My improvised SSD fan cooling

Contrary to initial data after installing a Samsung 970 EVO 1 TB NVMe SSD, I noticed today that the temperatures are quite high in my supersilent case. So I improvised a virtually noiseless fan cooling for it.

Luckily I found a 40mm fan that was silent enough at low speeds. I used two of my ancient and long-unused potentiometer cables connected in series and turned both to minimum. The fan still revs at 2500 RPM it seems, but inaudible from 50 cm distance and farther.

(Sadly I cannot control it in software because the only remaining fan connector on my shitty Asrock board is defective since two days after getting the board and only allows speed control with PWM fans. But I'd still want it in hardware so that it is not annoying outside of Windows where fan control actually works. - Linux is ugh.)

I had to use two wire straps, one with twists at three points, to mostly stabilize the fan in one position. I also put rubber pads on its base to avoid any potential vibration travel onto the PSU case.

Test data:
Process: Copying a 64 GB file at ~300 MB/s. At 70°C and above there was gradual, gentle throttling down to ~240 MB/s, it seems, unless that was an issue with the target SSD.
First temperature value is the memory chips, second one the controller.
before cooling ➡️ after cooling
idle  = 43°C / 57°C ➡️ 34°C / 48°C (-9 / -9)
load = 51°C / 75°C ➡️ 40°C / 62°C (-11 / -13)

I would have preferred to use a drive benchmark program, but I couldn't find one that simply does continuous max speed reads. (And only reads; I don't want to generate unnecessary writes on it.)

UPDATE: Since I spontaneously decided to get another SSD to resolve some OS multiboot stress, I already tested directing that fan not at the one SSD, but straight down at the mainboard between the then two SSD controller chips. Cooling effect (at least without load, but expecting same under load) is the same if not a bit lower even. And without fan cooling the issue isn't even gradual heat soak. The controller temperature goes up from 48°C to 57°C within a minute.
It is a corner with almost no air flow, and this shows what a tremendous difference just a little bit of air flow makes. (Especially in blowing configuration.)
Doesn't matter that it's gonna whirl around there and is not a smooth flow. the turbulence will allow the air pocket there to gradually mix with the main case flow.

I consider it an issue that the controller chip doesn't have at least an optional heat sink you can put on it where you have the space (i.e. not laptop). The sticker is said to be heat conductive, but it does so little, and apparently it cannot really dissipate effectively.
I only tested with 300 MB/s. Imagine if you're copying between SSDs at 4-digit speeds, what head load that must be generating. (I'm gonna test that once the new SSD is here, since I need to copy some stuff over then anyway.)

UPDATE 2: Found a suitable benchmark. 1800 MB/s continuous read. Controller temperatures idle/load:

no cooling: 59-82 °C

fan cooling: 49-70 °C

850 EVO SATA SSD (non-cooled) 450 MB/s: 30°C idle, 43°C load (Not sure what component the sensor is measuring there, but in any case this shows the advantage of not being an extremely compact device.)

Some WoW BfA impressions in commented pictures

(art shot) 

Here some impressions of my recent World of Warcraft BfA 3-day trial phase and some from shortly after that on my f2p chars.

 How to advertise a guild. ;-D

 That's how I rock.

 

I love to make a big show with portals. (If you want to be nasty, you can tank the framerate on weaker GPUs by casting them all on top of each other, causing massive overdraw.)

Definitely tricky to avoid weapon clipping with gnomes.

Easy way to add transmog items to the library if you don't have a highlevel for the armor type: make a trial character!

Finally smelting a whole lot of dark iron ore that has accumulated from my Hydraxian rep farming runs.

I took the liberty of killing the emperor and his wife. As a fiery wildcat, I am clearly more qualified to rule the Blackrock Depths. 8)

Among all the types of cloth, netherweave is a plague.

 A wolf shooting lightning from its mouth. Yep, that's Dowlphin style. 8)

 One of those Blizzard things. Completed before there was an achievement, for some it procced, for others not. This is a many months old issue.

Legit pandaren monk outfit.

