Requiem for a 20-year-old Netgear switch

From exactly 20 years ago:

This had been powering the hard-wired network in the walls of my old Harvard Square apartment ($125/run in pre-Biden dollars, facilitated by an attic above) and failed at some point in 2025. The front of the device was showing only one link light and it wasn’t on a port to which anything was connected. I found to my delight that the GS116 was still made by Netgear(!) and assumed that the new one ($100 for unmanaged) would have the same mounting pattern and, therefore, I could slide it up underneath the desk using the same screws. Sadly, however, they changed the spacing on the mounting holes.

I think that we need to give a shout-out to the Netgear engineers circa 2000 who made a machine that could run almost forever in Internet terms.

(Why didn’t I upgrade to a 10G switch? Xfinity is the monopoly Internet provider in most of Cambridge, Maskachusetts (the officials who wisely run the world’s smartest city rejected Verizon FiOS some years ago) and one is lucky to get 200 Mbits download throughput on their “gigabit” service, which is throttled to 35 Mbits upload.)

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Who has experienced a USB-C jack failure due to dirt/lint?

My 9-month-old pocket-carried iPhone 16 Pro Max stopped connecting reliably to USB-C cables. This had never happened in the bad old Lightning jack days. There’s an Apple Store 15 minutes south of us in Palm Beach Gardens (home to Tiger Woods’s former plaintiff/club-wielding attacker). The “geniuses” there cleaned it out in their back room so I can’t say what tools they used.

I had thought that the EU-mandated euthanasia for Lightning was a pure boon to consumers, but maybe others have noticed the same fragility?

Here’s what ChatGPT has to say:

Yes — USB-C jacks are generally more susceptible to dirt and lint issues than Lightning, though both can fail from pocket debris. Here’s why:

1. Connector Design

  • USB-C: The jack is a receptacle with 24 tiny exposed contacts along the walls. Debris can sit in the bottom of the port and prevent the plug from seating fully, or it can block some pins. Because the plug’s tongue is solid and must slide into the port, any pocket lint at the bottom tends to get compacted and cause “won’t charge” problems.
  • Lightning: Apple’s Lightning jack has fewer contacts (8), located only on the plug itself. The port on the device is a simple cavity with spring contacts on the sides. Dirt buildup still happens, but there’s less opportunity for debris to block a critical central “tongue.”

2. Durability in Daily Use

  • USB-C: More fragile if debris prevents a flush fit — wiggling or forcing a plug against lint can bend pins inside the port.
  • Lightning: More forgiving; the plug’s flat contacts scrape against the spring pins, which can tolerate a little more obstruction.

3. Real-World Failure Patterns

  • Many phone repair shops report that the number one cause of “dead” USB-C ports is lint compaction, especially in phones carried in jeans pockets. The plug simply won’t go in all the way until the port is cleaned with a pick or compressed air.
  • Lightning ports can also clog, but they usually fail from mechanical wear on the spring contacts after many years, rather than lint preventing insertion.

4. Cleaning and Maintenance

  • USB-C: Needs more frequent cleaning if the device is often pocket-carried. A wooden or plastic pick works best.
  • Lightning: Easier to clean, less prone to deep compaction.

🔹 Best Practices for Cleaning a USB-C Jack

1. Power Down First

  • Turn off the device completely.
  • If possible, unplug the battery (for laptops) to eliminate any chance of shorting pins.

2. Start With Compressed Air

  • Use a can of compressed air held upright.
  • Give the port short, controlled bursts at different angles.
  • Avoid holding the nozzle too close or using “liquid spray” mode (which can cause condensation).

3. Use a Non-Conductive Pick if Needed

If air alone doesn’t work:

  • Use a wooden or plastic toothpick or a specialized port-cleaning tool.
  • Very gently scrape or lift out compacted lint at the bottom of the port.
  • Work slowly to avoid scratching or bending the pins on the side walls.

4. Optional: Isopropyl Alcohol for Sticky Residue

  • If there’s grime (e.g., soda, lotion), lightly dampen a lint-free swab with 99% isopropyl alcohol.
  • Gently wipe the inside walls.
  • Let it dry completely before powering on.

