Tektronix’s TDS/DPO7000 series Mechanical (Chassis) Design is Evil

Posted on November 3, 2022 by admin

I thought the TDS500~800 series design is already frustrating to service. But TDS7140 (or DPO7000) takes the cake. Whoever the a**hole designed the chassis made it a f*cking lettuce wrap. It’s not even an onion that you can predictably guess how you’d approach it.

To get any meaningful access to the insides, you MUST first remove the plastic front panel bezel, which is a fragile part that if you didn’t get the plastic hooks right, you’ll break it when you try to force anything. The service manual is not helpful. Likely written by somebody with a ‘fuck it. somebody’ll figure it out’ attitude.

This can be seen by the service manual giving an exploded view diagram without a precise order-of-removal dependency graph, nor the decency of telling you where each hook is and which of them are slides that must not be pried open like hooks. This is basically is tricking people to break the front bezel because those who didn’t know this already won’t know until they shine a flashlight to investigate the geometry around the hooks before releasing the front bezel.

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All in 1 Mini Card Reader Manufacturing Flaw (Bad USB connector)

Posted on October 12, 2022 by admin

Recently, I’ve bought this CF card reader on eBay but it doesn’t detect at all.

I looked closely into the connector with a loupe and realized that the mini USB conductor was molded incorrectly. The center middle pin was pushed down because extra plastic was deposited above it:

The seller refunded in full but I figured that if the connector is malformed at the molding stage, buying it from another seller is not going to make it work, and the other form factors/connector configurations are inconvenient, so I tried my luck and see if there are exact matches for the connector they’ve used. Turns out it’s a 56 cents connector (price for 1 piece) available in Mouser (UJ2-MBH-1-SMT-TR):

In bulk, this connector can be bought for $0.22. For something that’s selling for $5/pc, the Red Chinese manufacturing had to go cheap to shave a few cents that ended up turning finished products into total trash. Most people are not electronics/troubleshooting savvy enough to figure out this shit, and the labor cracking the piece up and the SMD rework can easily buy 20pcs new. I just happened to have the tools (Metcal hot tweezers) so I can desolder the bad connector in seconds, but average users do not have that luxury so the neutered USB card readers go straight into trash.

We need more products NOT made in China!

Getting Quickbooks Pro 2019 to work on Windows 10 21H2

Posted on October 5, 2022 by admin

Turns out there’s two hurdles to launching Quickbooks as they used some old Windows dependencies

Internet Explorer needed for DLL/ActiveX/DCOM
XPS Writer needed for PDF libraries

In later versions of Windows 10, IE11 was turned off by default, and 21H2 made it difficult to re-enable it by hiding it from Windows’s (optional) features checkboxes, so it needs to be enabled through command line.

If you do not enable Microsoft’s XPS Writer feature, you’ll get this error message about PDF on start, though XPS is Microsoft challenger to PDF so they are not the same thing

Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10 21H2

Posted on October 5, 2022 by admin

Microsoft has disabled Internet Explorer on later versions of Windows 10 as they really want people to use Microsoft Edge. However, disabling Internet Explorer 11 might break some software such as Quickbooks 2019, which relied on old fashioned DLLs.

Since 21H2, Microsoft went the extra mile preventing users from re-enabling Internet Explorer 11 by hiding it from GUI ways to turn Windows features on or off (whether you use the app mode interface or the classic optionalfeature.exe interface launchable from control panel’s “Programs and Features”). Instead this needs to be enabled from the command line

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/developer/browsers/installation/disable-internet-explorer-windows

dism /online /Add-Capability /CapabilityName:Browser.InternetExplorer~~~~0.0.11.0.

or

dism /online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:Internet-Explorer-Optional-amd64.

Maildroid does not save sent email to IMAP ‘Sent’ folder by default

Posted on July 28, 2022 by admin

This behavior is so frustrating. We don’t live in a time where IMAP storage space is at a premium anymore! Fairmail saves a copy of sent mail in the IMAP’s ‘Sent’ folder by default.

I did some research and it seems like MailDroid insists on ‘saving the sent mail in “Sent from device” folder (I tried disabling it thinking Maildroid will be smart enough to save it in the IMAP’s sent folder, but no, it doesn’t).

Fairmail’s Settings->Send->Message->[Last Item] On Replying to a message in user folder, save the reply in the same folder was disabled (should be, or else it’d be messy), but there’s a subtext that says “The email server could still add the message to the sent message folder”, which points me to think saving a copy to the Sent folder is an IMAP server managed behavior, so it doesn’t rely on email clients specifically telling it where (which folder) to save the sent email.

I was about to give up Maildroid and stick to Fairmail, and did a little research on “imap put sent mail in sent folder” and viola, Maildroid is the first one that came up. Seems like I wasn’t the only one perplexed by Maildroid’s weird design choices and it seems like most other email apps do not have this awkward behavior.

I did as what the dev for maildroid said and it turns out all of the email accounts in use says “Not specified”. When I clicked on one of the accounts, the root folder /Inbox shows up. I had to expand it with the ‘>‘ so the (IMAP) sub-folders show up.

This GUI was designed horribly and it’s clearly an afterthought. The reason I’m saying that instead of just assigning the IMAP sent folder right away after I tapped on it, the UI changes the text at the bottom of the screen (WTF) to what I’ve selected (despite there were no multiple choices) and expect me to click the DONE next to it. It’s so unintuitive in many levels.