ReSound LiNX Quattro GN C-1 Charger Fix

ReSound LiNX Quattro are a line of bluetooth enabled smart, programmable hearing aids.

One thing NOT smart about these is the design around the ReSound GN model C-1 charger base unit's microUSB charging port.

Shown here on the reverse of the charger, and note the telltale trapezoidal shape of the socket for the microUSB plug at bottom. Based a friend's unit and those on eBay and elsewhere on sale for "parts only" due to having died, I've found a fix at least in cases as I describe here. Their charger one day no longer consistently indicated full charge, and over the next day or so it appeared to stop charging altogether. Upon closer examination I noticed that the cable when plugged into the socket was very loose. 

Using a couple of thin but firm metal spatulas from a set of precision tools geared toward tearing down electronic devices, I carefully pried the clamshell style case apart near the left and right seams, which I found secured with plastic clips. I was startled to find that the little piece of metal shown was just detached and if not for the case free to roam about the circuitboard. 

A bit of research on the microUSB architecture indicated that while that metal sleeve may beyond providing ground not serve any purpose electrically other than as shielding, structurally it is vital to ensure the male microUSB cable mates with the female socket's electrical contacts so that power can flow.

I decided to try to carefully mix and apply a tiny amount of epoxy under and around the area of the metal sleeve using a toothpick. I took care to try to encapsulate parts of the sleeve and the surface of the circuitboard it mates to in order to ensure a given male microUSB cable would once again fit snugly. I allowed the epoxy to cure overnight with the unit sitting level and upright, then carefully plugged the unit into a power adapter for a few hours.

The result? 

Signs of life, the green LEDs shown indicate the base unit is fully charged! Hearing aids placed in the unit's little cubby holes (which convey charge via induction) and the unit's status LEDs along with the hearing aids' own onboard LEDs now indicate active charging. Not bad, taking a "dead" device for some $17 off eBay and returning it to service rather than forking over $250 for one off Amazon, or nearly $400 for an OEM replacement from the manufacturer! 

At least one of their newer models I'm aware of implements USB C. It appears ReSound revised their design with that more uniform rectangular-slash-oval socket shape combined with visibly less empty space surrounding the socket. That clearly deters the kind of torque and play its predecessor suffers with.

While the C-1's fix is very simple, I think thanks to its design the issue could recur. The asymmetric nature of the microUSB socket plus the not quite flush fit of the female socket in the charger's plastic chassis can, over time, and especially with carelessness, allow for potentially enough play to cause the sleeve to detach with this C-1 model. 

Problem solved... for now.

Run Classic MSPaint On a Locked Down Windows 11 PC

My workplace updated the corporate laptop I use with Windows 11.

While it has its quirks, overall it hasn't been disruptively annoying or infuriating so far, just minorly so. 

The taskbar in a distinctly Apple-esque way has the icons horizontally centered by default. The calendar opens only on your primary monitor in a multi-monitor setup (a particularly trivial habit to be forced to break).

My only real (and slight) annoyance, which I address here, is that good old MSPaint has been replaced with a more frills tool, Paint. If accustomed to the old school tool, you may as I did find yourself aggravated that the workflow is a step or few more convoluted for the kind of elementary stuff you might do. 

By elementary, I mean stuff you want to do in the second or few you're accustomed to. Yes, there's the snipping tool, yes, there's Photoshop and Paint.net and myriad others, but no, this is about MSPaint, damn it!

Complicating this is that I lack admin permissions on my work machine. That means installing Classic Paint and pretty much anything else is a no-go. However, I found a workaround.

My first attempt involved trying to use the mspaint.exe executable from a Windows 10 laptop. To make that happen, I took a copy of that file, renamed it to mspaint.txt to avoid triggering any potential email filtering, and emailed that roughly 917KB file to my corporate inbox. 

From there, I saved the file to my Windows 11 machine, then renamed it to change the file extension from TXT to EXE, and tried running it. However, that yielded "Unable to create new document." I know Windows 10's version of mspaint.exe had a few changes since the Windows 7 "era", and likely some dependencies tied to Windows 10 itself, so this wasn't surprising. 

Notably, however, despite Windows 11 being locked down by group policy and antimalware measures, it didn't balk at attempting to start up its older Microsoft-published cousin. Anyway, out of sheer laziness, I then did a google search for web servers with directory browsing enabled using the following criteria:

"Index of /" mspaint.exe

That yielded among others a site down under in Australia somewhere that hadn't bothered to lock down their folder structure hosting an earlier version of the file, this one a mere 335KB or so.

That file I poached and went ahead and uploaded here. Those wishing to verify it's safe can run it past VirusTotal, but as far as Microsoft is concerned, it ran without a hitch.

Count on Microsoft, Inc., or any other corporate entity in IT to inflict the maxim that time marches on upon its users, by periodically and irrevocably changing things up in often annoying, inconvenient, arguably unnecessary ways.

That's perhaps the one constant right behind change itself in the industry today. 

Pool Deck Drain Cleaning, Mechanical and Biological

Now for something completely different, a cobbled-together "solution" for a clogged pool deck drain!

Hurricanes Helene and now Milton have had their way and then some with my area of Florida. As a result, various compostable debris off my roof has found its way down onto my pool (or bacta tank, if you're that hardcore) deck and through the plastic drain. Similar to this one except the drain lives at the corner of the concrete deck and concrete block wall.

Heavy rain led to water intrusion into my garage underneath the back porch due to a compromised door threshold with rotting wood thanks to one and done sketchy, sloppy workmanship by a contractor who shall remain nameless (not out of compassion, it's just been so long I've forgotten, lucky them). 

