thebaldgeek

Serial ports have been phased out of computers for the past few years now.
Its almost imposible to get a laptop with a serial port.
But for a lot of small (ie, cheap) electronic devices, serial is still king.
What to do?

Enter the USB to Serial adaptor.
Cheap, fast and easy to use.
Its almost a plug and play solution.

Trouble is greed.
People started reverse engineering the chip that is used in them and selling the fake chip for less money than the original.

FTDI, the company that makes the real deal has finally (after years of this going on) had enough and the latest Windows update includes a bit of code that will render the fake chips totally useless.
Yup, thats right. Rather than warn customers or go after the fake chip makers, FTDI has convinced Microsoft to include the bit of magic code that will kill the fake chips while leaving their real chips working as usual.

This is going to cause major drama the world over.
Tens of thousands of these fake chips have been sold, perhaps even hundreds of thousands…. Most people will not even know if they have brought a real one or a fake one….. After the update, they will know, but only via a whole lot of frustration and wasted time.
I can see the adaptor dieing, people buying another (fake) and it not working from ‘new’, so its going to get really ugly really quick.

The really sad thing is that the update totally kills the new chip, not just kills it on Windows PC’s, but actually kills the fake chip so it will never work again, on any OS or any computer.

Of course if you are using the fake chip on a Linux system, its all good.
Just dont plug it into a Windows PC.

I wonder if we are going to see more of this sort of thing in the future….

http://hackaday.com/2014/10/22/watch-that-windows-update-ftdi-drivers-are-killing-fake-chips/

This one kind of caught me off guard….

As you know, I have been talking about the Internet of Things on and off in this blog for a little while. Its a pretty big part of my day, so it just leaks over into this blog…. Im always mindful that a lot of my readers are not very technical, and are here because they are interested in about an Aussies life in SoCal…. So, when I post a video about computer speak, I get that some might tune out….

But stick with this one. (If nothing else, its only two minutes, so won’t hurt for very long).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmB8R2v5ZrE

You get a few days grace on the website……
Benson (my boss) discovered that I had neglected to update the RSS feed address.
He subscribes to my blog via RSS and could not update his feed because I was so excited about being over my old website name, I had totally forgotten the little details…..

Its updated now, but I will give it another day or two before I pull the plug.
(I need to check a few other things – like Google Analytics).

That said, make sure you do the right thing and take note, thebaldgeek.net is up and running so get used to it!

Im done.
I was done about 10 years ago, so by now, I am over done!

beno.id.au.
Thanks to the weird rules of the Australian government years ago, Australian citizens were not allowed to have .com website names, so I was forced to go with the .id address.
It was stupid then, its been stupid the whole time, and now that I have moved to the USA, its even more annoying.
The number of times I have had to take a 3-4 minute conversation to explain what the .id is to people is just no longer worth it.

About a week and a bit ago, after the Nth time of telling the same person my web address for the Nth time (Sorry, its beno dot what? Whats id? Why is it that? I have never heard of that. How do you type id? .au, what’s that? I have never heard of that. What website ends in that? But what if I’m not in Australia? Can I still see it?), I finally cracked.

In a few days, this website will have a new address, thebaldgeek.net
Yes, its a few extra characters to type, but you are not going to get a lot of love from me over that given what I have had to put up with over the past 10 years.

Can you tell Im done? I am. I am so very done.
It was not fun right from the time I bought it.
It barely got the job done, I should have moved on years ago.

It should be a clean switch. No, I am not going to do a forward from the old to the new. I want a clean break.

https://thebaldgeek.net is working now.
Change your bookmark, update your memory and move on.
I’m not shedding a single tear, and neither should you.

I’m done.