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Fixing a loud PSU fan without dying

2025-07-30T00:00:00Z

Three months after I built my new computer, it started annoying me. There would occasionally be a noise that sounded like a fan was catching on a cable, but there weren’t any loose cables to be a problem. Over the course of a few weeks, the sound got progressively worse to the extent that I didn’t want to use the computer without headphones on. I measured the sound at 63 dB, which is about the sound of someone talking. That may not sound terrible, but it’s a constant, nasty noise coming from something that sits about 40cm from my head.

After some investigating¹, I identified the PSU fan as the culprit. I have a Cooler Master V750 SFX, which is not super high-end, but wasn’t cheap, either. It shouldn’t be developing issues after three months. Thankfully, it comes with a ten-year warranty, so it should be easy to get sorted, right?

Warranty woes

I looked at Cooler Master’s warranty, and for issues within the first two years you have to deal with the retailer. That would be Amazon in my case. So I looked at Amazon’s information on warranty issues. Their policy is that if it’s more than 30 days since purchase, you have to send it off to a third-party repair center and wait for them to diagnose and try to repair it. Here’s the kicker:

Usually repairs take up to 20 business days (including delivery time), but could take slightly longer

I use the computer for work, have upcoming LAN parties to go to, and generally can’t do without it for an entire month. That’s assuming they reproduce the issue: the PSU fan only turns on when it reaches a certain temperature, so if you just plug it in briefly it won’t exhibit any symptoms.

If I was going to do a warranty return, I’d need to buy a new PSU first to use while this one was away. If I’m spending £100+ on a PSU, then I’d be getting a better one that doesn’t have known issues with the fans. So when the Cooler Master eventually got returned I’d have no use for it. What a waste.

So the warranty is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. Good to know, I guess. If I wanted decent service, I should have probably used a real retailer, not Amazon. Lesson learnt.

Doing some research

If the warranty is useless to me, maybe I should just void it and try to fix it myself. I did some research online. Most of the results went like this:

if you’re not a trained professional you should not be opening up your PSU at all. There’s a lot of current that goes through it which will seriously hurt/main/kill you

it’s time consuming and potentially dangerous

or some other variety of doom and gloom. There were some actually useful results sprinkled in, though. A post on the smallformfactor.net forums details someone swapping out the fan on the 850W version of the same power supply because it was too noisy. It looks like the fan connector in the PSU is a two-pin connector, and they just used an off-the-shelf adapter to convert the standard four-pin case fan connector. It sounded a bit annoying to make it all fit, though.

A similar post on reddit showed basically the same upgrade, but identified the connector as a 2.54mm JST-XH. They crimped their own connector on, which feels a lot better than using a bulky connector. I do have a crimping set for JST connectors, but I absolutely hate doing them because they’re so fiddly and annoying. I’m not sure if I trust one of my crimps inside a power supply, either.

Looking at the pictures in those posts, I identified the fan as an Ong Hua HA9215VH12FD-F00. I searched to see if I could see any specifications for it. I couldn’t. But what I did get back as my first result was another Reddit post, this one titled “Getting rid of a HA9215SH12FD-F00 fan from your PSU”. It says something about the quality of a component when the first result is a post about getting rid of it because it’s annoying².

All of these mods seemed easy enough, and I’m reasonably confident in my ability to both discharge and avoid touching capacitors, so I probably wouldn’t die. I ordered a Noctua NF-A9x14 fan and some pre-made JST-XH connectors and waited for them to arrive.

Upgrade time

The replacement parts arrived one evening, so when I turned the computer off for the night I unplugged it from the mains, held the power button down for a while, and left it overnight for good measure. The next morning I popped open the case, disconnected and removed the PSU, gleefully tore the “warranty void if removed” sticker off, and opened it up.

Removing the fan was simple: unplug the JST connector and undo the screws holding it to the outer panel. I confirmed that my JST connectors were the right size, then started surgery on the Noctua fan. I carefully removed the heatshrink, cut off the normal fan connector, and separated out the four wires. A quick check of their FAQ confirmed the wiring colours: black was ground, yellow +12V, and blue and green used for speed control (which we’re not using in this instance). I clipped the blue and green wires off near the hub so they wouldn’t be in the way, then cut the yellow and black wires down to length, and attached the JST connector with a solder seal:

Old fan, new fan, burnt mouse mat

In the process I discovered my mouse mat doesn’t like being hit with a heat gun. Whoops. The solder seals are great: the solder in the center melts to form an electrical connection, the parts at the end grip the cable to provide mechanical strength, and the whole thing acts like heatshrink and keeps the connection insulated. A lot less fiddly than crimping JST connectors, and a lot smaller and cheaper than an adapter.

I installed the fan and reassembled the PSU. Then undid it all and tried again, as apparently the face the fan mounts to isn’t quite symmetrical and I’d installed the fan upside down. Connected everything back up, plugged the computer in, booted it up, and… nothing. The PSU doesn’t actually power the fan until it hits a certain temperature. I figured putting it under load would probably heat it up, so ran a graphics benchmark a few times. Eventually the fan spun up. Huzzah.

