Miscellaneous
Almost 10 years after I registered 0x04.com, it’s time to part ways.
Yesterday I finalised the sale of 0x04.com.
My company in Singapore was called 0x04 pte. ltd. and to avoid any confusion I’ve renamed to su1 pte. ltd. su1 standing for Superuser.one. 🤷♂️
I live in Singapore. And haze is a thing. Thanks Indonesia and burning rain forests to create palm plantations. Needless to say, so far 2019 and 2020 haven’t been great.
Anyhow I got myself a Novita air purifier ~2 years ago, and I stole received a Xiaomi purifier from Liyun.
The Novita is pretty dumb (the PM sensor goes randomly nuts and it needs to be quite polluted before it really kicks in. It also needs to be turned off/on again every so often for it to keep on standby — if not it goes into some sleep mode).
The manual says you should consider cleaning (aka remove dust and cat hair) every 3 or so months, and replace the filter every 6 months. It’ll show a warning when the timer hits zero.
Selling new filters is how they make money I guess.
Buy a new filter (or don’t and use the same filter), reset the timer and things are back to normal.
For the Xiaomi it’s a bit harder. The “smart filter” is really just a HEPA filter with an NFC tag. It’ll calculate how often the purifier runs and calculate a % based on that. I’ve now hit 0% left on my filter after a haze season (September 2019) and ~8 months of normal usage (as it’s in the bedroom, it starts filtering around 21h00, and then runs in the quiet night mode until 9am next morning and then shuts off).
While the purifier still runs at 0%, it gives a big red warning both in the app and on the device itself and urges you to replace the filter.
You can tape off the NFC tag with some tinfoil, but that’ll just change the big red warning from “used and old filter, please replace” to “fake filter, please replace”.
Now I am not against replacing HEPA filters when they are used and are not actually filtering the air anymore. But I am also against uselessly replacing things for the sake of handing money to $BigCorp and ruining the planet with it.
Running a few tests with a relatively precise PM sensor (use this assembled kit if you are not into DIY) shows that for both my purifiers, the exhuast air is 0 PM1.0, 0 PM2.5 and 0 PM10. So that shows me that both are still working and cleaning the air just fine (further away in the room, the PM heads up to 10-20 on haze-free days).
Am I missing something here? Why throw away something that still works?
This is a rant.
I’ve dealt with quite a few (bad) banks over the course of my life across countries and businesses.
And I think HSBC is one of the worst.
For various reasons. But mostly for being stuck in another century.
And you’d expect a tiny (Belgian) bank to be horrible. Not one of the biggest banks in the world with branches in almost every country of the world.
But no. HSBC pretty much tops it.
I have tons of other examples how and why HSBC failed me, and by the end of the year I think it’s time to part ways.
