in any dimension whatsoever (speed, price, reliability, convenience). Why would I pay more to deal with more inconvenience?!

Today I got a foreign customer with a DHL account for me to ship against, and to my dismay, I found DHL is a total f*cking disgrace! It just felt like they’ve completely given up and waiting for the management to pull the plug! Here’s what I went through to ship a time-sensitive package:

  1. I haven’t logged in to make a shipping label for a while and noticed my email/login ID cannot get access to MyDHL+! I remember the last time I used DHL, it wasn’t called MyDHL+. That could be the reason.
  2. I can access my DHL billing account, which was separate from MyDHL. So I suspected they did not migrate my login information to MyDHL when they updated the system
  3. I emailed customer service and it took them a day to reply to my email EACH trip. The automatic reply reads “Thank you for contacting DHL Customer Billing Support Department. Our hours of operation are Monday-Friday, 8:00am-5:00pm (CST). We will return your request within 2 to 3 business days“. They are working at the French’s pace!
  4. Without logging in, I tried creating the e-waybill as a guest and they only take credit cards and there’s no option to use my customer’s shopping account, which means paying the retail rate at my expense! At least they should have the decency to have guests use recipient’s DHL account number and provide the credit card for charge-backs!
  5. This left going to the stores and fill in a waybill manually like a grandma as the only option to use my customer’s DHL account. I did it before in the past so I thought it’d work this time.
  6. I went to one of the crummy mailing shops taking packages for UPS and filled in the paper waybill there and was accepted.
  7. Since I’m at the mailing shop close to the cut-off time, I met the driver and he said manual/hand-written waybill is no longer accepted, but he’ll make the exception and take the loose paperwork to the office and make a label for me. This worried me as there’s no identifying information on the box so I’m gambling on the driver’s memory with no recourse or means to recover the package whatsoever if it wasn’t done correctly (i.e. broke chain of custody).
  8. 2 days later the package showed up at my door with DHL’s note in the pouch saying that the package was refused because they no longer accept manual waybill!
  9. WTF! It was an urgent package and they gave me force promises and wasted 2 days and it landed on a Saturday so I’d lose a whole weekend! WTF!?

This is an example of gross incompetence from IT to back-end to front-line workers. DHL in USA is broken, way broken, even for their international delivery services. DHL is now creating harms! I’d be saved had the workers told me to take my business elsewhere. I’d still had a an hour and a half to run to UPS if they had turned me down at the store!

DHL do not let you bill to an account unless you login
What I got from the package sent back to me, which wasted 2 days.
The driver said he’ll make the exception, but the office ended up rejecting it.
Not only it wasted 2 days, it landed me on a weekend so it could have been 3 days lost for an urgent package if it weren’t for UPS picking up on Saturdays!

Manual waybill wasn’t even one of the standard reasons for rejecting packages!
Sounds like DHL just whipped this cheapfuck policy out of their ass!

I ended up shipping with my own UPS account right away (using the expensive options to recover the lost time) and bill my customer later since the package is urgent and I don’t have time to go back and forth with this loser shipping company!

I’ve lost so much of my own time and energy fighting with this DHL nonsense, not to mention the stress as DHL was wasting days for an urgent shipment.

DHL has become so non-redeemable that unlike Fedex, I wouldn’t email their management to give them feedback because through this incident I can sense that nobody working there cares. The best I can do is to just tell my customers to stay away from DHL.

EDIT: The billing support just replied on Sunday after I replied to them with the DHL account number they asked for, what I got was “For further assistance on this shipment please contact our Customer Service at 1-800-225-5345 or MyDHL.Express.dhl Help and support Tip and Advise.“. I think they are not working in US hours despite their emails claimed so (likely Europe time), which would explain that they started the weekend earlier than I expected. More importantly, they are totally wasting my days by asking for details and in return gave me a generic boilerplate response that’s totally unhelpful. DHL in the US is hopeless.

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RS-232 Stop Bits in Agilent Instruments

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Turns out Agilent instruments do not use the same defaults for the RS-232 in their instruments.