Soon the entire computer will be beige and brown

Peace at last

I measured the sound of the new fan: 43 dB. That’s a decrease of 20 dB. Due to the weird logarithmic properties of the dB scale that no one understands, that means it sounds about 4 times quieter to human ears. Big improvement!

It’s worth pointing out this isn’t a straight one-to-one upgrade. I don’t know the specs of the old fan in terms of airflow, and I’m just assuming that the Noctua will be good enough by virtue of being a decent fan. They also behave slightly differently as the power ramps up: the stock fan starts spinning at a lower voltage than the Noctua, which needs around 7V to get started properly³. I don’t think this will be an issue, as it’s effectively just putting a small step at the lower end of the fan curve. It might shorten the overall lifespan of the PSU, but from my point of view it failed after four months, so any extra time is a bonus.

I recorded some before/after audio, so you can hear the difference. I think there’s some amount of volume normalisation going on, so it’s not quite as stark a difference as in person, but it’s still noticeable.

Audio sample from the old fan

Audio sample from the new fan

And if you couldn’t hear it, here’s a visual representation:

Side-by-side comparison of the audio clips

The whole upgrade took about an hour (less time than writing this post about it!), and I even managed to avoid killing myself.

Opening the case and sticking my ear near to various components. High-tech stuff. ↩︎
On closer inspection it’s actually a slightly different model — there’s an S not a V in the middle there — but I’m going to assume that doesn’t change much on the quality/noise front. ↩︎
It then keeps spinning down to about 5V or so, it just needs enough power to initially get started. ↩︎

Building a new Computer

2025-06-03T00:00:00Z

The finished PC. Cat pen for scale.

I recently¹ built a new computer, after exclusively using a laptop for three years. It’s also the first time I’ve departed from the usual combo of an Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU.

While the form factor of a laptop did make it amazingly handy for travelling and attending LAN events, it was starting to show its age and there was basically no sane upgrade path. The main problem was its 3060 mobile graphics card, which was okay for the first few years and then slowly descended into painful. At the time, the (fairly disappointing) 50-series had just been released, but hadn’t yet made it into laptops. Nvidia had stopped production on the 40-series beforehand, so there also weren’t any compelling options there, either.

That’s not to say there were no laptops at all that I could have upgraded to. There were. Just not really any that ticked all of my perfectly normal boxes like “run Linux”, “have at least 64GB of ram”, and “run modern games well”. Having to upgrade the entire system just because the graphics card was showing its age was a bit of a drag, too. So back to the land of desktop computers I went!

To try to preserve some of that convenience, I opted for a small form factor (SFF) case. The computer and all the accessories can fit inside a hand-luggage-sized flight case. More on that later, though.

Components, Choices, and Cramming

So what, exactly, is in this computer? The case is a Fractal Design Terra, which is a lovely little 10.4L case². My last desktop PC was a normal-sized Fractal Design case, which I liked a lot, and it seems like they’ve upped their game since then. The Terra is both pleasant to look at (just look at that wooden panel!), and a breeze to work in. The sides and top are fully and easily removable, giving you great access to everything inside³. I expected an SFF build to be fiddly, but the case made it feel about the same as a normal full-sized build⁴.

The case with sides and top off, and wires everywhere in desperate need of management.

Another nice feature of the case is the movable spine. I think this is relatively common in SFF cases, but it was new to me. You mount the graphics card on one side of a metal divider, and everything else on the other. The divider (or spine) can be moved side-to-side depending on what exactly you’re putting in the case.

As I mentioned earlier, this was my first departure from the Intel + Nvidia bandwagon. Nvidia’s 50 series was underwhelming, and Intel managed to put out a generation of chips that literally fried themselves. It seemed like a good time to try out AMD’s offering! I went for the newly released Radeon RX 9070XT graphics card, and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor⁵. The processor has a Thermalright AXP90 X47 Full heatsink on top of it, with a Noctua NF-A9 fan on top of that.

The motherboard is a Gigabyte B850I Aorus Pro, and it hosts 2 32GB Corsair Vengeance RAM modules, and a 2TB Crucial T705 NVMe drive. Powering it all is a Cooler Master V750 SFX. The PSU is modular to reduce the number of wires that need to be fitted in, but they’re still pretty big and bulky. I’m tempted by custom cables but they’re rather pricey, and you can’t actually see inside with the sides closed…

With the diminutive size of the case and all the components crammed in, there’s actually no room left over for case fans. The PSU, GPU and CPU all have fans attached, but that’s it. There are stories online of people having heat issues, but thankfully everything seems pretty happy in my setup. The components all draw in air from the sides, and the hot air passively vents out the top. If I keep the CPU under maximum load for a while then it starts to thermal throttle slightly, but the only time I’ve actually managed that is when compiling a kernel. Why was I compiling a kernel, you ask? Well, we’ll come to that.

But does it Linux?

I didn’t go into this build completely blind. I did a bit of reading and chatting, and it sounded like AMD drivers were pretty good on Linux these days. I didn’t check specifically if any of the components were supported.

The 9070XT was released on the 6th of March. I built my PC on the 26th of March. The first version of Mesa (the 3D graphics lib) that was generally stable with 9070XT cards landed in Arch on the 20th of March. If I did the build just one week earlier, I would’ve had a much less fun experience.

