Month: September 2020

Finally Got My Car Fixed

Earlier this summer, and in fact starting in the late spring, a bunch of warning lights popped up on my car out of nowhere. A quick scan with my bootleg copy of Rheingold ISTA showed me there was poor/erroneous signal coming from the right rear wheel speed sensor. I couldn’t clear the code, which led me to believe there was probably an open circuit somewhere, even though no trouble codes from the car explicitly said that.

I started by swapping the rear wheel speed sensors from left to right and vice versa, hoping that the problem would be a cheap and easy to fix sensor. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I wanted to check the tone ring for the sensor next, despite it being unlikely that a damaged tone ring would cause an unclearable code.

On this car, a 2008 BMW 535xi, the tone ring is built into the wheel bearing, and you can’t see it without taking the axle out of the bearing. I knew it would be some work to get everything apart enough to look at the tone ring, so I figured for $50 or so, I might as well replace the bearing while I was there. I watched a couple videos on removing the bearing from the car, but I think all of the featured cars were automatics, and mine is manual (fairly rare in an E60). You would think that wouldn’t have anything to do with the rear axle and wheel bearing. You’d be wrong. On the manual cars, the axle is an extremely tight fit into the hub of the bearing. Every other car I’ve worked on, the fit has been tight, but loose enough to push the axle in and out by hand if it’s new and lubed up. On the manual E60s, it’s so tight I had to buy a puller to rip the bearing out of the spindle. There’s probably a special tool to install the axle, but I don’t have one, so I slammed it into the concrete floor of my driveway a few times. This whole thing turned into a multi-week saga because of the weather, waiting for parts multiple times and my constantly fluctuating levels of motivation. My car was on jack stands in the driveway for about three weeks. And at the end of it, I didn’t fix anything. The lights were still on. If I knew how huge a pain this job would be I wouldn’t have done it. On the other hand, now that I’ve done it once, I could do it much quicker in the future.

Next, I decided I wasn’t interested in fixing the car myself. I tried a used ABS module because it was cheap and quick. This didn’t fix anything either. I knew there was likely an open circuit between the right rear wheel speed sensor and the ABS module, but I thought that I didn’t have the right tool to probe the tiny pins on the electrical connectors, and I didn’t want to run new wires down the length of the car. The shop I took the car to seemed more interested in fixing minor or nonexistent problems than diagnosing and repairing the ABS problem. So that was $100 and change down the drain.

I finally got around to diagnosing the problem myself with some help from some male to male jumper wires for hobby electronics. It turned out they’re just the right size to fit into the tiny pins on the electrical connectors. I quickly discovered an open circuit on one of the wires going from the sensor to the ABS module. Yesterday, I finally got around to replacing the wire, and it fixed my problem. At first, on the ABS light was extinguished, but after quickly calibrating the yaw rate sensor, they all disappeared. I took the car for a test drive, and everything seems normal now. The next step is to get a fresh inspection sticker for the car, and then hopefully I’m done with fixing it for a while. I do want to do an all wheel drive service, which I have the fluids for, but I really need a lift for it. I’ll have to see if my friend with the shop could lend me some lift time for it.

Here’s How Much I Hate Epic Games

Up until the last month or so, you may not have heard of the controversy surrounding Epic Games unless you were a PC gamer. The PC gaming community has been sharply divided over Epic Games and their practice of buying up games and their publishers to secure their exclusivity to the Epic store. I personally hate this. Pretty much any PC game worth playing is available on a few storefronts, usually Steam, GOG and/or Microsoft. Probably 95% of my games are on Steam, and I try to buy there when I can. It’s a good system for game purchasing and management. Epic isn’t. They don’t even have a shopping cart feature. They bought Psyonix, developer of Rocket League, and pulled the game off Steam, and canceled the Mac and Linux versions of the game. As of a day or so ago, you can’t play Rocket League without an Epic account regardless of where you bought the game originally. I hate it.

Epic recently started a practical nuclear war with Apple over an issue with Apple terms and conditions for developers on the store. Ars Technica has some good coverage of it. Honestly, Apple doesn’t look amazing either, but Epic is just getting damn scummy.

Anyways, my first anniversary and my wife’s birthday are coming in the next week-ish. My wife wanted Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 (developed by a studio nearby in Albany, to my surprise) for her birthday, which did come out on PC. But only on Epic, with no word on when or if a Steam release would be available. The game is only $40, a price that is more than worth it according to every review I’ve seen. I just couldn’t bring myself to pay Epic that $40 though.