5. What NOT to Do

  • ❌ Don’t use metal objects like paperclips or needles — they can short pins or bend contacts.
  • ❌ Don’t soak the port in liquid cleaner.
  • ❌ Don’t blast with high-pressure air compressors (too strong, may damage).

🔹 Maintenance Tips

  • Keep devices in a case that shields the port from pocket lint.
  • Store with a dust plug (tiny rubber caps for USB-C are cheap).
  • Clean ports periodically if you carry your phone in jeans pockets.

Should folks who do all of their charging and CarPlaying, etc. wirelessly invest 10 cents in a dust cover?

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Measured cooling effect of clay tile roof

I have a Chinese Govee temperature sensor above the fiberglass insulation in a mostly unventilated attic here in Florida. During a reroof there were periods of time when the attic was covered with

  1. concrete barrel tiles over hot mop tar paper
  2. modern peel-and-stick underlayment only
  3. clay barrel tiles (a medium-dark red/brown) over the modern underlayment

Weather conditions were reasonably consistent during these three time periods, i.e., hot and sunny.

Temps in the lower part of attic (only about 4′ high; probe on top of some fiberglass insulation above the finished ceiling) went from roughly 100 degrees underneath the old intact roof (concrete tiles) to 120-130 degrees under the peel-and-stick underlayment only (white in color, but apparently not very reflective), and back down to around 100 degrees underneath the new clay tiles over underlayment. Here’s a chart from the Govee app:

In late July, maybe the hottest time of year, the temps went up to a max of 115 degrees.

Speaking of Chinese tech, here’s an idea for an awning that can automatically deploy over a parked car:

(I hope that it checks the wind forecast and the actual wind and folds itself up automatically when necessary!)

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Memory prices flat for 18 months

We supposedly live in a world where electronics get cheaper even if everything else is subject to rampant inflation. Here’s an example from PC Part Picker’s memory price trend for 18 months:

Most of the other graphs are flat as well. If you adjusted these for official CPI there would perhaps be a slight downward trend in real dollars.

Why are memory prices more or less stuck at 2023 levels? Is it that fewer companies are making RAM? That the AI Boom (TM) has increased demand? (economics proves that immigrants don’t drive up prices for housing, but Econ 101 says that demand for memory drives up prices for memory)

Related:

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$2449 of e-waste thanks to Microsoft (and best way for kids to organize and sort photos?)

Here’s my January 11, 2017 order for a Dell laptop computer with OLED screen:

The machine supports Trusted Platform Module 2.0, but the CPU per se isn’t supported by Microsoft for Windows 11. I had hoped to repurpose this machine as a digital photo organizer for the kids, but Windows 10 security updates will end later this year so that’s infeasible.

Is the de-supporting of Windows 10 going to be the largest e-waste event in the history of humanity? What’s Greta Thunberg going to say about this? (Maybe after shouting “Free free Palestine” she would say “Install Linux”?)

This raises a question… what is a good system for kids to use to organize photos taken with a modern camera? My preference is for the organizer to run locally with the photos stored on the laptop’s SSD with a cloud backup (maybe just Microsoft OneDrive if we stay with Windows) rather than sign them up for life to pay huge fees every month for cloud photo storage.

Could ACDSee be the modern answer to what we lost when Google discontinued (and failed to open source) Picasa? Or is the built-in Windows 11 Photos app sufficient? ChatGPT says that MacOS has a better photos app:

Maybe the kids are young enough to master ChromeOS (for skool), MacOS, and eventually Windows? I don’t love the idea of having to learn enough about MacOS to support their efforts, but it does seem that Apple is more serious about this challenge. Windows 11 runs like a pig on my three-year-old laptop, which cost $1700 and has 16 GB of RAM. I can’t figure out if it is Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, or the Microsoft Photos app that is causing the problem (if I do an “End Task” on Photos the machine seems to come out of its sluggish state).