It still wasn’t quite perfectly smooth, though. When playing games I’d occasionally have issues. In some cases the screen just went blank and came back after switching windows, but in others the graphics drivers couldn’t recover and the PC needed rebooting. Fortunately the drivers are open source, and they have a public issue tracker hosted by the Freedesktop project. Searching through the issues, I found they’d already been reported (by another Arch user, of course), and there were various suggestions for work-arounds, as well as lots of work trying to reproduce the issue.

Within a week, an AMD developer had posted a set of patches that might address the issues, and asked people to test them. That’s fortunately pretty easy on Arch: you just clone the repository containing the PKGBUILD file, drop in the patches, and update the checksums for them. Then you start compiling, realise you didn’t tell it to use more than one CPU core, abort it, and start again but this time running on all cylinders. Soon enough I was running a patched 6.14 kernel and the problems stopped completely. Others reported similar outcomes, and the patches worked their way into the kernel proper.

I spent a few weeks having to compile a custom kernel every time I accidentally updated it (I should’ve just stopped pacman from touching the kernel for a bit…), then one day the patches didn’t apply because they’d been merged upstream. Since then everything has been perfect.

A friend commented that “this wouldn’t happen with Nvidia”. They meant it negatively, but I wholeheartedly agree! Maybe Nvidia have fewer launch bugs than AMD, but you absolutely wouldn’t be able to talk to their driver engineers on a public bug tracker, and get access to test patches that fix your issue. I’ll happily take a few bugs in exchange for a company that operates openly in a way consistent with the rest of the Linux community.

But does it travel?

Travel mode, engage!

So the computer works fine at home, but how do I get it to other places? I just shoved a laptop in a backpack⁶, but you can’t quite do that with a PC even one this size. I’d seen a few people at LANs who packed everything in flight cases, but they always seemed a bit unwieldy. Doing some research, though, I found that I’d just be able to squeeze everything into a flight case sized to be taken onto a plane as cabin baggage.

Peli (or Pelican in the US) are the most well known maker of flight cases, but I chose to go with Nanuk instead. Spec-wise they’re fairly similar. Nanuk are a bit cheaper. The killer difference for me, though, is that Nanuk publish STEP files of their cases. As someone with a 3D printer, giving me CAD models of things so that I can easily mod them is definitely a way to win my favour.

After lots of measuring and thinking and modelling I came up with an arrangement where everything could fit snugly into the case. The case has cutouts for the wheels and handles, which constrain what can go where. I ended up wanting the computer at the handle-end of the case to make best use of space, but that means it needs something to take its weight when the case is vertical. The solution was, of course, 3D printing.

Using the STEP files from Nanuk I designed an insert that spans across the case, with screw holes that line up with the ones in the flight case. I wasn’t sure it would be able to take the weight like that, so I also added in some supports in the other direction (running down to the bottom of the case, if it’s stood up). I ended up printing it in three parts, and it came out perfectly first time. I can’t emphasise how nice it is having CAD models instead of having to measure and guess at things.

With the support in place, I focused on cushioning the computer. I opted for 10mm thick EVA foam as it’s easy to obtain and work with, and doesn’t take up too much room. I used contact adhesive to glue the foam directly to the case and the 3D printed divider. There’s a piece that goes between the computer and the keyboard, so I printed some little 3D supports to hold that more firmly in place, and stuck those in with contact adhesive as well.

So how does it all hold up? It’s been to one LAN event so far, and it’s great. I think the flight case might actually be easier to carry than hefting a heavy backpack: the handles are sturdy and comfortable, and it has chunky wheels for pulling it around. It’s also actually easier to get everything set up when you can see it all laid out in the flight case and pull out what you need, and then the case can be tucked away out the way for the duration of the event.

Recently-ish. It may or may not have taken me a few months to get around to writing this post. ↩︎
Using litres to measure computer cases always feels wrong. Those are the units we use for water. Don’t put them near the computers! ↩︎
The case also has holes to put security screws in to stop all of these nice easily removable parts from being removable. Very handy when you’re leaving it unattended at a LAN. ↩︎
Which for me means it was good fun for about an hour, and then I got fed up and just wanted it to be done already. ↩︎
Three months in and I still can’t remember these random strings of numbers. Someone even explained the versioning scheme to me. ↩︎
Along with a portable monitor, mouse, keyboard, headset, mouse mat, kensington lock, power supply, cables, and controller. It was a heavy bag. ↩︎

Home Automation Without the Megacorps

2025-05-21T00:00:00Z

I first experimented with home automation in 2016, by picking up a Samsung “SmartThings” hub. It was terrible. The UI to configure things was slow and clunky, firmware updates were applied whether you wanted them or not, and everything stopped working if their cloud services stopped. You were also locked into whatever integrations they deigned to support, of course. After that broke for the umpteenth time I scaled back and for years the closest I got to home automation was a couple of Hue bulbs.

Recently I’ve been building it out again, though. This time using off-the-shelf components that interop using Zigbee, open-source software, and some code I wrote myself. It’s great; it runs entirely locally and has had basically zero downtime. The Zigbee ecosystem lets me integrate all sorts of things without having to spend lots of money on “smart” alternatives. I think I’ve spent less on this incarnation than I did on the original SmartThings hub all those years ago (even without adjusting for inflation!).

My current setup

I run everything on a Raspberry Pi 4, with a Sonoff USB Zigbee adapter based on the CC2652P chipset¹. Interfacing with the Zigbee stack is handled by zigbee2mqtt (z2m for short), an open-source project that basically bridges your devices to an MQTT broker². When a device reports some data, it will send a new message over MQTT; when you want to make a device do something you just post a message back. It’s incredibly lightweight, but supports a huge array of devices out of the box. And as it’s just using MQTT, it’s trivial to integrate with other software or build on top of.

I know a lot of people building out this kind of home automation use Home Assistant, but I don’t get on with it terribly well. It felt incredibly sluggish, and the entire project is just a bit… much. I want a binary or package or docker image I can just run, not an entire operating system. That’s not how computers are meant to work! In contrast, z2m is simple to set up, super light weight and responsive.

Anyway. z2m exposes Zigbee devices over MQTT, so I wrote some code in Go to connect to the MQTT broker, and listen to the messages. It’s grown a bit beyond this now, and I’m skipping some boring bits like error handling and JSON parsing, but at first I had something like:

for {
    message, topic, err := c.ReadSlices()
    
    if string(topic) == "zigbee2mqtt/desk-button" {
        if strings.Contains(message, "single") {
            c.Publish(nil, []byte("{\"state\": \"TOGGLE\"}"), "zigbee2mqtt/room-lights/set")
        }
    }
}

I think I actually made this harder to read by trying to simplify it here, but hopefully you can follow that it was relatively straight forward to listen for a particular action to happen (in this case me “single”-pressing on the device called “desk-button”) and then make another device do something in response (toggling the state of the “room-lights” device).

So what actually are these devices? At present in z2m I have the following:

Some generic buttons
An air quality sensor (USB powered), and a separate temperature sensor (battery powered)
A light switch
Some 240V relay modules, that I use to turn non-smart devices on and off
Some USB relay modules, for the same purpose
Some “smart” plugs that I mostly use to monitor power usage
A motorised blind roller

I think all of these are either Tuya or Moes branded, and were all sourced from AliExpress. You can get the same things from Amazon or elsewhere, but they tend to be 3-4x more expensive for the same product.

One of the cool things about Zigbee devices is that the powered ones work together to create a mesh network, so you don’t have to worry about network repeaters or signal strength like you do with Wi-Fi networks. z2m even makes a map showing the connections:

The network map produced by z2m. You can see how all the powered devices form a mesh that the lower power ones can connect to.

Some interesting automations

A Zigbee relay spliced into the power cable for the fan

So what do I actually do with all of this? Some of it is just what I’ll call “laziness automation”: I want to be able to turn on the lights without getting up and walking to the light switch. So there’s a Zigbee button on my desk that does it. Then there are some less manual automations: my blinds are automatically closed at sunset³, for example. It feels a bit trivial, but it’s surprisingly nice just not to have to think about that at all.

Another nice quality of life automation is the light I have above my monitor. It’s USB powered, and I now have it going through a Zigbee USB relay that lets it be toggled on and off. Then I have a small agent running on my desktop that turns the light on when the computer is unlocked, and off when it locks or shuts down. I keep meaning to make a “film mode” that detects when I’m watching a film, and turning all the lights and blinds down, but I haven’t got around to it yet.

The most complex automation is probably for a window fan. It’s not smart in any way, so I cut the power cable and inserted a Zigbee relay. The whole thing is housed in a little project box to keep it secure. The relay basically acts as a switch: the live wire leading to the fan runs to the “normally open”⁴ contact, while the upstream power goes to “common”. When the relay is told to turn the fan on, the two get connected and the fan gets power. Oh, it’s also not actually a window fan, but I designed and 3D printed some adapters so that it sits right in the window.

So now we have a window fan that can be turned off and on automatically. But I don’t want to have to press a button to do that. I’m lazy, remember? Instead, I made it so that the Go code constantly monitors the temperature reported by the air quality sensor, and queries the free OpenWeatherMap API to get the rough temperature outside. It can then turn the fan on if the room is too hot, and outside is cool enough to make a difference (there’s no point in blowing hotter air in!).

A graph of room temperature, showing the effect of the fan being turned on and off

I don’t want it to do that all the time though. The room doesn’t need to be cooled if I’m not around. There are various Zigbee presence sensors you can get, but the cheaper ones seem to be of dubious quality. Instead, I wrote some code to guess whether I’m present. It uses the state of the monitor light as a proxy for “is the computer in use”, and then makes some guesses based on the last time the computer was used and the current time (if I turn the computer off at midnight it probably means I’m going to sleep; if I turn it off at 2pm it probably means I’m going out somewhere).

You can see in the graph that the fan has a decent impact on temperature. I coded it to cool the room to 19 degrees, but then not turn on again until it was above 20. This prevents it flip-flopping on and off constantly. You can clearly see the pattern in the graph, as it actively cools and then slowly the room warms back up. This arrangement is much better than being woken up at 5am because it’s painfully cold. Trust me.

