Source: Hacker News
Source: Hack a Day
You know how it goes — some gadgets stick around in your toolbox far longer than reason dictates, because maybe one day you’ll need it. How many of us held onto ISA diagnostic cards long past the death of the interface?
But unlike ISA, USB isn’t going away anytime soon. Which is exactly why this USB and more tester by [Iron Fuse] deserves a spot in your toolbox. This post is not meant to directly lure you into buying something, but seen how compact it is, it would be sad to challenge anyone to reinvent this ‘wheel’, instead of just ordering it.
So, to get into the details. This is far from the first USB tester to appear on these pages, but it is one of the most versatile ones we’ve seen so far. On the surface, it looks simple: a hand-soldered 14×17 cm PCB with twelve different connectors, all broken out to labelled test points. Hook up a dodgy cable or device, connect a known-good counterpart, and the board makes it painless to probe continuity, resistance, or those pesky shorts where D+ suddenly thinks it’s a ground line.
You’ll still need your multimeter (automation is promised for a future revision), but the convenience of not juggling probes into microscopic USB-C cavities is hard to overstate. Also, if finding out whether you have a power-only or a data cable is your goal, this might be the tool for you instead.
Source: OSNews
The following chart shows how the Adobe Reader installer has grown in size over the years. When possible, 64-bit versions of installers were used.
↫ Alexander Gromnitsky
Disk space is cheap, sure, but this is insanity.
