I do a fair number of repairs at my bench, which is in my home office (well, it IS my home office), and all my power tools live either in the garage, or in the shed, so I needed a small electric screw driver for doing repairs. I’ve known about the Skil iXO’s for a while, but just recently I found a USB chargeable one! The 2354-07, which oddly has a MicroUSB connector on the base, charges via USB, and gives pretty decent performance for it’s price. I was able to use it to easily unscrew and open the MOTU 828 I recently repaired, and just about everything else I’ve thrown at it. My only real complaint is the driver doesn’t have any kind of clutch, so it pretty much will (un)screw with all available torque, which is a fair amount given it’s 400RPM speed (enough that you’ll find your hand/wrist twisting before realizing you need to let go of the trigger). The unit is small, and if you had bigger hands that medium, you’d find yourself pressing the forward/reverse selector (something I’ve seen people complain about online). But ultimately, this unit is meant for light duty. I could really see it as being useful in a network or server closet for racking gear. I may pick up a second one for that purpose in the future, if I expect to be re-racking a lot of stuff.
[xrr rating=4.5/5]
I recently realized that my Asus RT-N66U wasn’t routing at the speed it should have been when running the Tomato firmware. Apparently this is because Tomato disables (or rather, doesn’t enable) the hardware acceleration for NAT traffic. So, I started looking at a replacement router. At first I was looking at a Routerboard from Mikrotik, but a friend steered me toward the Ubiquiti Edgerouter products. The Edgerouter Lite is a pretty popular product for Sys Admins and network engineers home networks, but Ubiquiti recently released the Edgerouter X series. They’re the same OS, just slightly more consumer based hardware (no hardware acceleration, faster processor, but less RAM/Flash, and more ports). The stock X was nice, but the SFP version really caught my eye because it had Passive POE on all ports, and supported a single SFP module (which I could throw a copper module in and use for uplink to my cable modem). Amazon had them for $79 with Prime, so I ordered one and waited anxiously for it to show up.
Dad dropped a “new” (new to him, that is) MOTU 8282 Mk II off with me a few days ago complaining that it was rebooting randomly. A quick Google search turned up this is a relatively known issue, and that the LM1117-3.3 (3.3V regulator) basically starts to flake out after a few years, and causes issues.