Bonuses: metrics and 3D printer

One of the things my custom Go code does is collate all the various stats reported by the Zigbee devices, and inserts them into a VictoriaMetrics database. I originally hosted this on the Pi itself, and it performed fine, but I’ve since moved it onto a server so that I can use it for some other things as well.

I set up Grafana to point to VM, and can create dashboards showing power usage, what devices are turned on when, and a bunch of environmental conditions. This also makes it easy to spot how good the data coming from the devices are. For example, the air quality sensor reports a figure for the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air, as well as the amount of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). The graphs are basically identical, but on a different scale. It turns out this particular device has no actual way of detecting CO₂, so it just “calculates” it from the VOCs figure. Useful to know if you want to actually use that data.

Recently I came across a go library for interacting with Bambu Lab printers, so I’ve also hooked that into my automation. It exports metrics about the printer, so I now have a way of seeing what’s going on when I’m not physically present⁵. I even added a HTTP endpoint (exposed over Tailscale) that shows pictures from the built-in camera.

On the automation front, I’ve made it automatically turn off the printer’s light when it finishes a print, and also added push notifications via PushOver whenever the state changes. No longer will I be sat in another room blissfully unaware it ran out of filament seconds after I walked out the door!

Was it worth it?

These days you could probably just buy some kind of ‘smart home’ hub that works well enough, and do most of what I’ve done with a lot less effort and no coding. I’m still of the opinion that for something so essentially local, it should itself be managed entirely locally. I don’t trust companies like Google or Amazon not to kill their products, or change or remove an API I rely on.

Obviously the “Not Invented Here” approach of coding everything yourself doesn’t suit everyone, but as someone who enjoys coding and enjoys having things work just so it works very well for me.

It turns out the chipset is important. I initially used a similar Sonoff dongle that used a CC2531 chipset, and its performance wasn’t great. It often failed to pair with new devices, and dropped links to existing ones. The zigbee2mqtt docs do explicitly advise against the CC2531 chips for that reason. At the time they recommended CC2652Ps, so that’s what I went with. If you’re starting new I’d go with whatever their latest recommendation was. ↩︎
MQTT is basically a network protocol for publishing and subscribing to arbitrary messages. A broker is the thing that sits in the middle and routes the messages. I use Mosquitto but any will do. ↩︎
They originally also re-opened at sunrise but that was a terrible mistake. Who knew the sun rose so early?! ↩︎
“open” meaning “there’s a gap so it doesn’t work” not “open for business”. This confusion in terminology also extends to drawbridges. ↩︎
I use the printer in LAN mode, which means there’s no way to monitor it from a phone, even if you’re connected to the same network still. ↩︎

How I Get Things Done

2024-09-01T00:00:00Z

I always quite like reading about how other people do things. What software or hardware they use, or how they manage reminders, todo lists, and so on. I’ve never actually written about how I do any of that, though. So here it is!

Productivity

In the past I’ve fallen victim to the idea of there being One True Productivity System that would solve all my problems and make me amazing at getting things done. The title of this post is a nod to Getting Things Done, which I’ve read and tried to religiously follow in the past, but it’s just not for me. One thing that did actually stick from it, though, was the idea of “open loops”:

Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an “open loop,” which will be pulling on your attention if it’s not appropriately managed.

If I want to do something and it’s not recorded in a way I trust, it weighs on me a little. Those little weights all add up, and just make life uncomfortable. I deal with those in a few ways:

Inbox Zero-ish: if an e-mail needs me to do something, it sits in my inbox until it’s done. When it’s done, it gets archived.
Notes: random things I try to remember I put into my notes, so I can search for them later.
Budget: anything monetary I just adjust in my budget or create a category for.
Todo list: any other kind of task I want/need to do either now or at some point in the future goes into Todoist.

Todoist

In the past I’ve gone through a lot of different todo systems, once again hunting for one that will fix all my problems etc¹. In the end I always ended up coming back to Todoist, and have stuck with it for a decent period now.

In Todoist, I have everything split up into projects. Work projects are one colour and personal projects are another. Anything that needs more than a handful of individual tasks gets a project, which is archived when it’s done. Any one-off things that don’t neatly fall into projects go into “Random junk” project.

As I’m writing this, I have 116 items in 22 projects. A good deal of those are things that I might want to do at some point, not things that I actively need to worry about. If I want to get one of them done, I schedule it so it shows up in the “today” view. I have the Todoist desktop app open automatically when I login to my computer, and it gets positioned on the right hand side of my ultra-wide monitor, so I can see the “today” view and add/remove things immediately at any point.

I’m not precious about tasks becoming overdue, or unscheduling things I’d previously scheduled. Priorities change, ideas that sounded good a week ago might no longer sound good, and so on.

I do a few things to help me manage tasks and keep track of things:

I have a monthly recurring task to look through everything that’s not scheduled, just so I keep a rough idea of what’s there, and can update or get rid of it as needed.
I wrote todoistager and have it running on a server to automatically apply tags to tasks based on their rough age: weeks, months or years. This lets me identify things that are lingering and reconsider them².
I automate adding tasks for things that demand my attention, like incoming GitHub pull requests. The Todoist API is nice and straight forward, and hooking it up to things is trivial.