Hand of A'dal mount works SO WELL with the Prismatic Bauble! ^^

 Reminds me a bit of the wacky beach-style transmog outfits I did for my human female rogue.

 A dwarf's butt-warmer. (Also note my damage performance as healer. ... On my druid when in a good mood and in RFC I was top.)

I find it funny how green lowlevel quest rewards can proc epically. It is very usless and also further devalues any mystique that might have been left to the "epic" quality.

Body shrinker plus fancy pearl plus prismatic bauble on a shaman's ghost wolf form which is not slowed by the shrinking like other such forms. Makes for an amazing effect. A little shiny dot zipping about.

 Somehow I made a shaman look like a warrior.

True nature of the bank revealed, hah.

 Too bad the pearl shiny has such a long cooldown. It works so well together with the bauble.

Typical riding style for a blood elf paladin, I would say. xD

Incognito fishing - a specialty of mine. ^^

Now this seems like the only funny use of the faire's fish head cosmetic. Otherwise I find it just spoils the character looks. (And on druid forms it is pointing away upwards from the snout.)

Just a typical metal concert going on. ;-)

Future tech stealth weapon brainstorming

• Cold fusion pistol (zero IR emissions)
• Infrared laser rifle (invisible bolts - Or is it a beam? Nobody knows.)
• HEIAP pea shooter (very silent, compact and undetectable blowgun - until the target is hit)
• Electrononmagnetic shotgun (made completely out of plastic, extremely stealthy, thus got a massive nerf and now only comes in various bright colors)
• Buckslingshot (for very soft targets - also available as birdslingshot)
• No-shot-one-kill imagination beam launcher (extremely heavy, difficult to carry by one person - the lighter models had too many misfires)
• Mithril crossbow (Not only very silent by design, but its existence is still being widely denied, thus making it very attractive to criminals - From a court transcript: "That mithril bolt tore your arm right off!" - "No, it didn't.")

Youtube forces wrong caption language

First the crappy new UI, then they impose a Community tab beta on me, making my Discussions tab content inaccessible, and now I realized that Youtube combined some intelligent algorithm with total stupidity.
I had assumed that automatic captions are crap. Seems they work quite well though and the crap is what happens when the wrong language is set. So apparently the speech-to-text logic is quite good, but for some reason it does not detect the frickin' language everything is spoken in. So I realized all my vids got auto-generated subtitles, a failed attempt to interpret English spoken word as German.
So I went through all my videos with spoken content and set the video language from undefined to English. First attempts didn't immediately yield results, but I assumed it takes a while before it re-scans the contents. Apparently you can't trigger it manually.
So I just uploaded a new video (and my vids are not optimized for streaming, i.e. they likely can only be processed once the upload is finished) and on the very beginning of the upload I set video language to English. ... And when the video was finished, it had again added German subtitles.
I have now set my channel location to USA, hoping that might convince it. But I shouldn't have to.

This is the constant fail and facepalm that keeps convincing me not to go into a deeper business relationship with Youtube.

"And they wonder why retail is dying"

Reminded of that quote I heard on TV lately, I'll share this little experience I had; one of disappointments that sadly happen way too often.

I needed a beer mug that holds half a liter. I drove to a local furniture mart with a properly sized glassware department. (= time and fuel costs)
I found three 'tipover-optimized' half-liter Weizenbier glasses and a beer mug that only holds a third of a liter, brand "Leonardo". I asked a shop assistant about it and she said they don't have such and that Leonardo doesn't even offer them in half-liter size.
So I drove home, pissed at the glaring omission from a specialist dealer, and due to experience I checked Leonardo's website and there learned that in fact they DO offer those mugs I've seen in half-liter size.

Thus, more business for Amazon.

On Amazon I also checked alternative products and wondered something that one review indeed confirmed: If you design a beer mug, you of course have to keep a good amount of spare on the top for the beer's head. And one product didn't do that. Another example of "You had one job!". What IQ does it require to design proper beer glasses?!
Dilettantes. They're everywhere.
Now I have to wait for the Leonardos to arrive and hope they didn't screw up like that, too. Because they're not giving proper measurement information on their website but instead just the measurements of the carton the glasses are in, with width being the width of roughly two glasses next to each other and the depth referring to one glass including the handle. So I don't even know the exact diameter of them.
DILETTANTES! THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!


