EV200d - Amazing Image, Faulty Reception, Zero Support

PROS:

• stunning image
• great reception
• cheap
• Banggood will refund a portion in case of problems

CONS:

• reception loss in mid-air
• very power hungry
• lose lock or reboots in midflight
• some units have bad contact so you may lose one color component on one display
• some units have faulty cooling fan that vibrate the unit
• very slow scan
• gets very warm
• some optics have specs of dust in them
• hard to open without breaking, no support or parts available

FIX:

• Fan/heat: https://t.me/EV200D
• loss of lock: plug a 10A power pack to the USB of the battery
• no first lock: do a full scan

CONCLUSION: Buy it at your own risk, some batches are flawless. If yours have problems, contact BG and escalate until you get a 90% refund, you get to keep the goggles, then you can tinker with it to fix most issues. Then buy a HD system.

Using openCV to study a resilient rat

One rat still remains in our house, we see its little droppings in the living room and the stench from under the sink. The pest control are having trouble capturing it so I setup a cheap wide angle camera and observe.
Sifting through 8 hours of footage ain't fun so I asked the help of OpenCV based DVR-scan as well as ffmpeg.

Here are the command lines on Windows:
To merge bits of videos:
(for %i in (*.mp4) do @echo file '%i') > mylist.txt
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i mylist.txt -c copy ../../output-2019-04-26-08.mp4
To extract footage motion from hours of video:
for %i in (output*.mp4) do dvr-scan -i %i -o scanned%i.mp4

You need is ffmpeg and DVR-scan

EVGA 550 G2 - Dead Silent, Great Support

PROS:

• completely silent under normal load
• modular
• quality cables
• beautiful

CONCLUSION: Upgrading your stock PSU to this one will improve your quality of life because of the silent.
EDIT: the PSU died, I contacted EVGA, they offered to replace if I return and pay for shipping. 5 Year warranty, pretty cool.

Noctua NF-S12A ULN Silent, great support

PROS:

• completely silent
• very high quality
• silicon mounts
• good price
• great customer support: they'll send you a new one if it fails

CONCLUSION: replacing your stock case fans with these will increase comfort substantially.

TSA: how to pass security check if you lost your ID

This just happened to me and when I reached TSA I only had on me 2 outdated passports and GOES pre-check.

Here is what I learned:
In such situation GOES is worth nothing, won't help.
Obsolete passport don't count as ID (this made no sense to the supervisor either)

EITHER

• 3 pieces with your name, one of which should include your photo: obsolete passports, electricity bill, a magazine with your name and address on it, credit card, Costco card

OR

• Answer some Bank-security type questions like "give me a former address you lived in"

Then go through pat-down.
That's it.

QLink Ally - it works!

PROS:

• it works
• small

CONSLUSION: With cell phone, wifi and now IoT, EMF are everywhere. If you are sensitive to them and don't know how to shift their effect on you, you can use this little device.

Hamilton Beach 96700 orange juicer (+tip to stabilizing the steel bowl)

PROS:

• sturdy 5mm thick steel enclosure
• simple
• easy to clean
• powerful industrial motor

CONCLUSION: the only dependable juicer under $500.

TIP: to stabilize the bowl, line the top of the motor with gripping fabric.