Other desktop software

For notes I use Logseq, and I just put whatever I need to write under today’s note and rely on search or tags to find it again when I need to. I note basically anything that I might like to use again in the future. One of my most common tags is #blub, a term I came across in the excellent article “In defense of blub studies”. Blub is random ultra-specific knowledge; it might not be eminently useful to know on its own, but over time it can pay dividends.

I’ve previously tried a bunch of note taking apps, and methodologies, but like with todo lists I end up just wanting something that just works and stays out of the way. Logseq stores notes in Markdown, and I have a cronjob to commit and push my changes to a private git repository.

Like Todoist, Logseq launches when I log into my computer, and sits in the same 500px-or-so region on the right of my monitor. This allows me to switch from Todoist to take or refer to notes when needed. To do this positioning, I use devilspie2. I also use this to position Discord and my IRC client side-by-side on a small portable monitor that sits underneath my ultrawide.

More mundane software: I use IntejjiJ IDEA for almost all development and complex text editing³. The only exception is Android development where Android Studio rules the roost. For lighter text editing, Sublime Text is my choice.

I spend a fair bit of the time at the command line. I use kitty as a terminal emulator, with the zsh shell and Oh My Zsh for some nice plugins and enhancements. One thing I couldn’t live without is autojump, which allows quickly jumping to any directory you’ve previously visited using a substring of the name.

Web browsing is all Firefox, with Bitwarden for password management and two pinned Fastmail tabs, one for personal e-mail and one for work. I don’t think there’s much else to note there.

Oh, I use Arch, by the way.

Infrastructure

This is the hodge-podge of things that support my computer usage but sit outside the actual computer. In no particular order…

All my DNS queries go through NextDNS using DNS-over-HTTPS. NextDNS lets you add custom responses, block certain things from resolving, and subscribe to pre-made anti-tracking or anti-advertising lists. It gives you far more control over everything than most other services I’ve looked at.

Every device I control runs Tailscale to enable remote access. I also use Tailscale’s SSH authentication feature for my servers, allowing quick and easy access from my phone where I don’t have or want normal SSH keys.

One exciting service that combines these two is golink. It was created by Tailscale, presumably based on the go service used extensively inside Google. I run a version on my tailnet, and have NextDNS configured to resolve go to the tailscale IP of the service. That lets me type “go/whatever” on any machine I set up with NextDNS and Tailscale, including mobile devices. I use go links for all sorts of things:

Shortcuts to tools I use commonly: go/board gets updated to my current client’s kanban board or similar tracker, whether it’s in Jira, GitHub, Asana or whatever; go/meet goes to Google Meet with the user parameter set so I’m logged in with my work account not my personal account.
In place of bookmarks: go/flex goes to the CSS-Tricks flexbox guide⁴, go/cad goes to the OnShape login page, go/hmrc goes to the HMRC online services page, and so on
A few dynamic things: go/github/chameth.com will go to the csmith/chameth.com project on GitHub; go/ref/pipico will go to the Pi Pico page on my electronics reference wiki.

For my servers I have a minimal Ansible setup that does some basic configuration and deploys SSH keys to the right places. Almost everything runs inside Docker, and I use my own software for HTTP proxying: Dotege uses tags I apply to containers to build a config for Centauri which handles reverse proxying, using Let’s Encrypt for TLS certs. At the minute I have two servers: a dedicated server that runs basically all my services (including this website), and a little VPS for monitoring and backups. Both are from Hetzner.

I wrote my own basic monitoring software called Goplum to make sure things that should be running on my servers actually are. If it fails checks it sends a notification to my phone using Pushover, and a message to a channel on my private IRC server (running Ergo).

Hardware

For the last two years I’ve used a laptop as my main computer⁵. It’s a Dell G15 Special Edition. After some upgrades its specs are:

Intel i7-12700H processor
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card
2x32GB DDR5 RAM
2TB Gen4 SSD

At home it sits behind my Alienware AW3423DWF monitor. This is a Quantum Dot OLED monitor, and I bought it almost immediately upon seeing someone else use it at a LAN event. As did three other people that were sat near us. It just looks so good. I wasn’t sure I’d get on with a widescreen monitor, and made sure it supported picture-by-picture before buying it, but have never actually used that. I generally run whatever I’m working on at nearly-fullscreen, then have Todoist or Logseq on the far right. Games go fullscreen over everything, of course.

Above the widescreen I have a curved lightbar that I find helps reduce eyestrain and makes it easier to focus on the monitor. And on top of that I have a Logitech Brio webcam which gives a great picture with lots of control over pan/zoom/etc for meetings. I have a little set of systemd scripts that detect when the external webcam is connected and disable the laptop’s built-in webcam, and vice-versa when it’s disconnected; that means whenever I jump into a video call in any app there’s only one input and it’s always the right one, which is nice.

Below the main monitor and its friends, I have a generic 1080p portable monitor connected to the laptop via USB-C. This comes with me when I travel, and serves as a Discord/IRC monitor when at home. It’s handy for throwing other things on as well, like if I need to reference a design while writing code, and don’t want to keep alt+tabbing.