54600 series uses 1 stop bits (most common):

RS-232 modules used in old 54600 series
54620/54640 series (newer 54600 series)

However other bench instruments such as power supplies (E3640 series 663X series) and 33120A arbitrary waveform generator uses 2 stop bits (fixed regardless of parity), which is usually NOT THE DEFAULT for most terminal clients:

E3640 series and 33120A’s RS-232 configuration.
Parity only trade away one data bit, so it does not affect stop bit
663X series powers supplies’ programming manual aren’t explicit about that except in code example

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F#*@ing newline in Putty

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I tried to use Putty to connect to my serial port test instrument (Agilent’s 33120A or E3600 series power supplies) and to my dismay it doesn’t respond to my commands.

I figured it might be newlines not being recognized properly. Checked the programming manuals and found that HP/Agilent accepts LF (‘\n’)as newline and optionally allowing a CR (‘\r’) before it (i.e. CR+LF like Windows).

I thought this configuration (Implicit LF in every CR) would work:

However it doesn’t! I had to dig through internet forums to find out that the ‘Terminal’ settings page controls what gets SPIT OUT TO THE TERMINAL SCREEN, not how your keystrokes are treated/sent! This page controls what your keystrokes mean:

However, it says nothing about what Putty does with ENTER key. I found from Stackflow that Putty sends out only CR (‘\r’) when ENTER key is pressed.

Turns out with terminals,

  • Ctrl+J is LF
  • Ctrl+M is CR,

and the convention for ENTER is Ctrl+M (also mentioned here):

https://ss64.com/bash/syntax-keyboard.html

So if you want ENTER/RETURN key to generate LF (instead of CR) with the official putty, you have to press Ctrl+J each time!

Putty sending CR (Ctrl+M) with ENTER key by default is also hinted by the default Telnet (only applies to telnet, not serial) setting in the Putty docs “Return key sends Telnet New Line instead of Ctrl+M”, which means outside Telnet, it the default behavior or ENTER/RETURN key is Ctrl+M (CR)!

Ironically even HyperTerminal came with the option to send out CR+LF on ENTER key! Luckily some kind soul (Grzegorz Niemirowski) compiled a mod (currently v0.74) which added the option and and posted it on Stack overflow:

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RS-232 motherboard header mapping (DB9)

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The pin ordering for RS-232 (DB9) pin is sequential is row-wise (the long side is a row) while the IDC-10 (ribbon cable) header is column-wise (zig-zag pattern).

This might be a little confusing because geometrically, they are in-place on both sides (you can overlay the pins of DB9 on top of IDC-10 and they align perfectly, except pin 6-9 was lowered by half a notch on the DB9 side). I am writing this post so nobody waste their time separating the wires in a ribbon just to find out the DB9 was designed so it aligns with the flat ribbon cable perfectly.

Here’s a great tutorial building your own RS-232 cable which I took the images from to illustrate the point. Please pay them a visit to show some love: https://developer.toradex.com/knowledge-base/assembling-serial-idc-to-db9-cable

  • IDC10 RS-232
    (Motherboard male pins perspective)
  • DB9M RS-232
https://developer.toradex.com/knowledge-base/assembling-serial-idc-to-db9-cable

If you split the table on the right in half (cut after pin 5) and place pins 6 (DSR) ~ 9 (RI) on the right, you’ll see it align with the IDC10

1DCD (Data Carrier Detect)
Check if connection dropped		DSR (Data Set Ready)
DTR-DSR Handshaking		6
2RxD (Receive Data)
RTS (Request to Send)
RTS-CTS Flow control		7
3TxD (Transmit Data)
CTS (Clear to Send)
RTS-CTS Flow control		8
4DTR (Data Terminal Ready
DTR-DSR Handshaking		RI (Ring Indicator)
For phone rings		9
5GND (Ground pin)– (Not connected)10
Rearranged DB9M RS-232 to align with IDC10

Cable-tester.com has a clearer annotated picture that matches the physical mapping above:

http://www.cable-tester.com/rs232-pin-out/

Note that the tutorial itself has Tx(D) and Rx(D) reserved it was building a null modem cable and they skipped all the handshake lines. I’m doing a straight cable (which should be done for internal board header cables where the DB9 socket is male, hence DB9M).

