How ScanTek Australia Could lmpove Their Trust

I was recently required to verify my identity using ScanTek in Australia. However the experience wasn’t great, with not a lot to build trust.

1. The email was in plain text with no branding and was simply from [email protected]

Hi {NAME},

{COMPANY} needs you to verify your identity - click the link below to get started.

https://sctk.au/{CODE}

--

2. They used a short code URL, rather than something on their main domain, or a subdomain of their main domain, and it looked very similar to spam/phishing links.

3. If you look up the whois for sctk.au it is registered to Scantek Solutions Pty Ltd, but the email domain was registered to a different Sole Trader ABN. Now looking BAMBER, NEIL ROSS, he was a founder of ScanTek, but again it does build a lot of trust on an identity management system.

4. It also didn’t help that looking up sctk.au on emailVertas showed it marked a suspicious (this has since been fixed).

5. I called ScanTek to support to confirm things. The system was busy and I arranged a call back. When they called back the number showed as an Australia mobile number, not a fixed line or premium number that I could look up to associate with ScanTek.

6. Finally they don’t list sctk.au on any of the support documentation on their website. It would really help if they at least did this.

I hope they can address these issues.

What can Reship do to get more 5 star reviews?

Packaging forwarding services overall seem to get mixed reviews. I think this is largely down to expectations. They advertise low postage rates, but then have a few extra fees which people are surprised by. This leads to a negative experience simply because it gave false expectations and didn’t live up to them. I think the other issue is that it makes sense for higher value small items. Low value small items are not worth the postage costs, unless you really really need something, and large items just cost too much to post internationally in general. They should also link to the direct for their budget PostNL option (https://postnl.post/track?barcodes=) rather than where you have to manual input the tracking ID (https://postnl.post/#/tracking/items/).

I recently used Reship to post a guitar pedal which I couldn’t get here in Australia. The costs were as follows:
– $5 Annual mailbox fee (although this can be spread amongst future payments)
– $7 Package Fee
– $29.34 Shipping (Cheapest PostNL option)
– $4.22 Shipping GST (Australia requires large international companies to collect GST)

The total was $45.56 ($40 if you don’t count the mailbox fee) was still less than USPS would have charged at $55, and the particular seller I was buying from would not post international.

USPS took 2 days to deliver my package from the seller to the Reship warehouse. Reship had taken photos and added to my account on the 3rd day. I paid the fees and it shipped the next business day. Using PostNL, my item took 45 calendar days to reach Australia. This was also longer than the estimated 15-20 days, even if they meant business days.

If you choose to give it a go, please use my referral code for $10 towards your first shipment: DK771N6N8

Fixing Noise on the ’68 Custom and ’65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue

I’ve been long wishing the white noise floor was lower on my ’65 Deluxe Reverb reissue. I thought it was the carbon film resistors which tend to me higher noise that metal film, but after owning a DRRI for a long time, I have now discovered that it’s the PCB trace from the Vibrato channel volume pot wiper to the V2b pin 7:
– Cut the trace just below the bright cap in the volume pot
– Solder a shield cable from the volume pot wiper or bright cap socket to the resistor on V2b pin 7
– Solder the ground to one of the ground points on the PCB

Psionic Audio talks about how to do this in this video at 19:04, although he neglects to mention there is a resistor wired to V2b pin 7. He also says that the ’68 custom has other issues, and it does (the negative feedback and reverb on both channels) which add noise. But the negative feedback is primarily amplifying the same noise from the PCB traces as in the ’65. I know as I added a switch to my ’65 to have both negative feedback values, and the noise is louder on the ’68 setting, but is still a lot better now that I did this mod.

Two-Rock Copied My Deluxe Reverb!

Ok, not really, but I had already modified my Deluxe Reverb with:
– Be switchable high power fixed bias/low power cathode bias
– Reverb/Tremolo on both channels
– Bright cap removed
– Modified ’68 custom tone stack
– Modified negative feedback
– Post phase inverter master volume (although I didn’t like this on this amp and removed it)

And I was going to add:
– Add raw (tone stack bypass) with volume control
– Bias Tremolo (but only after converting to hand wired)

I was recently looking at what amps were on the market, and realised the Two-Rock Vintage Deluxe is essentially this amp:
– Low power mode is cathode bias
– Single channel with reverb/tremolo
– Bright cap switchable
– Mid control/Texture control
– Presence control
– Master Volume
– Tone stack bypass (with tone control)
– Bias Tremolo

One Pedal Company for Overdrives?

Was thinking about this recently, and while one of my favorite overdrives is the Wampler Euhporia, I think if I could only have pedals from one company for overdrives, it would be Lovepedal:

Eternity Drive
With more bass and more high end than a Tubescreamer, this is my other favorite drive. I’ve have been running one of these into a Wampler Euphoria in a DIY clone for over a decade!

Super Six Stevie Mod
The latest addition to my board, the Super Six has those cranked blackface tones in spades!

Purple Plexi
Another stable on my pedalboard, the Purple Plexi is a raw sounding Marshall in a box pedal.

5E3 Deluxe
Honky cranked tweed tones in this pedal. Very bright and lacking a tone control, but you can role down on your guitar if needed.