I have two Durgod K320 keyboards: one with Cherry MX Silent Red switches for when I’m at home and don’t want to annoy people with the sounds, and one with Cherry MX Blues for when I’m travelling and can make a bit more noise in exchange for a much nicer typing experience. They’re both tenkeyless so they can handily fit in a backpack.

I use a Zowie EC1-C wired mouse, which does the job well. I got fed up with mice from more mainstream manufacturers failing: my previous mouse was a Razer Viper that lasted 7 months before it started losing clicks. All my audio goes through a HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless, which has the most insanely good battery life of any wireless headset I’ve ever owned or seen. Their claim of 300 hours is not just marketing!

In non-computer hardware, I have a Bambu P1S 3D printer that I’ve mentioned in my blog before. For printing in fewer dimensions I have an Epson EcoTank ET-1810, which is surprisingly reasonable for an inkjet printer, and the ink costs aren’t as astronomical as normal cartridges. Plus, you can’t decide to DRM ink when it’s loaded raw into the printer…

I have a small Zigbee network set up mainly to control the lights and the old 3D printer I no longer use (the P1S has a sensible standby mode so you don’t have to yank its power away to make the fans stop spinning!). That’s run through a Raspberry Pi running Zigbee2Mqtt and a custom app I wrote to monitor events on MQTT and generate the appropriate responses (or just log the data).

My daily-driver phone is an iPhone 15 Pro, but I have a bunch of Android devices kicking around for work purposes. I read nearly every day on a Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition.

Money and work

I use You Need A Budget for figuring out how much money I can spend on what, and making sure I have enough put aside for bills and taxes and so on. I use it for both business and personal accounts together, but I mark all the business categories and accounts with a 💼 emoji, and have some scripts that use the API to make sure the money split makes sense⁶.

Every recurring monthly and annual payment has a category, as do all upcoming events I plan to attend, and all the wonderful taxes I have to pay. I also have categories for hobbies and other expenditure. I think all of that is pretty typical for a normal YNAB setup.

I also use YNAB for tracking anything I might like to buy at some point: it gets a category in a “Wishlist” group, and I’ll occasionally budget to buy things from there. I try (and often fail) to use that as a way to put off impulse purchasing. As my income is often very inconsistent, I try to set aside money so that I can “spend” a bit every week on things in the wishlist group. That feels a lot nicer to me than just budgeting everything in one go as soon as I get paid, and gives me more time to consider whether I really want those things⁷.

For work, I do all the more technical accountancy and tax filing and so on through FreeAgent. For my fairly straight-forward tax situation, I can basically manage everything myself using FreeAgent without paying for an accountant. That does mean occasionally spending a bunch of time reading tax manuals, but I’d rather fully understand the rules than just follow advice anyway.

The problem with implementing productivity systems or switching todo apps or anything of that ilk is that it can feel like you’re being productive by doing so. It takes a while to realise that you’re not, and actually getting on with things is better. ↩︎
Or just accept that I’ll maybe do them at some point. I kept the labels vague to try and not make it feel judgmental. ↩︎
Including writing this blog post right now. ↩︎
One day I will get all the justify- and align- options right without looking them up, but until then… ↩︎
This is very normal for developers, but much less common for computer gamers. I’ll probably go back to a desktop next time I upgrade, as I’m travelling a lot less. ↩︎
I can’t just arbitrarily move money from the business to myself, it has to be given as salary or a divided etc, which has tax implications. If I budget “business money” for personal things, then it actually has to be properly transferred and accounted for before being spent (as I’m in effect budgeting a future paycheck). It would be cleaner to keep the accounts completely separate, but I find this way works well for me as I can be a bit more flexible. ↩︎
It feels a little like I’m giving myself pocket money, which is a bit weird, but it’s a lot better than having no “income” for several months when client invoices fall weirdly or I’m between contracts. ↩︎

Further adventures in 3D printing

2024-08-04T00:00:00Z

The Bambu Labs P1S.

Not quite a year ago, I bought a Sovol SV06 3D printer and wrote about my initial experiences. At the end I joked:

I’m sure there will be more problems, but hopefully I get at least a week or so before anything else goes wrong. Maybe I’ll print an “X days since the last SV06 problem” counter…

That turned out to be more prophetic than I expected. It became a running joke that I’d flip the imaginary “days since” sign back to 0 almost every time I printed. I still really enjoyed having a printer, though: it’s so useful to be able to be able to go from an idea to a CAD drawing to a physical object in the space of minutes or hours. So when Bambu Labs reduced the price of the P1S — a printer generally regarded as about as trouble free as you can get — to £522 including shipping, I splurged on one.

Concerns

I make it sound like that was an easy decision, but I actually ummed and ahed a lot before pulling the trigger. I had a lot of objections to a Bambu Labs printer, and wasn’t quite sure if the price made up for them.

The Bambu Labs printers are designed to be more consumer friendly than most previous 3D printers. You can start a model printing directly from their website or mobile app, which employs a cloud-based slicer that then sends the model down to your printer. This is one of those things that sounds amazing for consumers, but should terrify anyone who works with computers. There are so many ways for a “cloud-connected” printer to go wrong, and with such potentially disastrous results it gives me anxiety just thinking about it.

