Sony Digital Camera ZV-1 … or is it a ZV-1? (WHL #122)

PSA: If you buy a Sony ZV-1: Make sure it IS a ZV-1!

Sooo…in preparation for a little trip, and because my Sony RX100M2 is getting old (not in terms of specs, but more on the wear-and-tear side of things), I somewhat recently had a look for alternatives, focussed on the portrait video captures that I do in my car while playing Beach Buggy racing.

The RX100 line of cameras isn’t a straight path in terms of more betterer™, it’s more of a twisty road. My M2 for example is a bit of an oddball with a multifunction hotshoe, the newer ones don’t have that anymore. […]

20th September 2026 21st September 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

VOVANE Electric Dust Blower, 150000RPM Air Duster vs. high speed camera (WHL #121F1)

It’s been a while, and aside from being busy editing and uploading metric shittons of Beach Buggy Racing videos (as of today spanning until the last week of December, on a two-day-release cycle)…

…I have also pondered my options regarding the air duster. I wanna know if this thing really hits 150krpm with all the cheap battery, power electronics, bearings and whatever else is involved. 150krpm for such an inexpensive device sounds so alien to me.

Luckily, we do have a high-speed camera at work. It’s more of a microscope, but zooming in and not having the full air blast onto the lenses might be a good idea regardless. […]

6th September 2026 7th September 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

Gadget shopping in China…is dead (#R7F1)

ICYMI: Some bullshit commission inside the EU has found that shops outside of the EU do not have to deal with the full force of European bullshit bureaucracy and have therefore a significant advantage over EU vendors – and therefore need to be punished to level the field. And to facilitate that, they implemented a 3€ customs fee for imported goods – starting July 1st, 2026. The fee applies to all parcels below a value 150€ (we had fees and taxes for those already in place before that), and to be specific, applies to every group of goods that have a distinct tariff number. […]

9th August 2026 10th August 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

VOVANE Electric Dust Blower, 150000RPM Air Duster Compressed Air Spray, 3-Speed Super Power Cordless Air Duster, Mini Blower Battery for PC Cleaning Kit, Keyboard, Car, Sofa (WHL #121)

This is puzzling.

Around two months ago, I bought one of these electric (cordless) air dusters. I do technically own some pressurized air equipment (14l tank, 12V pump and manual pump), but it’s always bulky and inconvenient to use. Since battery technology has advanced so much over the last couple of years…some nifty dude invented the server fan on a 18650. And aside from actually filling things up with a defined pressure, that’s basically good enough for most tasks that mainly consist of “dusting things off” needs. […]

26th July 2026 27th July 2026 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

Intenso High Speed Line 125GB update (WHL #117F1)

Tiny update on the USB drive with less-than-advertised capacity: I have now two replies in my mailbox, one from the manufacturer Intenso, one from the local Eichamt (Weights and measures office).

The manufacturer states, after a bit of bullshit concerning my “professional” use of this “home/SOHO” device (they know exactly that have replaced the excellent chipset with cheap crap, and now a week of use at the office is misuse and voids the warranty, degrades performance, blabla):

Diese fehlende Kapazität ist für ein Speichermedium (im Bereich Consumer Electronics) marktüblich.

[…]
12th July 2026 12th July 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

airnef and the Sony ILCE6100 (α6100) (WHL #120)

I’ve been thinking about a slight upgrade to my main camera, the Sony RX100M2. I got it quite a while ago, *checks blog post history*, in early 2019, and since it is a compact camera, it hasn’t been modified, despite the wide variety of tasks that I threw at it. It’s still decent for most jobs, it works most of the time (sometimes you gotta slap it back into action when the sensor reads garbage, and the mode wheel has been acting up lately), but e.g. on my 2 week trip to Xinzo de Limia, I thought about a backup device in case something happens, for whatever cause/reason. […]

28th June 2026 29th June 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

Cdycam 3pcs/1bag PoE Splitter Power Over Ethernet 48V to 12V IEEE802.3af Standard Type 15W Power Supply Module For NonPoe Camera (WHL #119)

Here’s something that lasted just shy of five years – a PoE to 12V converter.

I just checked, I never wrote about these things…so here we go. Last week, the ESP32 in my living room stopped working. It does serve as a sensor station (temperature, humidity) for the DECT heater valve in the living room, and it also runs some LED stripes around the house, some of which are automated via iobroker, and some are activated by infrared sensors. They all can be changed over a simple web interface as well. Turns out: The ESP is fine, but the power supply, a PoE to 12V converter, is dead. […]

7th June 2026 7th June 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

Width 6mm to 17mm Self-adhesive EPDM Foaming Strips Self-adhesive Flat Square Strip Glued EPDM Foaming Sealing Strips (WHL #118)

Slot covers. Slot covers for aluminium extrusions. That’s the topic for today.

Just the other day I was thinking about sealing against a 2020 extrusion slot. In a sort-of air-tight way. And after tinkering and ordering a bunch of samples of things that could work, I had a second look into one of the options: This could work for pure looks as well.

You see, the classic 40×40 (or larger, like 40×80, 40×160 if you like it beefy) aluminium profiles have readily available sealing strips against dust. Depending on exact slot type (since there are a couple of manufacturers/specifications), the typical slot to cover is like 8mm wide and goes 14ish millimeters deep. […]

17th May 2026 17th May 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

LabJack U6 Pro (and others) self-test script (#P53)

On the eternal quest of de-cluttering the living room, I picked up a bunch of stored “defective” LabJack units the other day. These are USB DAQ modules with generally very decent specs, in the case of the U6 Pro a 24bit (22bit effective) DAC with 14-port multiplexing (so 14 analogue ports, or 7 differential analogue ports), fixed 10µA and 200µA sources, two 12bit DACs, internal temperature compensation for temperature probes, 20 GPIOs and a bunch of miscellaneous stuff over the DA15 and DC37 Sub-D ports. All of them were discarded with AIN failure…and that didn’t add up. […]

3rd May 2026 4th May 2026 By Bzzz In 2 Comments

Intenso High Speed Line 128GB (WHL #117)

At work, we tend to use those godawful USB thumb drives that generally fall into two categories:

  • Ancient (and therefore tiny in capacity)
  • Cheap marketing giveaways (and therefore dog slow)

    Some even cover both bases and were the slow, crappy type ten or even fifteen years ago – and they have our own logo printed on them, because they were surplus items whenever the company logo changed.

    Sure, that happens for a lot of companies, but it’s fucking annoying, it’s embarrassing to operate in such a way, and it just wastes company time.

[…]
19th April 2026 20th April 2026 By Bzzz In 1 Comment