So, inspired by madness and various other factors, and rather than pay some handyperson to do the job for me, I put together a selection of goods to handle things brutishly.

First, a wood augur, this one.

Next, a 1/2 inch hex socket to hold the augur in place.

Then, a couple of TEKTON 1/2 Inch Drive socket extensions, 24 inches each.

Next, a socket adapter to enable my cordless drill to hook up with this maniacal assembly. 

And, finally, OG Duck Tape to literally seal the deal. 

The idea here is to connect these pieces into basically a long, heavy drill bit that will see the auger power through what gunk and dirt lives in the deck drain and extract it. 

Here's the end result, Ryobi drill for scale.

Months prior to devising this thing, I deployed a liquid biological dethatcher, basically a concoction of beneficial bacteria and microbes to go after accumulated organic matter and start to break it downl. This is similar to the notion of  creating compost, where bulky leaves and branches and grass clippings and whatnot are deconstructed into humus, ideal for gardening among other things.

To help my new microbial friends do their job, I also every few weeks in added some compost accelerator to speed up and promote the bacteria's growth.

Before this enterprise, the rotting threshold saw water intrusion leading to small puddles of water collecting in the area indoors just behind the back door leading to the pool deck.

After a few goes over a couple weeks with this super-lengthened augur, proper drainage has been restored, and despite the inches upon inches of rainfall, water has yet to accumulate. This is buying me some time so that repairs can commence to the threshold once the nice, agonizingly brief spell of cool fall weather sets in.

Following drilling into the muck and seeing the auger capture and help me extract foul-smelling, increasingly soil-like gunk, I took a regular garden hose to the drain and did a once over with it down the length of it. As I did so, very fine organic matter with roughly the same dark hue (and odor) as the dethatching agent would bubble up through the drain as I went, suggesting the bacteria had well established itself and been gobbling up the stuff in advance nicely.

Not exactly within the purview of information technology, but at the same time a nice side project to pursue to take unclogging clogs into my own hands.

Gateway vs Router: T-Mobile 5G Home Internet and Wifi Network Contention

A couple of years ago T-Mobile 5G Home Internet finally became available in my area of Florida, enabling me to ditch longtime but miserly AT&T with their paltry "legacy" DSL (6 Mbps down / ~384 Kbps [!] up), for upwards of 170+ Mbps down / 3-6 Mbps up on 5G.

In the wake of the afterglow of comparatively fantastic speed, following hurricane Debby that blew through my area of Florida in August 2024, I experienced significantly decreased internet bandwidth with my wireless devices only.

Devices hardwired via ethernet cable, like my desktop PC, were unaffected, and speed tests for those showed around the expected bandwidth. My laptops (plural), tablets (ditto), and others though were definitely having issues. Why?

I called T-Mobile and they informed me that one 5G tower of theirs was down for repairs while at least one other was undergoing maintenance and awaiting parts. I proceeded to reach out over a dozen times by message back and forth with T-Mobile support via former Twitter and Facebook, tracking their progress and advising of changes on my end. My 5G gateway has been facing out a south-facing window of my home, and the nearest tower they recommended was E-SE, so I oriented the front face (where the 5G antennas live for this Sagemcom Fast 5688W gateway) as best I could in that general direction.

Now, here's the thing. When I first set up the gateway using the T-Life mobile app for Android, I configured it (innocently enough) with the same wifi SSID and password as that used by my TP-Link router (which supports the newer WIFI 6 standard, as does the 5G gateway). Therein lies the problem, as I found out with reasonable certainty. 

The wifi 6 standard among other benefits enables you to not have to create unique SSIDs to use around your house, say. Instead of creating one SSID for say each wifi extender you might have on every compass point of your home as you might have with wifi 5 and older, now you can use a single SSID to be smartly managed by the router in a mesh setup (as I delve into here).

However, as I discovered, that does NOT mean that separate wifi 6 gateways or routers play nice, wifi wise, with each other. Computers, tablets, even wifi extenders all cope nicely within the wifi 6 standard, but "royalty" in the form of gateways and routers that actually serve as upper management for your local wifi device community can clash.

I followed steps in the T-Life app to do the following:

1. From the Overview => My Wi-fi screen, create a new wifi network named TMobile (with SSID hidden).
   
   
2. From under My Networks, tap the current SSID I originally configured on both my gateway and router, let's call it DARTH.
   
   
3. Tap on DARTH, and on the Network Details screen, tap Delete Network, and confirm. Note also the reminder from T-Mobile, you must have at least one Wi-Fi network to be able to access the gateway from the T-Life app itself. 

In retrospect, that little warning T-Mobile provides turned out to be prophetic, and I wish I took the hint early on that hey, maybe dueling wifi networks are part of the problem, here. Indeed, by setting up the T-Mobile gateway to use the exact same wifi network as my router, I can only imagine the constant radio frequency duel going on between the two devices, each with the same valid credentials and security, each vying for control of the wifi devices on my LAN.

Now, having that TMobile network on the gateway, not only hidden but completely unique to DARTH which my router manages exclusively, and the T-Life app connecting by wifi from the former network's only connected device, my phone, I now am enjoying bandwidth much like my desktop PC from my laptop.

Much better! At this point the only things stifing connectivity are what you'd expect, obstacles impeding signal between the wifi extenders and the router, the relatively elderly Intel Centrino onboard adapter this particular laptop uses, etc. Not a pitched battle between gateway and router over which one serves as the official conduit for local network traffic.