The DTE/DCE might be confusing. Hope these properties can help people make sense out of it (so you can figure it out in your head confidently instead of randomly trying null modem adapters till it work)

  • DTE device (colloquially ‘computer’) has the pattern as shown in the pictures above (receive pins above/before the transmit pins), which is usually the computer end and the port/socket is male. Think of it as the ‘driver/master’ (though it’s arbitrary)
  • DCE device (colloquially ‘modem’) reverses all the sends and receives of the DTE. Can think of it as the ‘receiver/slave’ (though it’s arbitrary). It’s usually the modem and the port/socket is female.
  • For DTE-DTE (like data transfer between two PCs), the send lines on one side should go to the receive lines on the other side. A null modem cable that swaps the send pins with receive pins. You can think of it as making one side DCE. Given that the topology is symmetric, it’s up to the software set up to decide which side is the initiator/client (master) and which side is the reactor/server (slave)
  • The handshaking (optional) and flow control (optional) lines also have their initiator/reactor roles reversed with null modem cable.
http://www.lm-technologies.com/wp-content/downloads/wireless%20adapters/LM048/Application%20Notes/DTR-DSR-RTS-CTS_Difference.pdf

Here’s an image for the above mapping:

Puertos E/S COM
https://itigic.com/input-and-output-ports-on-pc-types-uses-and-characteristics/

It turns out the direct geometric mapping (IDC male pins match the relative locations of the DB9 male pins) mentioned above is the less common type of motherboard header configuration. IDC ribbon crimp-on DB9 headers like this:

ฅนบ้ายอ: [34+] Db9 Male And Female Connector Pinout

has to follow the above geometric layout since the pins cannot be remapped (so it has to follow the ribbon order). The soldered version looks like this:

https://store.cwc-group.com/lowprldb9mat1.html

However, the more commonly seen soldered RS-232M to IDC10 header uses a transposed configuration (which DB-9M pin numbers matches IDC-10 pin numbering EXACTLY despite one is row-major and the other is column-major), which has nothing to do with the IDC10 pin layout mentioned above.

https://store.cwc-group.com/lowprldb9mat.html
(I don’t think it’s a good idea to call it ‘crossed-config’ like CWC did.
It almost mislead me to think it happens to swap the roles of Tx and Rx.
I did the mapping on paper and it didn’t make any sense.
Let’s call it ‘transposed-configuration’)

The crazy thing about the existence of these 2 pin layouts is that there’s no easy way to tell which pin layout/mapping it is until you open the connector up and inspect the solder joints! Taking a pin and probe it with a multimeter is more work than taking the screw posts out and disassemble the connector.

So if you just buy some old scrap parts that came with old motherboards, this might confuse the heck out of you until you tested the pin mapping with a multimeter and realize things doesn’t add up!

Note to self: just open the DB9 side up whenever I see a DB9-IDC cable and mark the configuration on the DB9 end directly on the cable!

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Off the Goolag (2): Low cost shared hosting

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For absolutely privacy, avoid using email (say, talk on Signal instead). Unless it’s inter-server mail in zero-knowledge encrypted providers like ProtonMail that also encrypt the message headers (meta-data, especially who’s sending to who), expect determined people with enough social engineering or authority can see it naked. It’s the same deal as snail mail where people in the post office can see what’s written on the envelope.

For big files like photos and typical cloud storage, which you should self-host these at home anyway. If you are worried about slow internet connection and downtime, you can pay for Zero-Knowledge cloud storage (which the server owners don’t have the master keys to your files) to add redundancy.

The next step down is to self-host your email, contacts, calendar, tasks (productivity suite) which you physically own so nobody can peek into it as long as you guard your home.

Hosting these services from home might be more work and risks (downtime), especially when it’s possible that your ISP’s IP address block is on the spammer’s list or if your ISP blocks the ports needed. The less secure alternative is to pay for extremely cheap shared web hosting services (we are talking about <$4/mo regular price and <$2 for the first year) which

  • you can make as many email accounts as you wanted
  • each email account comes with contacts, calendar, tasks as a bundle
  • use your own domain name
  • also host your own webpage and wordpress site

With Google, Microsoft, Apple and other big providers, they have big security teams to protect your data from hackers, but because of their centralized nature, it’s much more rewarding for hackers to breach one big provider than going after little accounts spread across different servers and IPs. Unless you are a high profile person or expect to be specifically targeted, you are better off managing your own productivity suite’s hosting/storage.