Speaking of avoiding e-waste, Boise, Idaho offers an awesome model for other cities: Reuseum. In addition to classes for kids, they offer refurbished Windows 11 machines at low prices, e.g., these machines that could use more RAM for $80:

Plus if you want to make a sculpture out of old PCs and telephones you can buy them by the pound:

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Harry’s Plus razor defeats almighty Dorco?

I succumbed to relentless online advertising and tried out the latest Harry’s Plus razor (see Harry’s Crummy Razors for my opinion regarding the predecessor). Maybe it is the advertised “Progressive Blade Technology”, which the previous Harry’s cartridges lacked, but I think this is better than Dorco, which also means that it is better than Gillette’s finest. Neither Dorco nor Gillette seems to have been working on improvements to their respective products (Gillette owner Procter & Gamble is concentrating on preserving their race-based hiring and other DEI programs rather than on engineering). The “Plus” version of Harry’s seems much smoother and less prone to generating cuts and nicks during the first few shaves.

The blades are “German-engineered” so I guess they are Halal even if likely made in China.

Who else has tried Harry’s Plus?

Related:

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Apple in China, the rise of iPod

Second post regarding Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee. This one is about Apple’s shift from making computers to making handheld devices. (See Apple in China book, Intro if you missed Post #1 about this book.)

… just a month after the launch of iTunes [January 2001], hardware chief Jon Rubinstein—aka Ruby—and procurement head Jeff Williams were in Japan and stopped by Toshiba. The Japanese supplier showed them a new hard drive, just 1.8 inches in diameter, with a massive 5 gigabytes of capacity. Toshiba didn’t really know what to do with it, but to Ruby, the implications were “obvious” immediately: this thing could hold a thousand MP3s! It was the enabling technology they needed. “Jeff,” Ruby quietly said, “we need to get all of these.” Williams negotiated an exclusive supply agreement as Ruby made sure the $10 million check they drew up wouldn’t bounce.

Rubinstein and Fadell would later dispute who the key figure was behind the hit MP3 player, but the truth is that its brilliance had multiple authors, reflecting how each domain in the pyramid structure (ID, PD, MD, and Ops) worked on their specialty simultaneously. Ruby had found Toshiba’s disk drive and realized its potential. Phil Schiller, of marketing, introduced the idea of the scroll wheel—probably the feature most loved by consumers, as it reacted to the velocity of each turn and enabled them to race through hundreds of songs in a matter of seconds. Fadell was the overall architect. He presented to Jobs a prototype made from foam core and stuffed with old fishing weights to give it some heft. Jony Ive’s team made it unapologetically white, with a polished, chrome-like stainless steel back, a remarkably sharp turn from the childlike colors of the iMac. It was an unusually high-end material for a mass-market product, giving it a feel unlike any other handheld device. It was also durable and could dissipate heat more effectively than plastic.

The MP3 player would remain nameless for months, until four people in branding tossed ideas back and forth with Jobs. Vinnie Chieco, a creative director, recalls how the team would write down every permutation and then sort them into three piles: the worst, the ones that suck, and the not horrible. He’d come up with one: Troubadour, named after French poets who went from town to town playing music. This thing, too, was mobile, could travel and play music. The metaphor worked. The name didn’t. Jobs had his own preferred moniker, which Chieco remembers but won’t share. Like MacMan—what Steve wanted to call the iMac—his idea wasn’t very good, and Chieco is hesitant to share something now that Jobs can’t defend. The other three people in the room told Jobs they loved his name for the device, perhaps trying to avoid his infamous wrath. But when Jobs asked Chieco for his opinion, the creative director said, “Well, I understand your name is novel, but…” Feeling as if he were putting his head in a guillotine, Chieco told Jobs the reasons he didn’t like it. Meanwhile, he kept thinking in metaphors. He was struck by the all-white design, which looked space-like. Riffing on Jobs’s idea that a Mac computer was the “hub for your digital life,” he considered how in the future, the ultimate hub would be the mother ship. The only way to escape would be in a pod that flies away for temporary adventures, returning to replenish and recharge. He got the idea from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and hey—now it was 2001! It felt serendipitous, like when the Macintosh emerged in the Orwellian year, 1984. He proposed Pod. Jobs didn’t hate it, and over a few meetings it grew on him until it became the obvious name. It just needed one tweak, one letter, and then it was perfect: iPod.

