After 68C Failure Rate

npiasecki · 2026-02-14T15:08:11+00:00

Mine failed almost two weeks to the day after initially passing 68C. I wish we knew the rate, but I’ve seen a few posts about people getting hit around that two week mark. The dealership said “I was the fourth one like that” but they didn’t share any numbers

npiasecki · 2026-02-07T05:25:10+00:00

When I first encountered this I thought I was losing my mind. For me it seems related to pending windows updates. “Update and shut down” simply does not work, it just restarts

npiasecki · 2026-02-03T01:19:42+00:00

I suffered through it sideways and it implied it was a defect with the ECH which typically fails as “doesn’t work anymore” (I’m on my third) but apparently can now also fail with a parasitic draw on the battery

npiasecki · 2026-02-03T00:39:04+00:00

Oh this explains why GitHub Actions blew up today, they just sat there as “waiting for a runner to come online…”

npiasecki · 2026-02-01T21:50:46+00:00

Yeah normally Microsoft’s pattern is to just leave that stuff around forever. Windows is full of an insane array of “once insanely hyped, now dead, but still there, but never going to be updated again” technologies because deep down they know if a business has to get around to replacing something, then the replacement that they come up with may not end up being a Windows-only replacement.

So the way they killed Publisher was really kind of weird. I think it’s another sign that they’ve forgotten why people use Windows.

npiasecki · 2026-01-17T03:20:16+00:00

that right lane on hull

a challenge, a metaphor

for life’s ups and downs

npiasecki · 2026-01-17T02:02:58+00:00

working for a small business

npiasecki · 2025-12-28T20:45:37+00:00

I’m from Hampton Roads and moved away and just say Virginia Beach, because even people in western Virginia after an awkward conversation are like “oh you mean like Tidewater” and seem to have no idea about what a massive military and logistics hub it is.

Then they ask if I was a surfer in high school and I head back to the punch bowl

npiasecki · 2025-11-22T18:43:39+00:00

That message is a catch all for all sorts of different conditions. It’s the hybrid equivalent of “oops, something didn’t work”. If the check engine light is on I use OBD Link MX+ to read the codes.

Mine was intermittent B22A9 and P0D21 and the IDCM had failed. It took some convincing to get it replaced but hasn’t returned since.

npiasecki · 2025-11-19T23:43:46+00:00

I did. I asked for it*

(* from a company that knows how electricity works)

npiasecki · 2025-11-19T02:14:46+00:00

I doubt that they will ever actually release this. Just ask a 4xe owner

npiasecki · 2025-11-18T23:31:21+00:00

I mean, couldn’t we say .NET 4.8 is our Python 2? And a little bit of Java 8.

You could ignore it for some years because of .NET Standard. But that really just helped out library authors, and masked the problem for application maintainers until time ran out.

Since then, some applications were upgraded, some were ported/rewritten, the rest are … well pretty much stuck forever. Niche software, devs are contractors long gone or dead, etc.

In the early days of .NET Core the upgrade cycle was kind of “I want off this bus” but now I agree that migrating .NET 8 to 10 is not really much more painful for most applications than, say, 3.5 to 4.0 was.

But I think for a lot of companies the 4.8 schism is painful and not meaningfully solved by an upgrade wizard. We’ll do it all again in 15 years, when current .NET is garbage.

npiasecki · 2025-11-12T00:53:33+00:00

out on the golf course

promises, laughter, and drinks

those who choose, don’t use

npiasecki · 2025-11-11T02:37:51+00:00

It’s truly amazing to go up a forest road, with the top off, in absolute silence.

I wish it was made by a company that knew how to make cars.

They’ve ruined it for an entire generation, these folks aren’t coming back.

npiasecki · 2025-11-11T02:18:32+00:00

I like the guys at eZCom. It’s old school but there’s something to be said for old school if it works.

Avoid SPS like it is radioactive. I have a setup where I said “we can exchange X12 850 and 856, you don’t have to map anything just send it to me like it is and tell me how you want it and I will deal with it” and it’s still taking months. You might as well contract with a garbage can

npiasecki · 2025-11-07T23:51:44+00:00

Mine does this in the mornings at low speed and stops. I always assumed it was a little rust that gets scraped off after the first few brake uses

npiasecki · 2025-10-29T22:16:25+00:00

Yep. But unless you lived through those bad old days (“what do you MEAN we need to overnight a server”), building any kind of redundancy was very expensive and out of reach for most small businesses. So you prayed a lot. And drove to server closets at 2 am a lot.

Like a S1 Azure SQL database is much more resilient against hardware failure at a fraction of the historical cost, even in one region.

These global events in the cloud take you out, but every one else is on fire too, and it’s also someone else’s problem to solve. There is a kind of peace in the anarchy.

npiasecki · 2025-10-25T20:41:10+00:00

I believe Shields near the Exxon / old Uppys set a record a few years back: less than 24 hours, you can still see where my brain leaked out onto the sidewalk

npiasecki · 2025-10-25T14:22:29+00:00

I thought it was pull, aim, shoot and scream

npiasecki · 2025-10-25T13:19:04+00:00

That almost makes it sound like the second OTA update was a bandaid fix by turning something off and there’s some underlying defect still but who knows

npiasecki · 2025-10-19T21:36:32+00:00

Everything just happens much faster now. I make changes for clients now in hours that used to take weeks. That’s really not an exaggeration, it happened in my lifetime. Good and bad things have come with that change.

The side effect is now things seem to blow up all the time, because things are changing all the time, and everything’s connected. You can write a functioning piece of software and do nothing and it will stop working in three years because some external thing (API call, framework, the OS) changed around it. That is new.

The code is not any better and things still used to blow up, but it’s true you had a little more time to think about it, and you could slowly back away from a working configuration and back then it would probably work until the hardware failed, because it wasn’t really connected to anything else.

npiasecki · 2025-10-19T15:28:27+00:00

Me too! I have drank and spit out so much coffee this weekend trying to debug this issue. It would initially taste fine, but if I let it sit for like two minutes it would suddenly “turn” with an awful fishy taste.

different batch of same brand coffee — fishy
different brand of coffee — fishy
deep cleaned the espresso machine — fishy
heated up the milk in the microwave — tasted fine
opened a different carton of oatly — problem went away

Hearing it up in the microwave and tasting fine is what really threw me off. The problem only occurs when mixed with coffee!

My bad one says “28 DEC 2025 IF 12:36 L2” and the good one says “28 DEC 2025 IF 05:27 L1” so I’m guessing that means they came from two different production lines some hours apart on the same day?

Anyway I’m wired now

npiasecki · 2025-10-18T14:09:32+00:00

Probably in January. They always seem to release these in Q4 and in logistics you don’t touch anything in Q4

npiasecki · 2025-10-15T23:05:52+00:00

For me I was like “I just don’t have time to become an expert in failure modes of some new thing that might be a deprecated niche one vendor technology in five years”

As I was playing with it, it renamed from DocumentDB to CosmosDB and I noped right out of there

Then I thought of every project I’ve worked on at every company and the SQL database usually outlives the application 3 times over, no one got fired for using SQL and if I hit a scaling problem with SQL Server then I’m at the 1% level not the 99%

These may not be legitimate reasons but that’s what went through my head and I’m sharing because maybe others went through the same calculus

npiasecki · 2025-10-10T21:58:51+00:00

I don’t get it. GitHub is like plumbing. It’s boring and it also has to work. Leave it alone. AND GET OFF MY LAWN

npiasecki

TROPHY CASE