My wife suggested we get a PS4 as a kind of anniversary present. If coronavirus wasn’t happening, we’d be taking a small trip like a long weekend for our anniversary, but that just isn’t a good idea today. I took a look, and found out we could get a used PS4 Pro with games for less than we’d spend on a long weekend. She’d get Tony Hawk (and hopefully some more stuff eventually), and I’d get to play the PS4 exclusives I missed by being a PC gamer. So I got one. It was about $350 for a PS4 Pro, controller and several games, all of which except Horizon: Zero Dawn will likely be going on eBay this weekend.

I got Tony Hawk for my wife, which she loved. I also got Ratchet and Clank, thinking that we could both play a fun 3D platformer. She loves Tony Hawk, and I’m extremely happy with Ratchet and Clank. For me, Ratchet and Clank alone was worth the price of admission. It has a really beautiful, Pixaresque style with a humorous, unreliable narrator presenting a kind of unoriginal but interesting enough story with some self references sprinkled in. The PS4 offers remote play, so I can play on my PC in the office or bedroom if I want. My plan is to buy the handful of Playstation exclusives I want either used on eBay or from the Playstation store on sale, plus any games that are Epic exclusives on PC, like SnowRunner.

So that’s how much I hate Epic games. I’d rather pay $350 for a used Playstation than give them $40 for a fabulous game.

Resurrecting an Old Laptop

I really enjoy bringing old computer hardware back to life. For instance, I used to run a previous blog on a Frankensteined computer composed of old parts from a couple Dell desktops. This time, I brought back my brother’s old laptop. My dad asked me to take a look at it because his current laptop is a dinosaur over 10-years-old and it’s just not cutting it for the work from home stuff.

The laptop in question is an Asus Q501LA, which I feel like was refurbished when we got it a while ago. According to the stickers inside, it was made some time in 2014. It has an Intel Core i5 4200U, 8GB of RAM, a 1080p IPS touch screen, backlit keyboard and originally, a 750GB hard drive. It was a pretty good mid-range laptop back in 2014, or whenever we got it. Along the way, it broke down for some reason, and got put into the attic because my brother needed a working laptop for school immediately. The most obvious problem was cracked glass on the display, which was duct taped to the lid. My dad bought a new piece of glass ages ago, which I was planning on installing.

After a quick diagnosis, I decided it needed a new motherboard to hard drive connecting circuit board. Mostly because it broke when I pulled it out. I surmised that the connector that broke was probably already in bad condition before removal because while the computer’s BIOS loaded, the hard drive wasn’t spinning. Luckily, that part was only about $10 on eBay. I convinced my dad that it’s practically criminal to not have an SSD in a computer these days, so I ordered a 500GB Western Digital Blue SSD.

While waiting on the parts, I decided to take a crack (see what I did there?) at the glass on the screen. I quickly discovered two problems: firstly, the glass is glued to the display behind it really well. I probably wouldn’t be able to separate the two. Secondly, on this computer, the display assembly attaches to the lid with a system of snap-fit connectors, similar to car interior panels. Probably 90% of them were damaged beyond use. My dad decided he was willing to shell out for a replacement screen, thinking that this laptop would still be better than a comparably priced Chromebook or Windows laptop.

When the parts finally arrived, I put everything together ready for some success. Unfortunately, the backlight of the new screen was dim, and flickered rapidly while on the charger. Off the charger, the screen was only barely bright enough to read with total concentration. I thought maybe getting Windows fully installed would fix it up, but it made no difference. I was fairly convinced it was a problem with the motherboard because the screen was bought used from a reputable seller on eBay. Both my dad and I were disappointed. For the last couple days, the laptop sat on my dining room table, waiting to be parted out.

Today, on a whim, I decided to try out the old, cracked screen to verify the new screen was at fault. To my surprise, the new screen looked perfect (other than the broken glass of course). I cleaned off some exposed copper parts on the motherboard where the hinges screw in, thinking that may be part of the problem. Even if it wasn’t, clean parts are better than dirty parts. I screwed the new screen back down, and after a little flickering, it came back and it’s now totally normal. The touch screen stuff doesn’t work, which is a tad disappointing, but my dad doesn’t care. I’m pretty happy that it kind of fixed itself, but I wish I knew exactly what the problem was. So it’s mission accomplished I guess. I’ll drop it off to my dad this weekend and I’m sure he’ll be really happy with it. I don’t think he’s used a computer with an SSD for any length of time, so he’ll probably be blown away by the boot up time.

Website Downtime

On Thursday afternoon, I updated the server hypervisor and restarted it to apply a new kernel update. When it booted up, I couldn’t get to this blog or a couple other web services I run for some reason.

All but one of the broken services used the same virtual network bridge, so I tried switching to a different bridge with no change. I also tired unplugging and replugging the ethernet cable from corresponding port on the network card. The made no difference either.

I took a look at my reverse proxy settings on my router. It appeared that my problem was HAProxy because changing HAProxy settings made some difference. When I disabled the health checking in HAProxy, the sites would load, but very slowly. I thought maybe the router needed to be restarted, so I did that. Unsurprisingly, that made no difference either.

I figured the slow page loading had something to do with the Apache server having a messed up configuration or an incorrect module activated, even though I didn’t change any settings earlier. All the config files looked correct, and all the right modules were loaded. I looked a resource usage and noticed very low ram usage during page loads compared to working services. I tried updating the virtual machines, but that didn’t do anything.

Then I tried updating the working services to see if they’d break. That made no difference (probably a good thing). Finally I tried updating my database server. It couldn’t reach its update server or ping anything. Finally, a problem that could be solved. The DNS server setting was incorrect. I set up a Pi-Hole for my server subnet and I must have changed the DNS server setting in /etc/resolv.conf. Ubuntu uses /etc/netplan to set DNS servers, and I was unaware of that. I corrected the DNS server setting and everything was back to normal.

I just finished up my first week of the new school semester about an hour ago. So far, things are going well. It’s only the first week though, so we’ll see if it stays that way. I’m taking four classes: operating systems, networking 2, and a class each on Excel and Access. The operating systems class seems like stuff I’m already somewhat familiar with and it’s going to end with setting up a homelab-esque network with Windows server and active directory. I have no experience with that, but I’m looking forward to learning. Networking seems like mostly a review of the second half of networking 1 from last semester. Cisco shuffled the curriculum around I guess. I’m not even mad. These two classes are the regular self-paced online class where there isn’t any face-to-face with the teacher. The Excel and Access classes are taught by the same person, which is neat I guess. Those are going fairly slowly so far, but I’m sure they’ll pick up as the class gets more comfortable with the programs. Those classes were planned to be on campus, but due to the pandemic, they’re also online. We all gather in a Zoom meeting instead of a classroom. I don’t really mind the virtual class thing, but I don’t think it would be anyone’s first choice.

I’m disappointed that my school is using Zoom, because it’s a totally unproven piece of software whose owners/executives have bowed to Chinese pressure to silence dissidents who aren’t even in China. My school has some sort of deal with Microsoft for email and Office 365, which I have to assume comes with Microsoft Teams and involves some exchange of money. A Zoom package for a large organization also costs money. Why would you pay for worse software when you already have something perfectly functional? I’m really, really disappointed in my school.

But whatever I guess. I only have this semester and then one more before I graduate. Hopefully I won’t have too much trouble finding a big boy job in a year or so. I’m looking forward to making some real money so I can get a car. I’m tired my old salvage stuff and I’m willing to trade more money in exchange for a more solid car. On the other hand, I noticed that supercharged 2012 Range Rovers are in the $15,000-$18,000 range, which would probably be attainable. I would love a Range Rover, but it’s a Range Rover. Probably known more for its unreliability even more than its luxuriousness and off-road ability. I’m not sure if I want another car with a reputation like that.

In other news, my dad has asked me to troubleshoot my brother’s old laptop so my dad can use it. Currently, my dad is using a laptop that’s probably 10 years old at this point. It blows, in my opinion, but he soldiers on. My brother had a fairly decent Asus laptop that stopped working for some reason. He needed a laptop right away for school, so he just got a new one. I’ll be checking out the old Asus on the weekend. I hope I can get it going again because it’s fun to “supercharge” older computers I think. If I can get it running again, I plan to install some more memory (8GB at least, unless it already has that much), an inexpensive SSD and probably some fresh thermal paste on the surfaces that require it. Plus a thorough cleaning. My brother’s laptops get gross as hell very quickly. There will be more on this computer over the weekend.