Electronic-Stuff

And breaking silence over here, last few months went quite busy. I travelled to Cambodia, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong recently for various tasks from APNIC’s IXP workshop in Cambodia to SGNOG in Singapore, APNIC 44 in Taiwan and so on. Apart from this, I went for solar power setup at home here in Haryana since grid has been quite unstable (specifically this year). I think the overall grid is OKish but it’s quite bad in my city due to the construction of an overhead road from where a high voltage line is crossing. That has lead to regular long outages in the area. I think in terms of formal load shedding things are getting better and I am certain Indian Govt. will be able to reach its target of 24 x 7 supply without any shedding before 2022. That would be the key part as we go for electric vehicles in India. But still, I think we won’t get a good stable grid for at least next 6-7 years. Checkout Vidyut Pravah website which gives an idea of load and demand across India. And here is data for Haryana.  

In Hong Kong and right on the day when I was leaving for Hong Kong - I noticed a bug in my Macbook Pro’s screen. A real insect yes!   ![img_20160907_151934]https://cdn.anuragbhatia.com/web/post/2016/09/three-days-without-laptop-repair-of-damaged-macbook-pro-screen/images/IMG_20160907_151934-scaled.jpg)

This was irritating. Hard to know how it actually got inside but may be from bottom side of laptop which was missing two screws for a while which I recently bought from UK and added. Apple support couldn’t answer on how it got there. Furthermore I was facing a problem of screen showing pink/green lines after turning on for almost 1.8 years now. They used to show up when laptop was turned on and used to go away after 15-20mins. Over time the issue increased and now it was taking as much as 40-50mins for lines to go away. Since I was visiting Hong Kong for HKNOG 3.0, I booked an appointment with Apple store. Fixing time went quick (over phone call with Apple support) and I was at Apple store in HK right on next day after an overnight flight to Hong Kong. They dropped bill bomb by quoting me $5600 HKD / $720 USD / 48k INR !!!

When I was in US last time, I picked a nice charger with it’s own backup from Amazon. It’s PowerGen charger with a storage capacity of 8400mAh with two USB ports for output (one with 2Amps output and other with 600mA with 5V standard USB).

This is a amazing product since 8400mAh is really huge amount power. My phone’s battery has a capacity of 1750mAh and theoretically speaking this can charge battery from 0 to full around 4 times. In practical experience I have tried for around 3 times during long flights. Never really needed to go beyond that point. The charging cable which came with this charger has something special - It’s a “charging only” cable without any data connection capability. The charging only cable carries only “e_lectrical connectivity_” via + and - wires without any data pins (D+ and D- shorted). The advantage is that charging speed with this cable was really fast and I really enjoyed using it with external charger as well as my iPad’s charger which has a 2A output (which brings 2A x 5V = 10W power). In theory these charging only cables give very fast charging because they don’t put USB data connection. A standard USB port on computer has power limits and device is signaled to pull more power via “shorted data pins”. Usually device is connected to 600mA or even less in data+charging mode, while such shorting brings power to max of port which is usually 1A for most of ports (and 2Amps for iPad charger). Unfortunately connector of cable which came with my powergen charger went pretty loose. Tonight I decided to make an extra data cable which was lying around into “charging only” cable by shorting it’s D+ and D- mins. It was pretty easy except that actual wires are really thin and I had slightly hard time in removing insulation without breaking them off.