21–30 of 75 posts
I don't get the point of designing and building a 3.3 to 5v booster instead of just wiring a cable to one of the existing USB C vbus 5v pins? Am I missing something?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I reflashed the BIOS to kill the whitelist Still boggles my mind that people praise ThinkPads as an option for those looking for repairability and upgradability while casually talking about the built-in BIOS whitelist designed to block all that. To me that means an instant black ball. It's cool hackers are patching this out, but this anti-consumer feature should not be present in the first place in something people…
Lots of other laptops has the same whitelist annoyance, and are harder to tinker with. Lenovo is still nearly the least cumbersome even with this. Sony laptops were the worst: Sony has elitist culture when it comes to miniaturization and engineering excellence, which manifests as unsolderable gapless tiny solder pads in case with PCBs. Fujitsu is better: they love to get creative with their own testing criteria that…
Which other brands?
Amazing adventure and great write up! It reads like an adventure novel :-) > Unfortunately, Lenovo continues to implement a stupid network card whitelist that IBM started over 20 years ago on its ThinkPad models. If the card in the M.2 slot is not advertising a known PCI vendor and product ID in the whitelist contained in the BIOS (now UEFI firmware), the ThinkPad will refuse to boot. Why?? Are there legitimate reaso…
> I use a Logitech mouse which can connect wirelessly to a USB dongle over RF, providing lower latency and better battery life than Bluetooth In my experience this has not been true at all now that most Logitech mice use LE ("Bluetooth Smart") rather than BT. The only advantage the RF dongle has is that it works without an OS.... or on an OS without a BT/LE stack, like here.
One exception to the "no BT/LE stack" case is the combo of Apple input devices paired with Macs or hackintoshed generic PCs with a handful of Broadcom-based BT chipsets used by Macs. macOS flips some bit on those cards that tells them to keep Apple peripherals paired at all times, which allows you to type and mouse around in the pre-boot environment and subsequently-booted OSes without drivers even on old BIOS-based machines which can't load EFI drivers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of other laptops has the same whitelist annoyance, and are harder to tinker with. Lenovo is still nearly the least cumbersome even with this. Sony laptops were the worst: Sony has elitist culture when it comes to miniaturization and engineering excellence, which manifests as unsolderable gapless tiny solder pads in case with PCBs. Fujitsu is better: they love to get creative with their own testing criteria that…
>Lots of other laptops has the same whitelist annoyance Which other brands?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The usual line that Lenovo gives is that this is for FCC reasons. The argument goes that the laptop is FCC certified as an entire unit, and changing the WiFi card technically invalidates this. This is quite plainly nonsense. Every other manufacturer allows WiFi adapter replacements because every module on the market must be individually FCC certified. Technically, the claim does make sense under a creative interpreta…
If that sounds silly, while working in commercial construction in Los Angeles, we encountered pushback for placing UL-listed devices in a UL-listed enclosure. The city determined that to be a “new assembly” and required UL listing for the entire unit. UL has a category for this situation; the enclosure is “UL recognized” because all of the devices and the enclosure are UL-listed. Their proposed solution, which UL was…
The former means that the assembly is assumed to meet UL specifications; the second means that it has been inspected by UL and confirmed that the assembly actually does meet specifications.
Making sure that things meet specifications is the entire point of the building department's inspections.
> I use a Logitech mouse which can connect wirelessly to a USB dongle over RF, providing lower latency and better battery life than Bluetooth In my experience this has not been true at all now that most Logitech mice use LE ("Bluetooth Smart") rather than BT. The only advantage the RF dongle has is that it works without an OS.... or on an OS without a BT/LE stack, like here.
I don't get the point of designing and building a 3.3 to 5v booster instead of just wiring a cable to one of the existing USB C vbus 5v pins? Am I missing something?