Category Archives: Tech Stuff

MateBook X Pro Survey Results: Most User-Modified Laptop!

How common are the issues plaguing the MateBook X Pro? And how many users have taken solving them into their own hands? This past month, I surveyed 309 visitors of Reddit.com/r/MatebookXPro and BradsHacks.com about their experience with the critically acclaimed Huawei laptop.

The majority of the surveyed users reported having a loose or rattling touchpad. Based on my understanding of how the touchpad is installed into the frame, I suspect that all units actually have this issue to some degree and some users just don’t perceive it as an abnormality. After all, loose trackpads are quite common in laptops.

Subjective Perception

Similarly, the issues with temperature and various types of noise are inherently subjective. For example, the same laptop can be considered too hot or loud by one user yet be completely acceptable for another. Some people are more sensitive to the buzz of coil whine and work in quieter environments, so they could notice the coil whine much more than others.
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NotebookCheck Needs to Fix Their Useless Rating System

Everything is “good” according to NotebookCheck. They’ve come across devices with glaring problems, but even those get a high final score.

How are consumers supposed to distinguish between better and worse when three-quarters of all scores are between 80 and 90?

Here’s how NotebookCheck categorizes the scores:
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Huawei Revises MateBook X Pro with Speaker Distortion Remedy

Previously, the Huawei MateBook X Pro’s speakers would produce distortion because they rattled against the laptop body. As shown in this unit purchased in November, Huawei has addressed this issue by putting small pieces of foam underneath the speakers. Is this because they saw my original post, where I both pointed out the issue and introduced this very solution? We may never know.

Spectre X360 13t (Coffee Lake) Teardown

The bottom lid: 4 Phillips screws hidden under the rubber strip/foot, 2 T5 screws on the bottom corners. HP, fuck you for hiding screws under the rubber foot, and for double-fooling people by putting them under only one of the two strips.

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MateBook 13 Models: 16GB Variant Internally Tested

With a 4.6GHz i7-8565U and a full 25W GeForce MX150, Huawei’s upcoming MateBook 13 is looking to become the most power-dense ultrabook. But apparently, it only has 8GB of RAM? Let’s investigate.
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Show CPU/GPU Stats in Notification Area with Afterburner

By the way, I’m using NetSpeedMonitor to show my network throughput.

If you want to show CPU or GPU stats like usage, frequency, power and temperature in the Taskbar’s Notification Area/system tray, like iStat Menus in Mac OS, you can do it using MSI Afterburner.
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Extract Image from PDF in Acrobat DC (with transparency)

Here’s how you can extract a PNG image from a PDF in Acrobat DC while preserving its transparency.

Go into edit mode.

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You’re Probably Doing 3D Printing Tolerancing Wrong. Here’s a Better Way.

Do you use 3D printing to make functional parts? Do your printed parts have slight dimensional errors, such as undersized holes? It is essential to take care of this if you use your FDM 3D printer to make precise or functional parts. Here’s the easiest and most elegant fix, using nothing but your slicer and a caliper.

Because the extruded molten plastic gets squashed by the nozzle and also flows outward toward the sides, everything you print is fattened, creating overall oversized prints and undersized holes.

Fortunately, there are ways to fix this flaw. First, I would recommend against these methods, if you currently use them:

Bad methods

Compensating by slightly changing the values in CAD: this is cumbersome if you use different printers or have collaborators, and problematic if you work with assemblies in CAD.
Changing the size in the slicer: FDM 3D printers generally have undersized ID and oversized OD, so enlarging or shrinking the size is bound to reduce one problem while worsening the other.