Projects
As with work dominating whatever time I have, I do not have much progress to share with personal projects.
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Over the course of producing more of these designs, I have been making some minor tweaks on the way but nothing significant enough to be able to write anything here.
2nd Life Inc.
Monday, October 20
When looking through laptop scrap again, I found a Ryzen 5000-based Lenovo Ideapad with a broken screen. I looked at the inspection log for it and it was scrapped just because the screen was broken and the bezel was chipped. I could not find an extra 17.3" panel for this laptop in the warehouse so I have not been able to fix it properly yet. I was able to connect a smaller panel to see if it could boot a live USB and it did. I checked specifications and it had a Ryzen 5 5500U which is actually Zen 2 and not Zen 3 like the other Ryzen 5000-series CPUs. Also, one memory channel had 4GB of RAM soldered down, the other channel having a SODIMM slot. It is not the greatest Ryzen laptop but it is still Ryzen-something and I did not want to see it being scrapped just because it had a broken LCD.
Later on in the day, everyone was in the back picking through a gaylord of laptop scrap parts that came in recently. As I was not doing much other than staring at Memtest86+, I joined in and somehow seemed to be the only one actually enjoying it. I found even more of those Samsung DDR4 8GB 1Rx16 laptop SODIMMs that I have been working with for a while now. Like before, all of them had date codes from Week 50, 2021 to Week 2, 2022, having me believe these parts came from the same source. I added the modules to the pile of DDR4 SODIMMs to test.
Tuesday, October 21
Receiving a LCD display driver kit in the mail for the N116BCA-EA1 that was swapped out of the Samsung Chromebook "Chromium Sulfate", I ended up taking it with me to 2nd Life Inc. for the day as I picked it up as I was heading out. I tested it with a slightly larger BOE panel of the same resolution and, unsurprisingly, it worked. These boards are not that complex and I have received boards from this same seller in the past.
I noticed multiple tall server racks come in with several Cisco UCS 5108 chassis, many Cisco switches, a Cisco 1U server of some sort along with other networking and power distribution-related equipment. Recognizing the UCS 5108 as the blades I have previously worked on here at 2nd Life back in March 2023, I took a look inside one of the blades and noticed it had sixteen 64GB DDR4 RDIMMs, totalling to 1TB per node, quite impressive especially for 2017. As all of this equipment had to be pulled from the racks and added into IMS (inventory management system), I did not work on this equipment until a couple days later as seen in the section below titled "Friday, October 24".
I continued to test RAM, working through the Samsung SODIMMs from the day before. My supervisor and manager seemed interested in that these modules were reasonbly valuable, with 96 of them potentially selling for US$800-1000. It is at this point that my memory testing and sorting ordeal is starting to pay off for the company.
Wednesday, October 22
Me and a few other coworkers worked on pulling out all of the Cisco servers from the racks from Monday, being a challenge with the immense weight of the UCS 5108 chassis, expected for blade server chassis in general. After that, I started working with one other to take apart some small AV racks and sorting whatever equipment that is pulled from them.
I noticed in laptop scrap an ASUS VE247H monitor with an Innolux M236HGE-L30 Rev.C4, about the same panel in the ViewSonic monitor I most recently acquired but a newer revision. As the monitor was in scrap, the panel was broken but now I know this specific monitor model would likely have this panel.
Thursday, October 23
I was given back a box of LCD panels I added to the inventory management system a while back after saving them from the laptop scrap to have them marked as inspected. I did not have to test the displays but I did anyway as it seemed that they plan to resell these and it took no time at all for me to test them. I eventually added more panels to the same Misc quote that I pulled from scrap recently, inspecting them in the process.
Later on, I noticed more monitors up at the inspection area. Picking the first and only ViewSonic monitor as it now seemed that the modern (post-2014) units consistently have Innolux panels, which in this case, it did as it was an MVA-based VA2055Sa utilizing an M200HJJ-L20, likely an older revision as the monitor was dated 2019 and did not have the characteristics of the post-2020 revisions like the M215HJJ-L30 Rev.C6 that I prefer. I resisted the temptation to immediately buy this unit and somehow add it into my workflow.
Friday, October 24
Today, I started to work on inspecting the large amount of server hardware we recently received. First, I worked on the several Cisco UCS 5108 blade chassis, all having four to six blades each. This is the same hardware I worked on before in March 2023, at the time prompting the installation of 240v outlets to be able to power them up for inspecting. Each blade had quite a bit of RAM, the B230 M2's having 512GB each and the B200 M4's having 1TB each. Seemingly all of the B200 M4 units had the front panel power button disabled, effectively preventing me from being able to power on these systems to boot a live USB to test the system and get specifications. However, the RAM modules were easily accessible so I was able to get part numbers and capacity that way.
To work on these units, I brought the VA2055Sa monitor I inspected the day before and the small Samsung Chromebook-now-coreboot-laptop "Chromium Sulfate" to inspect these units from where the 240v outlet is.
I noticed in the announcements that we were getting a truckload of gaylords, at first I did not realize this was literally a truckload of gaylord boxes and not just another shipment of IT hardware. It ended up being a challenge to get this massive amount of cardboard out of the back of the box truck.
Personal
I continue to notice that the year is almost over and that we are already halfway through the 2020s. I worry every day that I am having life pass me by, but this act of worrying is doing just that. The solution is simply to not think about it and make the most of it. 2025 however has shown to be my most productive year yet, especially following the return to 2nd Life Inc. in mid-July. I intend on making 2026 my best year yet given the major strides I have made this year.