Exxos's B-roll blog of nothing in particular

[exxos]

USB charger socket fell off my torch :roll:

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Scrape some of the solder mask off to give me something more to solder blob to..

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No proper clamping on the solder lugs at all :roll:

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Soldering away...

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Quick test...

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Sorted ! Good for another three weeks now....

[exxos]

Power went off in girlfriend's flat :roll:

Long story short, there was a four-way adapter which was taking out the RCD. The odd thing is though, it was only one specific socket which when something was plugged into it would actually take out the RCD.

I measured the adapter with nothing plugged in and it was basically open circuit from Earth to life and neutral I plugged in a empty extension lead into the suspect socket and the resistance dropped to about 700k.

Taking the adapter to bits was a pain because it was a security bit set, and even though I had a security bit set, the bits were not long enough. so I just ended up breaking the plastic apart in the end to get inside.

Having a good look round inside and nothing looked broken or damp or anything suspect whatsoever. so the mystery of why this extension was taking out the RCD remains a mystery. :(

[exxos]

Saw another odd critter on my way home :shock:

This one looked like the size of a normal cat.. But did not look to have further and this was sort of grey all over maybe with a hint of brown.. It had its head in the grass but his head look twice as long as any normal cat. So no idea what that was either.

[PhilC]

Gruffalo?

[exxos]

Gruffalo?

:chairsmack:

[exxos]

Went outside.. Washed my van.. Well attempted to.. :lol:

Always get those little black specs of black everywhere. They used to come off with heavy degreaser. Now they hardly come off with IPA. Not really practical to clean the van with IPA wipes :lol: But what else is there? Preferably without risking taking the paint off! :lol:

[PhilC]

@exxos if it's bitumen type spots. Then use diesel, wd40, petrol etc.

[exxos]

I tried this stuff...

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Don't think it did anything at all.

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Went over with the sponge loads of times, rinsed-repeat, half bottle gone, not getting anywhere. Rubbed some with my fingernail and seemed to start coming off.

[exxos]

There's some cheap rotary polish spinning thing is on the Internet for about £22. So ordered one of those. This rubbing at it with a sponge for hours when there's a high-speed electric option !

One interesting thing, is while IPA fetches it off, also CIF works well. But apparently you're not supposed to use that on paint ! :roll:

Hopefully I can put that crappy spray on the rotary pad and see if that will do the job next!

There is also other weird things which is like a cloth impregnated with silicon which is supposed to get the spots right off.. But I still prefer a high-speed approach so far ;)

[exxos]

VOIP has died now :pullhair:

It's been working fine for months. Yesterday I changed the No Answer Time from 10 to 20 seconds. May or may not be coincidental, but the phone hasn't worked since. Calls to our landline from a mobile beep a couple of times and drop; outbound calls do similar.

In the router "Telephone Numbers" page there's a grey circle with a cross — VoIP isn't registering. Router log says "every IP of the domain has been tried, but we didn't find the correct one!" — retrying every 30s, all failing.

IDNet support has asked me to delete and re-add the config, done that (and rebooted), no change.

A few other things I've checked:

DNS resolves sbc.insmartcloud.com to 83.137.183.171 consistently (AdGuard and Google resolvers both return the same single IP, no failover).

Ping to that IP gets nothing back — but I know that might just be ICMP filtering at the SBC.
Checked from another UK line on a different ISP — same ping timeout.

check-host.net shows the IP unreachable from 54 global test nodes (again, could just be ICMP filtering).

Tracert dies at Cogent (149.14.250.234) before reaching the destination network.

The IP belongs to DRD Communications plc / QUDO platform (ASN 34967), not IDNet directly — I'm guessing it's their wholesale VoIP upstream.

Internet is otherwise fine.

Anyone else seeing this, or any ideas what to try next?

Emailed IDnet support which is pretty much pointless in recent years. Pretty much at the "have you tried turning it off and on again " phase :roll: just did a similar post on the IDnetters forum to see if get any help there. But my router isn't getting a reply from THEIR services :roll:

EDIT:

I changed Bound Interface: from LAN to ANY_WAN and connected right away. :shrug: I never even changed that setting :stars: