Unfortuantely the samsung had some ridiculous OS that kept forcing me into making and using a Samsung account for just about anything, including watching youtube, it was terrible. So, I decided to switch to a TCL instead. The TV panel is great, the Google TV OS on it is decent, but:

Then I spent 2.5 months with their tech support team. Worst experience ever. They asked me for my feedback, this is what I sent them. Not impressed TCL, this is a new level of amateur hour I had never seen in a company that size. Actually I also forgot to mention that after my TV never getting any update whatsoever, and support saying I should have a later version that wasn't pushing, they sent me one by Email, with a link to their intranet, requiring a microsoft live.com account, and eventually telling me I'm not a TCL intranet user so I can't download it. To this day, they have no idea how to fix it or how to send a file to any customer.

First, I want to point out that I'm an engineer who has worked with android more than 15 years and filed over 1000 android bugs at google. I have also worked with many tech companies, found bugs in their products and helped them address them.
I'm sorry to say, but this has been the worst support experience of any major company I've ever dealt with.
1-2 days after I bought the TV, now 2.5 months ago I immediately called you to report the biggest issue with your software, namely that when using an older AV receiver that supports HDMI 1.3 with CEC, your TV is able to talk CEC to it, but as soon as I switch the TV sound to optical out, it refuses to send CEC commands over the HDMI cable coming from the receiver. This works perfectly with the Samsung TV I had, and fails with your because your engineers not only didn't test this, but did not even understand or envision that this exists and that it should work.
The first agent, after being confused about how HDMI CEC works, said she would file a bug or a report and someone would get back to me. After a month, no one ever did, and no report was filed, it was just entirely lost.
Now, what a normal company would have done is filed a bug, sent it to their engineering team for review, and they would decide whether they want to support this use case.
With you, nothing went anywhere, no one got back to me when they said they would, and it took over 10 phone calls and followups from me to get some traction, often wasting 30 to 60 minutes with agents that simply do not understand that eARC and HDMI CEC are separate and that you can have one without the other. They kept repeating it's impossible to send volume commands over an optical cable, which is totally true, and would not understand that HDMI CEC is separate, is what the volume commands are sent over, and that it works totally fine with both your TV and my denon AVR 3808 receiver, until I turn optical output on and then you disable it.
I spent over 5H on the phone with mostly agents that were undertrained, were unable to access my ticket in your own system (I should add it took you over 1.5 months before you even filed this ticket after I called multiple times asking why I had no ticket, no Email and no status). Why are your support agents not even able to access the ticket system, what madness is this?
Emails sent in reply to the ticket went 100% unanswered, so I would have to call to get an agent to ask me questions for 10 to 30 minutes before they would have to call someone else to access the ticket system they can't see, and get what I typed there.
I also tried to file 2 more bugs, which I think were both ignored, one of them being that Google TV, the HDMI dongle buy from google supports sending IR codes from the remote to the receiver to change volume directly. Once I re-paired my googletv remote with your TV, your TV wiped my remote, removed the IR codes that were working, and you also removed the part of googleTV that supports re-adding IR code to my remote. This is another example of already working functionality that you have removed, and no support agent ever acknowledged this and maybe filing a bug to consider adding it back, would be a good idea.

Jow that you have wasted 2.5 months of my time before maybe finally filing one bug out of 3 internally, too late for me to return the TV and too long for me to keep waiting for this to ever work, so now I'm going to lose $1000 to $2000 to replace my top of line AV receiver with a newer one that supports eARC because of your unwillingness to support HDMI CEC without eARC or have ever considered how many AV receivers are in the field that do not support eARC and yet support HDMI CEC

It was fun to be back and see friends, the set however didn't work as well as the one I remember from 2018: it had some epic tracks that were up to 25 years old, but they were mixed with others that took me off the dream cloud. Still, it was a good time.

Video Summary:

A Story About 'Magic'

Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).

You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words 'magic' and 'more magic'. The switch was in the 'more magic' position.

I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.

It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.

Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the 'more magic' position before reviving the computer.

A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the 'more magic' position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.

The computer promptly crashed.

This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.

We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.

I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on 'more magic'.

1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.