On a side note, also no business today for Panasonic, because they are unwilling to offer consumer camcorders on the EU market that can optionally record in 60fps like the same models for the US market do natively.
I mean, it's not like we live in 2017 or anything.

HTML5 on Youtube still pissing me off

I made another attempt because now some longer videos (or 60 fps ones?) don't offer DASH formats for Flash player anymore and thus are 720p only. A blog claimed HTML5 autoplay disable is fixed in Firefox/Waterfox since version 41, but it wasn't, not even in 47. (48 and newer is out of the question because it absolutely blocks unsigned addons now.) There are autoplay stopper addons that work, but now HTML5 videos took an eternity to buffer before they started playing. So that version I then had to downgrade to 43 ALSO because my old without-alternative addon "Youtube Center" (that gives me stuff like video info on thumbnails) didn't work anymore - not at all. Then the player was centered and I lost my patience and enforced Flash player again and clicked on one icon in it and it was properly aligned on the website again. (Video playback fluidity isn't good anymore in Flash though, at least not on Youtube.)

I also got messed up colored ratings bars under my videos even when disabling Youtube Center which has that feature. Some other addon must be doing this, but no other could be. It just started a couple days ago with the video format change.

Now my mouse scrolling doesn't work on the site anymore if I clicked on the video and this blog's text window interfers with a tab navigation addon. I had to go back to version 40 again; the one before I started this latest attempt. Now all my cookie settings are gone! (Luckily I could restore them from my backup. But it's stupid to use an sqlite database file and have it mess up itself between versions.)


I hate this shit! It's getting worse all the time.

We need to make the web great again.

German newsmedia actually called good relations with Russia a problem

This is how mindbogglingly corrupted the media are really, how much of a hate-propaganda organ they are, with an added dose of lazy spinelessness.

Very recently, shortly before the U.S. presidential election's results were expected, I heard a host (or pundit? - the borders are very fluid there) say on German 'public' TV evening news that both Clinton and Trump would be problematic/inconvenient for Germany/Europe: Clinton because she might demand us to provide military forces for their wars, Trump because he could improve relations with Russia.

Yes, he said it like that. What an inconvenience that would be, to not be able to regard Russia as an enemy, a villain, but to have good relations with them. Apart from the glaring opposites of opposition and cooperation both being villified there, actually this is expressing a view of Russia being the eternal and core villain beyond change or complexity, no ability to discriminate and looks at the various facets of a country. It is saying: Russia is evil, so any cooperation with them is bad.

This is textbook hate propaganda. It is incitement. And incitement is a crime according to German law. But that law is never applied to that side of hatemongers. They're only using it as a weapon against their hate-competitors; those who have the audacity to openly (and often sincerely) express their negative attitudes towards others, those others being the allies of this propaganda establishment.

But the game of distracting from inconvenient self-knowledge by projecting it onto others is very popular. And so you often hear the view expressed like: "China really has censorship and propaganda. We are not perfect, but we are angels compared to them."
The sad irony is that those who say that are much greater devils, for they conceil, use trickery, lies, deception. In China, censorship is actually not a secret at all, it's at least in part more like official policy to filter out certain foreign cultural influences.
While those who play the accuser try everything to pretend they don't do what they accuse others of.

Media censorship in the West is at an appalling level, supported by the convenient ignorance of the masses.
I will end on an anecdote to put things in perspective: Recently someone made a remark about elections manipulation and all the democracy talk and the accusations against countries like Iran. The remark was that it should make us stop and wonder that unlike many targets of accusation by the USA, the USA is the country which refuses international observers at their elections to ensure a democratic process. And their domestic issues with democracy aren't even a secret. But people get angry when you speak out the obvious truth. They consider it a personal attack of their convenient denial.