More importantly, it feels creepy when Google harvest my email and suggest I allow them to automatically register my appointment on my calendar. Random staff might not be reading our emails, but bots are and god knows what else they can do just by updating their code if they someday want to turn on us. They’ve become so powerful that with enough bankroll, they can make our politicians look the other way so there’s no way to stop them if we become dependent on their platforms.

cPanel

The instructions below assumes your shared hosting provider adopted cPanel as the account management interface which you have access to.

Like Google, your Gmail (email) account is also your account for a variety of productivity services (contacts, calendar, tasks). You can set it up by logging into cPanel, often https://(your server here)/cpanel.

There are a few naming conventions in cPanel that are different from Google’s ecosystem:

  • Login name is your ENTIRE email address because you can have different domains attached to the same hosting storage so you must enter the domain name after the @ sign for it to tell the accounts apart

Email

In modern times, I’d stick with IMAP for email (which is enabled by default in cPanel). Since Google would like to keep you in their ecosystem as much as possible, IMAP is not enabled by default for Gmail.

Note that due to tougher security settings in shared hosting email server (EXIM Internet Mailer), you might not be able to receive email sent from servers with shady practice (often done by spammers) such as the source address’s server not resolving with DNS (no A or MX records). Skype server might have a typo in their verification email server so I cannot use my shared hosting email address for it.

Webmail

Web email interface (you have a choice between Horde or RoundCube) is at port 2096. You can access it by

https://{name or IP to the shared host server assigned by your provider}:2096

or

https://{name or IP to the shared host server assigned by your provider}/webmail
(which will redirect you to port 2096 above)

In most cases, your domain name attached to the hosting points to the actual underlying shared hosting server assigned by your provider. I’d prefer not to use the underlying server address/IP because it might change when you move between hosting plans.

Also, per security design, WebMail doesn’t warn you when you enter non-existent email addresses (login). I’ll just silently loop you back to the login page again without explanation if you got any part of the login or password wrong.

DavX5 for calendar/tasks (CalDAV) and contacts (CardDAV)

In Android, calendar and contacts (also known as address book) are stored in a standard place shared by apps that picks them up from the system (email storage is per app, since POP3 and IMAP itself already does things very differently)

The default Calendar/Contacts app made it look like you have to use Google Calendar/Contacts to set up an online account (by default it came with Device/Local and Google accounts as option), but you can inject CalDAV/CardDAV accounts into the Android’s calendar/contacts system with an app called DAVx5.

The App is FREE if you download it from F-droid but costs $5.99 if you download it from Google Play. It’s not a loophole, but the authors want people to move away from Google Play and use F-droid, a Free-and-Open-Source (FOSS) app store.

DAVx5 works in a little unusual way that accounts are NOT added through calendar/contacts app but instead you register your CalDAV/CardDAV accounts, select the folders to sync, SYNC IT, then each sync’ed FOLDER (you hear me right) will show up as standard Android Accounts (just like Google/Samsung Accounts) which will work with any standard Calendar/Contacts app. All management (add/removal) happens in DAVx5.

You must enter the URL which points to Port 2080 of the shared hosting server! If you forget to enter the port number, the account will be set up with CalDAV/WebCAL only, without CardDAV! This is buried in cPanel’s instructions:

When you set up an CalDAV/CardDAV account, remember NOT to use the first option “Login with email address” (or else the server URL will be whatever that’s after the @ mark and therefore no port number entered, which means CalDAV only, no CardDAV, and DAVx5 will simply remove the CalDAV tab and won’t warn you about it)!

Select “Groups are separate vCards“:

Help - Davx5 (Davdroid): How do I use the Posteo address book and the Posteo calendar on Android devices? - posteo.de
https://posteo.de/en/help/synchronising-contacts-and-calendar-entries-with-the-address-book-and-calendar-using-davdroid-android

Basically CardDAV is just a folder storing each contact as VCF (vCARD) file and CalDAV is just a folder storing each event/task as an ICS file. Basically it’s just a primitive HTTP file manager hosted with HTTPS login and apps are supposed to find the folder using a consistent naming scheme.

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