Zendrive
Perhaps the original “Dumble in a box” pedal, but perhaps has only been equalled by the Mad Professor Simble. Lovepedal took over the production of the Zendrive, so we’ll count it in this list.

Dover Drive
Another colaboration with Hermida audio, the Dover Drive is Eric Johnson in a box:

Fixing Unselectable Audio Device on Mac System Settings

My MacBook recently stopped me being able to select my monitor speakers as the output in the system settings. Everytime I clicked it, it would jump back to the built in speakers. I could select it as the output for alerts, and then came across this solution:

1) Go To /Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup.app

2) On the menu bar Window -> Show Audio Devices

3) Right click the desired audio device and click “Use This Device For Sound Output”

After I did this I could no longer select the the built in speakers as the output device. It would do the same thing as before, so I don’t know what is going on with OSX in this instance.

Deluxe Reverb Cathode Bias Mod

I recently completed a mod to my Deluxe Reverb Reissue to add a cathode bias mode. Overall it made the tone brighter and a little more raw, but didn’t make that much difference so I switched it back and forgot to take an internal picture in the complete state, but you can see part of the mod here:

I changed to a ClassicTone power transform which has a low power 300V primary along with the regular 330V. I used a 4PDT switch to switch between high power/standard bias, and low power cathode bias. Using the low power mode puts it inline with a Tweed Deluxe, so I used the same cathode resistor (250?) and bypass cap (25µF). I put the 4PDT switch in fuse slot, moved the fuse and power over and removed the standby switch. I disconnected the middle pin of the bias pot to do the mod, along with the respective pins on the power tubes, so no modification to the PCB was needed. I did need to drill extra holes though to fit the ClassicTone transformer, which is vintage spec.

Rough demo here, no comparison, just for posterity:

Comparing Google and AWS free instance performance

I was looking to host some websites and wondered if I could do it for free on either Google Cloud or AWS free instances. Google list their free instance as having 2 vCPUs, while AWS list only 1. However, since this is an arbitrary unit derived by the cloud service themselves, we don’t know if 2 vCPUs on Google is really faster than one on AWS

I wanted to use the service with the highest performance, so I decided to benchmark the two using sysbench. To my suprise Google was actually faster than AWS as you can see from the screenshots. Ultimately I found shared hosting to be higher performance in the real world, as you share a large powerful server with a lot of memory, so it can handle spikes in traffic better, and once I factored in backup and support costs, it made sense to just pay for that.

Google

AWS

LG Ultrafine 4K daisy chain with 34WK95U-W

After my last post comparing these two monitors, I wanted to see if you could daisy chain the two and still only have to connect one cable to the MacBook, as the LG Ultrafine 4K supports 40gbps and has a thunderbolt out port as well.

Turns out that you can! Thunderbolt 40gbps from MacBook -> LG Ultrafine -> 20gbps to LG 34WK95U-W at full resolution on both monitors.

LG UltraFine 4K 24″ (Mac) vs. LG 34WK95U-W 5K2K 34″ Monitor

For a while now I’ve been using an LG UltraFine 4K (24MD4kL) monitor with my Apple MacBook. However I’ve wanted to have a little more desktop space and was able to get an LG 34WK95U-W UltraWide at a discount, so I thought I would share the differences between these two high pixel density monitors.

Comparison:
– Higher pixel density on the UltraFine, but the UltraWide is still retina like
– Clearing sounding speakers UltraFine, but the UltraWide is louder and much more useable than the built in 14″ MacBook’s
– Ultrafine is slightly brighter, and the semi-gloss screen is slightly more premium
– 3 USB-C ports on the UtraFine compared to 2 USB-A, but the UltraWide has HDMI/DisplayPort inputs and can display two sources at the same time
– UltraFine wakes from sleep faster
– Thunderbolt on the UlatrFine allows daisy-chaining to another 4K monitor
– Native Apple controls for volume an brightness on the LG UltraFine although you can use MonitorControl with the UltraWide
– Some people are annoyed by the fan noise on the UltraWide, but I couldn’t hear it
– About 1.5x more desktop space on the UltraWide
– UltraWide is almost twice the price

Overall, some people might be better off getting two UltraFine 4Ks instead of a single UlatrFine, since it’s almost twice the price, but I got my used and I already use the monitor on my MacBook as a second display as well as Touch ID and the webcam, so having 3 monitors was just too clumsy and took up too much space. I tend to work on just 2/3rds of the UltraFine, as I find two windows optimum as a programmer. But the extra third allows me to have space for email or a video without having to constantly cover my main work.

I had to do a few things to get my UlatrFine to work at high DPI resolutions.
– Update the monitor firmware using the LG OnScreen Control software downloadable here.

– Using the display menu on the monitor itself, change the Display Port version to 1.4. Again it wouldn’t show up as a 5120×2160 monitor without doing this.

More tips can be found on this MacRumors thread. I did not need to use SwitchResX or BetterDummy in order to run at 3840×1620 resolution.

Also while the UltraFine 4K is made for Mac, people have got it working on Windows machines with Thunderbolt, and the brightness can be controlled with one of these apps:
https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/lg-ultrafine-brightness/9N5MJ2FQ4GWW
https://github.com/motamed/LG-UltraFine-Brightness-Control