My Huawei Y9’s screen got cracked :(

 

I thought the screen was unbreakable but I was wrong. I owned this phone for more than 1.5 years. It fell multiple times: on the road, on the carpet, on the floor in my room. But it didn’t get a single scratch on the screen. I was impressed. And yeah, I didn’t put any screen protector nor a casing during this time.

However one day, the phone fell on the floor in the gym changing room. It was marble tiles and boom! The screen cracked 🙁

I am however able to use the phone like this, it is not presentable if you’re doing a demo in front of a client.

Mobile repair shops in Curepipe and Rose-hill are quoting me Rs 2500 – Rs 3200 to replace the screen while the official Huawei support centre for Mauritius told me it would cost around Rs 3200 to replace. However the will have to order the screen which will take 2 weeks.

Should I get a cheaper replacement screen in a shop or get the original one from the official repair centre? With the specs of the phone, it can easily be used 2 or even 3 years more. 4GB of RAM is quite good.

Anyone else got shocked by Mauritius Telecom Bills? Rs 600 increase!!! (MyT)

How the hell did our MyT bill become so high all of a sudden? We used to pay around Rs 1,000 per month. But now, it has become around Rs 1600!

vs

We don’t have the “Smart Box” thing. How the hell did they start charging so much? Plus, on the website, the 4K package is at Rs 1200 per month. Where does Rs 1,316 come from? VAT is added before the total again.

The aim of this article is to raise awareness of such issues. Now we need to mentally prepare to go fight these people for our rights 🙁

AMD vs nvidia vs Intel

2020 is kinda exciting year for computer hardware. AMD has been killing it.

But would I recommend an AMD for a laptop? Hmm, I’ve been looking at eGPU systems lately. It does require a thunderbolt port to work with. Unfortunately thunderbolt is an Intel exclusive technology for now. You will thus not be able to use your ultra light AMD laptop as a real gaming monster. I don’t know if USB4 works with eGPUs. Anyways, always confirm that your Intel laptop does have a thunderbolt port. My Asus Zenbook has no thunderbolt.

On the GPU side, the 6900XT seems to be on par with the RTX 3090. But most machine learning libraries such as tensorflow are optimised to be running on CUDA/nvidia. I hope the machine learning community start using AMD GPUs as well. Maybe it is AMD which is keeping some APIs close or something. But I hope machine learning takes on AMD GPUs as well. It’ll be awesome.

Will I be able to afford all these techs? I don’t think i’ll be building a PC anytime soon as I don’t have the money and space in my house to be able to get a huge TV for entertainment.

Enabling Nvidia Hybrid Graphics on Linux

I was going to activate my NVIDIA 940MX to play some Tomb Raider when I saw that nvidia-settings has a new option: on-demand.

Activating the option allows you to run only selected applications on the discrete GPU. How to activate that on Steam?

Let’s take an example of Tomb Raider:

Step 1: Open steam and go to Library

Step 2: Go on game settings:

Step 3: Set launch option as follows:

__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia %command%

And voila! Next time you open the game, it’ll run on your discrete GPU. You can check it with nvidia-smi

 

Review: Awei A780BL Bluetooth Headset

The Unboxing

The box doesn’t feel cheap at all. When you open the box, you get the Bluetooth headphones first. Underneath, you’ll find a micro-usb cable, aux cable and a manual thrown in.

The Sound

The bass isn’t impressive in any way but I find it adequate. I’d say it’s very balanced and does it’s job.

The Microphone

Oh dear it sucks. Everyone complained about a loud static noise in the mic during remote work meetings. But they could understand when I talk though. Weird.

The Comfort

First time wearing your headset is a real pain as it really presses on your head. I tried to stretch my previous Bluedio headset by hands and that’s how I broke it. I stretch the AWEI headset using its box itself everyday for 2 weeks before it became somewhat comfortable.

The Cons

  1. First worlds problems? I cannot connect the headset to both my laptop and mobile phone. If i get a call e.g. i’ll have to disconnect it from my laptop and connect to my phone manually. My previous Bluedio T2 didn’t have this issue.
  2. If you shake the headset, the right cup has some parts moving in it. It’ll not be possible to wear this while you workout e.g.

Conclusion

For the price of Rs 1500 in Mauritius (saw it being sold at Rs 1000 too), I think it’s an okay headset. Not great but also not bad. In times where international ecommerce websites are slow to ship, I’m okay with it.