Why did Apple make a phone? It was obvious to everyone that consumers wouldn’t want an iPod once reasonably capable smartphones were ubiquitous. Profits from Apple computers were insignificant compared to profits from the mass market iPod.

Around mid-2005, another project began to gain traction internally. The interfaces team had been toying with multi-touch technology for roughly two years, aided by a start-up Apple had purchased called FingerWorks. Senior engineers from Project Purple knew about it, but the original concept was about rethinking the Mac’s interface. When Steve Jobs first showed Fadell the technology, asking if it might work for a phone, it was far from obvious that the enormous contraption Jobs pointed to was the future of something that would sit on your desk, let alone be shoved in your pocket. “It filled the room,” Fadell recalled. “There was a projector mounted on the ceiling, and it would project the Mac screen onto this surface that was maybe three or four feet square. Then you could touch the Mac screen and move things around and draw on it.”

Meanwhile, the fear that the iPod business would be cannibalized by the phone giants continued to fuel anxiety and innovation. “It was an existential crisis,” a senior engineer says. “[We were saying], ‘You realize what’s gonna happen here is this business we built on iPods is going to go away. We need to build a phone.’ ” Jobs eventually canceled the other phone ideas and declared multi-touch the future. He was adamant there’d be no keyboard, so the phone would be as full screen as possible. Apple’s engineers suddenly had to find suppliers that could build multi-touch displays at scale—something that didn’t exist at the time. There was no way Apple could send the specs to some factory and wait for the parts to be built; instead, it sent teams of engineers to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China to find hungry vendors it could work with to co-create the processes. “There were a few truly groundbreaking mass production processes we were involved with, where we really had to go around to find the best people in the entire world—the peak of what humans have developed for some of these technologies,” says a product manager. By early 2006, they had a full-screen prototype enclosed in brushed aluminum. Jobs and Ive “were exceedingly proud of it,” journalist Fred Vogelstein would later recount. “But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they’d created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well.”

(I don’t understand how “cannibalized by the phone giants” made it through the purported editing process of this book. In business, cannibalized refers to a reduction of sales of Product A after the company that makes Product A introduces Product B. In the context of Apple, the iPhone might cannibalize sales from the iPod or a notebook-format Macintosh might cut into sales of desktop Macs rather than take sales away from IBM PCs.)

The iPhone required a lot of new manufacturing techniques, mostly developed by vendors in China and Taiwan, often with significant help from Apple engineers who’d fly over from California.

Another important supplier was TPK, which placed a special coating on the Corning glass, enabling the user’s fingers to transmit electrical signals. The Taiwanese start-up had been founded just a few years earlier by Michael Chiang, an entrepreneur who in the PC era had reportedly made $30 million sourcing monitors and then lost it all on one strategic mistake. In 1997 he began working with resistive touch panels used by point-of-sale registers. When Palm was shipping PDAs that worked with a stylus, Chiang worked on improving the technology to enable finger-based touchscreens, even showing the technology to Nokia. But nobody was interested until 2004, when a glass supplier introduced TPK to Apple. An iPhone engineer calls Chiang “a classic Taiwanese cowboy [who] committed to moving heaven and earth” by turning fields into factories that could build touchscreens. The factory was in Xiamen, a coastal city directly across from Taiwan. “The first iPhones 100 percent would not have shipped without that vendor,” this person says. He recalls Chiang responding to Apple by saying, “ ‘We can totally do that!’—even though [what we were asking was something] nobody in the world had ever done before.” Among the techniques Apple codeveloped with suppliers was a way to pattern, or etch, two sides of a piece of glass to do the touch sensor, at a time when film lithography processes were being done on only one side. Another pioneering technique is called rigid-to-rigid lamination, a process for bonding two materials using heat and pressure, which Apple applied to tape a stack of LCD displays to touch sensors and cover elements to create one material. The process was performed in a clean-room environment with custom robotics.