This is not just theoretical, either. In a blog post with the rather under-stated title of “Initial Investigation in the Bambu Cloud Temporary Outage”, Bambu describe how a server-side error caused printers to start printing unprompted. Users on Reddit reported printers starting in the middle of the night, trying to print on top of other objects that were left on the build plate, and so on. 3D printers can easily start fires; having them cloud controlled is frankly insane.

As a result of that “temporary outage”, Bambu further improved the “LAN mode” for their printers, which allows you to sever its connection from their servers and control it over the network. That’s basically how my old printer worked anyway, so I was happy enough that I could enable LAN mode and ignore all the cloud nonsense.

My other objection to Bambu was more nebulous. Almost all 3D printers are built upon open source software, and some companies like Prusa go out of their way to make their products more open to give back to the community. Bambu don’t really do any of that: I’d be very surprised if they hadn’t incorporated a bunch of open source software into their printers and just ignored the licences¹. I’d much rather give my money to a company doing good, but the only equivalent printer was the Prusa MK4 which was double the price and didn’t come with an enclosure. To add an enclosure kit would have made it £800 more expensive than the P1S, and I just can’t justify that.

Experience

The initial setup of the P1S was a breeze. While the SV06 shipped in parts, the P1S came fully assembled and just needed some packaging and retaining screws removed. These were all clearly marked with large coloured arrows. It’s very much designed so anyone can do it.

I ran through the initial calibration, firmware update, and then put it in LAN mode. Then I just started printing and it went fine. No messing around levelling a bed, or using a sheet of paper to try and set the Z-offset properly; it just worked. It was really loud though. After talking a bit with a friend who’d also bought a P1S, I realised that most of his noise was from the fans, while most of mine was from the servos. A bit of research later and I found out they added servo noise compensation in a firmware update, but I hadn’t run the calibration for it because the initial calibration happened before the update. After doing that, the printer went from sounding like it was impersonating a continental police siren to just being a bit fan-y.

The biggest difference over the SV06 is the speed. I’d swapped the nozzle on the SV06 to a 0.6mm one, and generally printed at a layer height of 0.4mm. The P1S still has its 0.4mm nozzle, and I mostly print at a layer height of 0.2mm. So it’s laying down twice the number of layers, with a nozzle that can extrude half the amount of plastic… And it’s at least twice as fast! Prints that I previously wouldn’t have even attempted on the SV06 are now 8-10 hours on the P1S, without even adjusting the speed or lowering the quality. Here’s a side-by-side comparison:

P1S vs SV06.

The P1S can print eight objects because of its slightly larger bed, while the SV06 can only manage three. The P1S is also printing at a much higher quality. Yet somehow it still ends up being faster. It’s mind blowing.

The other big difference I’ve not mentioned yet is that the P1S is a “core XY” printer rather than a “bed slinger”. That means in order to move along the Y-axis (from the front of the bed to the back), the P1S moves the extruder while the SV06 moves the bed. This makes a big difference when printing tall objects, as they’re far more likely to wobble and come loose when the bed is moving back and forth. It also presumably makes the kinematics a lot easier as the mass of the moving parts is constant, instead of gradually becoming heavier as more and more plastic gets added.

The only failures

I’ve only had a handful of failures since getting the P1S. I had one weird issue where the slicer decided to print some parts extremely slowly, and the print just didn’t work out in those parts; that’s more of a slicer issue, though: after tweaking the model to stop the weird behaviour it printed fine.

The only failure I can directly attribute to the printer was when I tried ironing. This is a process where after printing the top layer, the printer slowly goes back over it at the same height while extruding a small amount of plastic. This is meant to fill in the small gaps between extrusions and give a smooth finish. In my case, though, it just clogged the nozzle and extruder.

At first I thought it was because I was printing too hot: the profile I was using was designed for fast printing, so had to melt the filament rapidly, but there was no way to turn that temperature down just for the ironing pass. I tried another run at a lower temperature and everything clogged again. I then swore off ironing, did a normal print, and everything clogged once more.

At this point I was getting exceedingly good at disassembling the hot end, but also fairly annoyed. It felt like I was using an SV06 again²! I’d previously read some recommendations that you should leave the door or top of the enclosure open when printing PLA, but had never really had any issues so hadn’t bothered. I tried a print with the top propped open and everything worked smoothly again. In hindsight all these clogging issues happened when it was particularly hot and humid outside, which was probably a factor.

Summary

Upgrading to the P1S has made the 3D printer feel more like a tool and less like an additional ongoing project. The speed increase continues to amaze me, as does the increase in quality.

I still think it was valuable to have the SV06 to learn how printers work — you definitely don’t get as much of that from using something so consumer-focused as the P1S — and figure out if I was actually going to use it long-term or whether it was just a fad for me. So it served its purpose, but I’m rather glad to see the back of it in favour of something better in pretty much every way.

And if they did there’s nothing anyone can do about it because copyright doesn’t exist in the same way in China. ↩︎
Although taking apart the P1S (which is a proprietary machine you might not expect to be very user-servicable) was orders of magnitude easier than taking apart the SV06 (which was an open source design). Everything is just much nicer: the connectors are easier to attach and detach, the screws are all a consistent size instead of needing a whole suite of allen keys, and so on. ↩︎