Uncategorized – Page 2 – WirelessMoves

Anker Power Supply Revisited – Temperature Limits

A few months ago I bought an Anker A1336 72 Wh power bank with a nice display, supporting 3 USB ports, 100W charge and discharge power and simultaneous loading and discharge. All in all, a great power bank, and I reviewed it here and here. However. there are a number of limitations mostly related to prevent overheating, of which I only became aware while using the power bank extensively. So let’s have a look:

When charging or discharging the power bank, its temperature rises, and while you don’t go to the specified charge/discharge power limits you probably won’t notice. But try to recharge the power bank with a 65W power supply while at the same time connecting a notebook and mobile phones, all with low batteries and high power draw, and you will notice a quick rise in the power bank’s temperature, which in turn quickly leads to counter measures.

Dishy on Ice – Starlink in Iceland

When I was in Iceland recently, another thing I wanted to have a look at was if Starlink would work reliably there as well. So why wouldn’t it? Have a look at the Starlink satellite map image below and you see where my question came from: Most Starlink satellites are in orbits with an inclination that doesn’t bring them over arctic and antarctic areas of the planet. However, there are some that have a different orbit that brings them close to the poles for coverage of such areas.

If there are enough, then this will work, as you definitely don’t need a lot of capacity at these higher latitudes. But are there enough satellites for a continuous coverage?

Aging Micro-SD Cards

Yes, there is the rumor that the flash memory used for micro-SD cards is kind of scrap. And it’s probably true. Due to this and because speed matters, I buy more expensive SD cards such as the SanDisk ‘Extreme’ line. But even those cards start to slow down and show erratic behavior after a few years of usage.

Docker ‘Latest’ Can Be Fun – Or Not!

When I updated my Docker Compose based Onlyoffice instance today, I soon discovered that the update broke my installation. Hm, wasn’t one of the promises of container based services to prevent exactly such a thing from happening? Well perhaps, but if you have several containers working with each other in a Docker Compose setup, non-backwards compatible changes in one image can render the overall service unusable. So what exactly happened?

Flat Prices for Storage – Rising Costs

Back in December 2024 I wrote a blog post about hard disk prices having remained pretty much constant over the past decade. Also, there seem to be no price cuts in the making, the technology seems to have hit a wall. Sure, HDD capacities have increased in the last decades, but so have prices per drive, and hence the price per TB is pretty much the same it was a decade ago. This might have some interesting consequences:

2D Barcodes For Paperless Receipts

2D barcodes have been around for a while. In fact, it’s more than 20 years and I mentioned this ‘new’ technology on this blog in 2006. Mind boggling. But some things take their time and it has taken 20 years for the technology to be deployed to get paperless receipts at the bakery. No, I’m not kidding.

Beware of Your Log Files

A little anecdote today about log files and SSD wear: As you might have noticed, I’ve recently done a lot of disk drive benchmarking. The iostat command is a great tool to check how much data is written to a block device over time, and just because I’m curious, I had a look at how much data is written to the main drive of one of my servers since I rebooted it 4 days ago. When I looked I got a shocking number: 400 GB! In 4 days! Now that is impossible I thought at first, perhaps iostat is giving me wrong numbers. So I had a closer look.

In-Flight to Iceland with Viasat

I recently flew to Iceland with Iceland air, and as it was a 3 hour flight from Frankfurt, I was happy to try the on-board Internet to stay connected. For 12 euros a flight, it was perhaps not cheap, but compared to the price of the ticket, it’s almost negligible. As large parts of the trip are over water, satellite connectivity was used. Like the on-board Internet I reviewed last year on Delta when flying to the US, connectivity was provided by Viasat.

HDD Performance – Part 8 – 2.5″ 4TB Drives – Reading and Writing

A 4 TB 2.5″ drive 700 GB written, avg. speed 70 MB/s

And while I’m already at the topic and my test setup is up and running, I also had a go at two of my 2.5″ 4 TB drives and their read and write performance when running differential backups that contain large 50+ GB files, many files in the range of 2-3 MB and many more much smaller document files. My questions: How much slower are these drives compared to the 3.5″ drives that I had a look at so far and can I see a difference between the two drives? As in the previous posts, I’ll keep manufacturer names and drive types out of this, as I wanted to get a general idea rather than praise or blame a particular model.

HDD Performance – Part 7 – Differential Write Performance

Differential backup of 1.3 TB of data from a 20 TB drive to an 8 TB drive. **Avg. speed 68 MB/s**

The proof lies in the pudding, they say. I’ve initially started this hard disk read and write performance marathon, because the perceived speed of some of my backup hard drives when performing differential backups to them was very slow. Despite being differential, such backups easily go beyond 1.5 TB. So after establishing read and write speed baselines in the previous posts, it’s finally time to look at the speeds of my drives during differential backups.