WoW features acheesements

I noticed that WoW often negates the purpose of achievements, specifically raid achievements.
Being overlevel can make things a lot easier, but some achievements are still tricky and should be if it can be helped. Now if killing a boss in a certain timeframe is the achievement, there is little you can do against overlevel soloing this without any problem. But let me give you an example of what surprised me a bit.

For the Lich King there is an achievement where in one phase of the boss fight spirits or such appear and you need to mske sure none of them explodes. Now when you are soloing the encounter with an overlevel char, you might kill the boss before that phase has a chance of appearing. Now the proper strategy for this would simply be to not nuke the boss down but let the phase occur.
Instead what happens is that your achievement panel announces to everybody that you successfully prevented spirits from exploding in that encounter when you actually simply nuked the boss down. You get the achievement because it never even had a chance of failing.
Same earlier in the same raid instance when you had to heal a dragon up to full health. There's an achievement about entering portals, and if you heal her up quickly, those portals don't appear and you will get the achievement for entering them.

I find that a bit lame and don't understand what the reason is. It's easy to cut back on your damage or heal output, even without removing gear to weaken yourself.

Desperate 'scientists'

Occasionally I read an article about scientists who apparently are desperaste to find something worth examining, or can't find it, or are just not competent. Like when a group of scientists 'found out' that flies have unusually quick reflexes.

Today I read an article announced on the frontpage of a local newspaper where a group of scientists at the University of California in San Diego around Prof. Nicholas Christenfeld and Hannah Tuller 'found out' that when two people have an argument it is easier to loosen up positions, understand the other person's point and settle the argument if you allow yourself to view things from their situation (and maybe even argue from that point, as in the experiment) and that you need empathy to be able/willing to do that.

Wow, yet again.

Those 'scientists' discovered something that pretty much everybody but sociopaths already knew.

If I look at some other works of Prof. Christenfeld, I begin to wonder (not really) how easy it can be to get a position as a university professor. I might be applying too rigid standards to myself.
I mean, OK, not everything they do has to be outstanding, but why is stuff like this making frontpages? Doesn't paint a good picture about the newspaper. (Not that I'd expect much from them, to be honest.)

If you wanted to take the making of this study seriously, it would create some interesting implications about the intellectual and emotional maturity of the USA, heh.

Positive surprise by Valve, albeit still quite flawed

Rarely Valve can surprise positively. In this case, the gesture is appreciated, something encouraging, but in execution still very flawed.

What happened was that in the Terraria community artwork section there were two people heavily practicing art theft. The first one uploaded a flood of other people's character art with many of them being ... age-inappropriate. The second one was someone uploading someone else's piece of art and when called out for it went into a defiant, spiteful rage, uploading three more uncredited pieces from the same artists, this time knowing the source. That one also wrote lots of vulgarities. (Also an observation: It's generally a clichée you cannot deny that when art theft like this happens, most times it's Russians.)

So those I reported. And they kept collecting upvotes for two weeks or so, some of them topping the feed.

Until finally I received this nice e-mail:

------------------------------------------

Subject: Thanks for reporting inappropriate content on Steam!
Dear -----------,
Thank you for reporting content that violates the Steam Terms of Service or breaks the rules of the area in which it was submitted.

Because of your efforts, we've removed 4 inappropriate or offensive pieces of content from the Steam Community.

The Steam Support Team
------------------------------------------

Smart, isn't it? Giving feedback to show people that their efforts are valued and have results. Even if this e-mail has been sent automatically (very likely), that is sufficient and doesn't detract from the effect.

Well...

The first guy, the spam wave, it seems all of those pictures are still up. Dunno, maybe because they didn't know the sources they couldn't verify the validity of the claim.
But the second person, they uploaded four pictures with all the same source, which was stated. So I assumed those are the ones.

But then I noticed that one of them, the fist picture, with most of the offending comment activity and all the calling-out, is still up. O_o

So in essence this is a very flawed minimum of courtesy, but it's positive (and thus rare), so I considered pointing it out.
(Doesn't change my stance on Valve's under-age gambling scheme though.)