The more Raspberry Pi specific posts are here:

Before you see the non professional looking mess of wires I built with 2 rPi5 and reclaimed/recycled drives (I only bought 2 new boot 2TB NVME for boot as I want those flash drives to work a long time), I considered another Dell server I had laying at home, not even sure where from or why. Looking it up, it was a Dell DSS1510 which seems to be a cheaper version of the R430. It's a very professional looking server with redundant power and all, and I did consider it, especially since Dell seems to use capacitors that don't just die years later and take the motherboard down with it.

room for 8 2.5 Sata flash drives plugged into an unknow raid card

this shows the MB similar to R430 but with lots of stuff missing to save money

Research showed it was a system from 2016, an upgrade from my existing 2006 server :) but at the same time, do I really want to "upgrade" again to a server that is almost 10 years old? The colo I'm in (via.net, now nextlevel), nicely asked me if I could use less power for the monthly rate they are giving me, and this server can still peak at 200W. Even if it only takes a bit more than 100w, my double rPi5 solution takes less than 30W, probably between 10 and 20W when idle, and that's for 2 computers, giving better high availability and failover

Good search said:

With 2 rPi5 I'm actually faster than the DSS 1510 for maybe 1/10th of the power, so not a bad deal :)

So here is the end result I built:

The 2 things I had to engineer is using each server as a serial console server for the other one, as explained on my Using a Raspberry Pi 5 (Rpi5) as a Server With Btrfs, Raid1, Serial Console and Dual NVME/SD Card Recovery Boot blog.
The next thing was how to get 5V power for those sata drives. My first solution was just to steal it from the GPIO port:

But I found a dual sata power cable I had laying around and a 3 pin female plug with the right plastic bits to make it almost impossible to plug backwards (which would likely destroy the drives):

this

to replace that

The last relevant bit is to find those hard to find USB-C power supplies that give 5A on 5V (normally it's 3A max), although you could also get a real 5V power supply and feed the rPi through the GPIO pins, but that would bypass some protections. In the end, my very professional setup that did take many days to build and test, looked like this:

oops, forgot to protect the back so it doesn't short when touching metal, duct tape to the rescue

the new setup on top fo the existing poweredge server running for a while as recovery/emergency

And for shits and giggles, still found an original VA Linux server going strong, as a rack spacer :)

Power Cycling

Moremagic is back!

Now I'm back with 2 servers, on the same network which is not ideal, but they are both redundant filesystem-wise and capable of taking over one another's duties if one were to die (likely the power supply I assume).

Further reading

This year didn't really have anything too exciting compared to last year, to the point that given the very remote location, I'm not sure I'll go back next year.

All that said, here are the pictures: i01*

The dark room was probably the most fun location for me :)

hi Erin :)

the cuttlefish crew made a new art car this year

bad ass helmet

One thing new this year was the Luminarium, which costs $7 extra. You were supposed to reserve timeslots, but the whole thing didn't seem efficient, and was apparently oversold, so it soon had a long line that didn't move much. Mmmhh....

I had plenty of spare time to see a few talks, not too many caught my eye, but those 3, did:

a talk on wearable LEDs

batteries are often the issue :)

nice one

the talk by Steve Wozniak was excellent

The magician that uses physic properties and adds magic on top, did a great job:

I had a chat with this guy, I was honestly worried about this "plane", given that it was meant to carry a human. The guy is a pilot and did his research. His goal was to fly in ground effect only, which will indeed limit the injuries if anything goes wrong, which it probably will a few times :) If he sticks to that, I wish him luck as long a no one tries to actually fly at altitude with that thing, since if any motor failure happens, this thing is going down and hard (glide ratio of a brick and no rudder to compensate for adverse yaw from a single motor failure):

Other random things:

make your own fireworks

the framework laptop I hope to own one day

Of course I wasn't the only person with costume:

big LED earings need a big battery :)

So there you go. Not sure when I'll go back, but here are the previous ones I went to if you're curious:

Also random fun birds and animals:

small armadillo, so cute

very well protected

they also had some larger ones

cockatoo

wallabies

And I finished the visit with pretty and friendly Bengal cats: