Rick's b.log - entry 2025/10/08

Crappy fake µSD card

It'll take more than a pretty pattern to convince me.

Now, in the beginning it seemed to work, only suffering from a rather tragic lethargy - managing a pathetic 5.78MB/Sec with the read test benchmark built into the Linux disc manager. I didn't entirely trust it because, well, something just seemed off with it - like no actual "SD" logo or any sort of manufacturer ID. I used it as a place to dump stuff of lesser importance, and also a ghost backup (because it was there). That is to say, not my only backup, so if I lost the data, no big.

I dropped my AI generated songs onto the card and, well, that's when things went screwy. The album art for some of them didn't appear. Verifying the integrity of the filesystem threw up numerous errors. I thought to myself "I bet I've passed 32GiB". Checking the space used showed that I had only used about ten and a half gigabytes, but looking in the space used in the disc info tool said I had about 108GB from 134GB. That annoyance is because different bits of Linux just cannot agree on whether to use decimal or binary sizes. So that's 26GB (decimal), or about 24¼ GiB (binary). Is exFAT really that wasteful? [later] Yes, it seems like the default allocation size of an exFAT volume is 256K. In RISC OS terms, this is the LFAU, which means that files will be allocated space in units of 256K. So a 10 byte file will take 256K, and a 300K file will take 512K. NTFS and ext2/3, by comparison, use 4K allocation units.

That's a lot of space consumed for so little data.

So, while I haven't technically passed 32GiB, there is a possibility that the new data written crossed the 32GiB boundary depending on how exFAT does things, if it fills in freed up space first, or allocates previously unused sectors first. Why is this important? Well, I think it's a cheap old 32GB part that has been rebadged as a fancy 128GB one. If you pass that boundary and it eats your data, too late. The vendor has your cash. Sucks to be you, etc.

Here's a photo of the back. A quick search for that ID leads me to a 512GB SD card on Amazon Germany that everybody has called out as a fake.

The lack of an SD logo and manufacturer are massive clues.

I got myself a 32GB SanDisk µSD card, formatted it Linux native (so ext), and popped it in. It's there for having some extra space, a place to put my screenshots and stuff some day (but not right now).

Paracetamol

Eight boxes of paracetamol pills.

How much paracetamol? Eight in a tube, two tubes in a box, so sixteen. This is basically like MEMC page sizes isn't it? So I have either eight packs of sixteen, or sixteen tubes of eight. Which means I have 128 kilobytes paracetamols.
Being the 500g type (I don't use the 1000mg ones), that means I have sixty four thousand milligrams of paracetamol, or in normal sane measurements, 64g. Over 10g at one time is very likely to be fatal, and 24g at one time absolutely is. In the UK, an overdose is considered if the amount taken is ≥75mg/kg/24 hours; which for an adult is something in the region of 4000mg in 24 hours. That's only four 1000mg pills, or eight 500mg ones.
I typically take one or two a day when at work depending on what bits are hurting. I don't like taking them because I'm very well aware that painkillers kill the pain but don't do anything about the cause of the pain. But I'm getting older, this crappy body I inhabit is way beyond its warranty period, and I do a difficult physical job so, you know, compromise.

Why am I talking about overdoses? Do I plan to check out? Absolutely not, and if I ever did, trust me when I say it sure as hell would never be with paracetamol. If you don't directly end up in coma, you may well "recover" in hospital and maybe start to regret your choices only to learn the meaning of the phrase "fulminant hepatic failure", which typically takes 2 to 4 days because you slaughtered your liver, and, well, really sucks to be you, bye. What a horrible way to go.

No, I'm talking about paracetamol overdose because getting this in the UK (back circa 2000, but I doubt it's any better nowadays) was impossible. Supermarkets would only sell a single box, a chemist might give you two if you didn't look sus. Your haul? Maybe a dozen or so tablets. I remember one day mom and I wanted to have a stock of them so we went into different chemists one by one - there's a Boots here, a Superdrug there, and a Moss over there... What a farce.

Anyway, I have 128 pain pills which, god forbid, will last me for a good long time. Hopefully until this time next year, but this depends on what I'm doing...

Dates are important. Currents and raisins less so.

...on the other hand, this lot cost me about €30. I think it's something silly like £1/box in the UK. It's worth mentioning that these are not regular pills. They are a special type that can dissolve in my mouth and be taken without water. This is primarily because as gross tasting as headache pills are, I find water to taste worse.
And all those people who say "b-b-but water doesn't have a taste!", you are right provided that you can get hold of pure water that has absolutely no contaminants. Unfortunately, since water is a powerful oxidiser and corrosive, pure water needs to be carefully created in a lab. The stuff you buy in bottles is full of contamination - only the labels will tend to say something nicer like "mineral water". And, dear god, let's just not talk about the stuff that comes out of the tap - it's like drinking from a swimming pool (pee and all)... Anyway, that means this probably costs a little bit more than regular paracetamol. And, note, 30 euros is only 3,75 a box. It just adds up when you get a lot of them at once.

Oh, and for my American readers, this is the same thing as Tylenol. So I'm now the proud owner of eight boxes of auto-autism pills...not that I need any help in that department. 🤣

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Joseps, 10th October 2025, 15:31

On the subject of water, I live in a tiny village with extremely hard water (plus what looks loke sand and who knows what).    I fitted some years ago an osmotic filtering system as mom had bladder and kidney stones (miserable thing to suffer). This was a five stages plus pump set, the cheapest random brand on sale on amazon) and the bloody thing is superb.     A friend that works on heating boilers tested my water before and after, and went from the hardest drinkable on his scale to perfect on the middle. That after running over a couple years on the same filter.     Before we used Britain filters and on the long run this is way cheaper, and actually works, not only does taste

Rob, 11th October 2025, 13:54

Not sure about that type, but regular paracetamol tablets are about 39p/16 in the cheaper shops. Max of two packs (of anything containing it) per person.  My wife takes it regularly, though, among other, much stronger meds, so gets a prescription from the GP. 200 at a time..

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