Category Archives: English language

Blackberry Q10 error BB10-0020 fix (soldering required)

Let’s get quickly to the point: many people have reported that some Blackberry smartphones just randomly refuse to turn on reporting the error “BB10-0020” – here is how I fixed a phone affected by this problem.

Looking on the BB troubleshooting guide, we can see that the error is related to a bad battery, but it typically isn’t solved by simply replacing the battery. Here I will show you how to fix the problem and I will also comment a little bit about what to me appears as an obvious design fault. The problem is due to a broken connection between the battery connector and the mainboard. Continue reading →

Syma X5C quadcopter magnetic camera mount hack

Cerchi l’articolo in italiano?

It so happens that I gifted myself a cheap quadcopter for Christmas (although it arrived shortly after New Year) – the Syma X5C, as it has good reviews and is about as cheap as you can go (which also means, there are tons of them around, and replacement parts are widely available and cheap as well). This quadcopter also happens to have an HD camera that, given the price of the whole package, doesn’t suck.

HOWEVER…

The camera mount is not really well-thought. The camera is screwed on the battery compartment lid, at an awkward angle as well. Given that this drone has not much power to spare, flying it without the camera gives both better performance and better runtimes, so I decided that I wanted a better, quicker way of adding or removing the camera as I wished. Continue reading →

Quick tip: HP Pavilion X2 10-j000na Windows 10 WiFi Fix

Attenzione: l’articolo qui sotto non è valido per la versione del Pavilion 10 X2 distribuita in Italia, perciò non tradurrò l’articolo in Italiano. In ogni caso, basta cliccare il link e scaricare il driver in questione.

After updating to windows 10, every owner of the HP Pavilion 10 X2 (not the newest version, but the original one from last year) convertible will have noticed that the WiFi now sucks really bad, even though it was pretty bad even with Windows 8.1. In particular,if you leave the device in standby for a long enough period of time (as it could be during the night), when exiting the standby the WiFi card will show Error 10 – Unable to start device and won’t work until a reboot.

Now, a bit of a disclaimer: what I’m writing here refers to the UK version of the tablet, the 10-j000na which differs from the 10-k000nl in a few things, including the WiFi card; so even though the problem seems to affect both the Broadcom and Realtek cards, the fix here is ONLY VALID FOR the tablets that in Device Management show Broadcom 802.11abgn Wireless SDIO adapter.

So, here is how I got it fixed: after trying all sorts of drivers, I came across the version 5.93.103.15 that is distributed by Toshiba, most likely because one of their products luckily uses the same crappy WiFi card. Here is the link: http://support.toshiba.com/support/viewContentDetail?contentId=4007649

EDIT: new version of the driver available, again from Toshiba, 5.93.103.25 link: http://support.toshiba.com/support/viewContentDetail?contentId=4008154 This helped me fix some more errors that appeared probably after some Windows Update.

After removing the old driver and installing the aforementioned one, I was able to leave the device in standby for a solid 12 hours and the WiFi was already connected as soon as I opened the lid. I also tried to connect to a Wireless Display and it worked absolutely fine, so I’d rate this driver as perfectly compatible with our device. I will keep testing this driver for the next days to see if it is a definitive fix or just a placebo, but it looks very promising.

Kudos to Toshiba!

Edit: fix also reportedly working for Asus Transformer Book T100TAF (thanks to Marcin Kruszyński) and Asus VivoTab 8 M81C (thanks to markop90)

Pimp my drill – Cordless drill lithium battery conversion

[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”6″ gal_title=”Pimp my drill – english”]

DISCLAIMER – Lithium batteries are DANGEROUS! We know enough about what we are doing and especially we NEVER put anyone but us in danger. In no respect shall we incur any liabiity for any damage to people or things happening due to you doing what is written in the following article.

Stai cercando l’articolo in italiano?
Did your old trusty cordless drill die out due the batteries not being able to provide enough juice? Are you as annoyed as us about throwing stuff away? Well, here’s a solution you may want to look at.

Spoiler: final result – The writing says: Don’t go below 12.0!!

Continue reading →