John's Blog

Fixing Sony A7 LCD delamination

I’m a big Sony camera fan, and I’ve been using an A7 for the past few years. Recently I noticed the rear LCD was showing a lot of patchy discolouration.

It was starting to get very noticeable and distracting, and was only getting worse.

It turns out the camera has a built-in screen protector, and it’s this that is prone to delamination – the LCD underneath isn’t affected. Fortunately it’s possible to remove the protector.

The original is stuck in place with some fairly strong glue and I used a razor blade with some gentle pushing to lift a corner. From there you can peel back just enough to get your fingernail under, and the rest can be worked free. Make sure not to pull the LCD off!

Note the mark in the top right corner is glue from the protector. This wiped clean with an alcohol wipe.

Once removed I replaced it with an Afunta A7 screen protector. It’s a bit thicker than the original (it says it’s actually glass), but fits nicely. The end result is a big improvement:

Super Nintendo Mini Classic, for kids

I bought a SNES Mini Classic recently.

The original wasn’t that popular when I was young – more of an American thing I think – and I didn’t know anyone with one, so I was very curious. The closest I got as a kid was The Great Giana Sisters on the Commodore 64 (a Super Mario clone).

I also wanted to see if I could get my daughter interested in some simple video games, outside of the many cooking/hairdressing/simple tapping games she has on the iPad.

It is easy to emulate older systems, but I wanted a self-contained box that could be plugged into the TV, and that my daughter could use. The mini classic fits the bill perfectly. It’s got two nice colourful controllers that are ideal for small hands, and a simple on/off switch and reset button. The European version is very friendly looking, unlike the ugly weird American one.

She’s loving it so far, and has even taken to watching people play Mario games on YouTube (I’m going with it being a good thing).

One thing I quickly realised is just how brutally difficult older games are, and some of the bundled games are very unforgiving for kids. Kirby’s Super Star has become the favourite, followed by Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario World.

Some of the games are also very verbose, and some of them I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to be doing (Final Fantasy & Secret Of Mana I’m looking at you).

It’s been fun playing the games with her so far, and as a bonus, her geek points are rapidly increasing!

Speeding up a Synology rebuild

After purchasing a Synology NAS I inserted a bunch of drives and left ‘expanding’ overnight.

When I came back in the morning it had gone from 2% to 5% complete – about 95% less than what I was hoping.

I discovered that you can SSH into the box and check the status of the rebuild with:

cat /proc/mdstat

This showed that I had another 14 days left. Hmm, I don’t think so.

After some poking about I discovered it defaults to a strangely small 256 byte cache size.

There were a lot of posts on the internet about changing this value in /sys/block/md3/md/stripe_cache_size, but this failed with a permission problem. Maybe this applied to older versions.

Instead you can edit:

/etc.defaults/synoinfo.conf

And add the line:

md_resync_cache_size="16384"

It took a few minutes for this to be picked up and then the rebuild time decreased to 14 hours. Much more acceptable.

I tried some larger cache size values but they didn’t make any difference.

Clearing Chrome’s DNS cache

If you ever need to point a domain name at an IP address, for sandboxing during development, or for whatever reasons, then Chrome can be a real nuisance. It seems to cache the domain name and refuses to use your new IP address.

Recent versions supposedly monitor /etc/hosts, and if you view the DNS cache this seems to be true.

chrome://net-internals/#dns

However it can still be stubborn about actually using the new IP. After some digging I found that clearing the socket pool usually does the trick.

chrome://net-internals/#sockets

Certainly beats waiting until Chrome finally gives up the old values.

MacOS terminal cursor navigation with a mouse

File this under ‘I can’t believe I didn’t know this sooner’.

Ever had to edit a long command in a terminal window? Certainly you can set things up so you can jump back and forward using the keyboard. But you can also option+click to move the cursor instantly – really handy for some commands.

Also, in iTerm at least, you can apple+click a URL to open it in your browser.