Instead of selecting components off the shelf, Apple was designing custom parts, crafting the manufacturing behind them, and orchestrating their assembly into enormously complex systems at such scale and flexibility that it could respond to fluctuating customer demand with precision. Just half a decade earlier, these sorts of feats were not possible in China. The main thing that had changed, remarkably, was Apple’s presence itself. So many of its engineers were going into the factories to train workers that the suppliers were developing new forms of practical know-how. “All the tech competence China has now is not the product of Chinese tech leadership drawing in Apple,” O’Marah says. “It’s the product of Apple going in there and building the tech competence.”

We might owe most of our current toys to Apple’s 2010 agreement with TSMC, motivated by a desire to reduce its dependence on Samsung:

In 2010, Apple operations chief Jeff Williams reached out to Morris Chang through his wife, Sophie Chang, a relative of Terry Gou. Dinner between them launched months of “intense” negotiations, according to Chang, as Williams pressed TSMC on prices and convinced the Taiwanese group to make a major investment. “The risk was very substantial,” Williams recalled at a gathering for TSMC’s thirtieth anniversary in 2017. “If we were to bet heavily on TSMC, there would be no backup plan. You cannot double-plan the kind of volumes that we do. We want leading-edge technology, but we want it at established technology… volumes.” Williams’s narrative leaves out some of the most interesting facts about the early partnership. One is that Chang wouldn’t commit to Apple’s demands. In a 2025 interview with the podcast Acquired, Chang said that TSMC would’ve had to raise substantial amounts of money, either by selling bonds or issuing more stock. Williams had another idea: “You can eliminate your dividend.” Morris balked at the aggressive suggestion. “If we do what Jeff Williams says, our stock to going to drop like hell,” he recounted. Chang agreed to take only half of Apple’s order. Even this partial commitment forced TSMC to borrow $7 billion, so it could invest $9 billion and devote 6,000 full-time employees working round the clock to bring up a new chips fab in eleven months, according to Williams. “In the end, the execution was flawless,” he said. The partial commitment forced Apple to toggle between Samsung and TSMC, which some in Cupertino saw as a plus—it meant that Apple wasn’t beholden to just one supplier for what serves as the brain within the iPhone. But Srouji’s team found it nightmarish to manage both suppliers. So Apple turned to TSMC on an exclusive basis, establishing over-the-top contract terms to protect itself. A person familiar with the contract characterized it as saying: “We need to make sure that you’re gonna go out of business—if you’re gonna put us at risk of going out of business.” It was a “mutually assured destruction” type of situation, this person says, because if TSMC didn’t perform in any given year, there’d be no iPhone. So the Apple decision was made: “We are going to put all of our eggs in one basket, and then we’re gonna guard the basket.” TSMC’s bet would prove critical for making it the world leader in semiconductor fabrication, with Apple as its

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Florida question: Why isn’t a compressed air source a standard part of poolside equipment?

Every Florida pool has an equipment pad nearby with electric power, sometimes natural gas (electric heat pumps are better these days because they’re cheaper to run and can also chill the pool), and filtration. The question for today: Why isn’t there always an electric air compressor on the pad? Given the popularity of inflatables why wouldn’t there be a permanently stationed powerful compressed air source to top up rafts, etc.?

Most compressors don’t seem to be designed to handle the elements, but here’s one with potential:

Has anyone ever seen something similar mounted near a pool? If not, why not?

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The long dark winter is finally over

February 2024, regarding a tragedy that began in 2023: Microsoft keyboards back from the dead.

After massive daily injections of healing Paxlovid, the Sculpt keyboard has risen! Amazon now stocks the Incase “Designed by Microsoft” keyboards.

Get yours before the 6,000 percent tariffs kick back in (the case is stamped “Made in China”, almost surely by the same factory that Microsoft used).

The new supplier’s site:

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