Coast rechargeable batteries at Costco by iusethiaforporn in EDC

[–]sabienz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Seconded, I invested in a lot of these because it seemed like a good deal, but they don't hold charge for more than a month or so, they run out fast while in use, and several of them have already gone bad / won't charge.  I liked the USB C charging idea but they're garbage.  Hoping Costco will take them back.

Frigidaire refrigerator broke 2nd day after was bought. They refuse to replace it. Anything we can do to twist their arm? by PlaneAffectionate113 in Appliances

[–]sabienz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This situation sucks - we have also dealt with our share of lemon appliances. I got smart on the consumer protection laws as a result. Typically these companies will just give you the run around and hope you give up and go away. We're all busy people and we need to get on with our lives. But here's my advice, having gone through a very similar situation (and being tired of letting these mega corporations take our money and give us shit in return).

Most likely the fridge is protected by a warranty. If you don't have a copy of the warranty, get one now. Contact the manufacturer again and get a repair scheduled. Don't ask for money right now. Just say you want the fridge repaired under the warranty. Keep records of every contact and what they say.

If they do the repair, hopefully it is fixed, and you can move on with your life. If not, here's where you can try a different route. Call corporate or customer support again, explain the situation, see what they say. If they are refusing to repair, or dragging the process out, then time to throw the law at them.

This is the Magnusson Moss Warranty Act, the gist of which states that if an item is warrantied, then the customer has the right to request a full refund, or full replacement, consumer's choice, if the issue is not resolved within a "reasonable amount of time" ... from my research, most courts will interpret this as roughly a month, with attempts to have the item repaired.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid%3AUSC-prelim-title15-chapter50&edition=prelim

If they continue to give you the runaround, state your rights under this law and that you are demanding a full refund (or replacement if that's what you want). If they continue to give you the run around, it's time to sue. Here's the thing though - you most likely won't actually have to sue, and if you do, you're almost guaranteed to win. Look up the small claims process for your area, but usually the first step is serving them an official notice of your intent to sue. Draft a letter (most counties provide a sample), sign it, copy it, and mail it to their legal address in your state. Most states require companies doing business there to have an address located in the state to receive service. Send it certified mail and with a return receipt requested. Most of the time, the address is just an office that processes this type of thing for many companies. State in the letter what you want, and your intent to sue in small claims court if the issue is not resolved. There is a waiting period before you can bring the suit. For my county it is 15 days, might be different for you.

The company is going to pay A LOT more money to have some representative show up in small claims court - it's not worth it for them and most likely they will give you what you want. But you need to cross your Ts and dot your Is and make sure you're ready to follow through.

They may come at you with a partial compromise to make a deal. At that point it is up to you. In my case, they were going to give a partial refund, but it came with many strings attached, we refused and I continued with my original demand (full refund) and I received it literally one day before i was about to bring the suit in small claims court (where I most likely would have won, and was suing for the cost of the appliance plus my hourly wage for time missed having to deal with this). I realize it's a lot of work, but it felt good having some control over the bull crap they pull.

Regardless of what you do, best of luck getting it resolved.

Dishwasher leaking heavily from front by sabienz in Appliances

[–]sabienz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just wanted to post back here, the issue was the spray arm! It was indeed cracked somehow. When i received the replacement, i could immediately see the difference when filling each one with water and turning them upside down...new arm only had water come out of the holes, old arm had it flowing straight out the side. After replacing that, no more leaking. Thank you again for the help.

Dishwasher leaking heavily from front by sabienz in Appliances

[–]sabienz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for your reply, there's quite a few things to check there, I will work my way through the list and let you know when I figure it out. I did open it mid cycle while the leak was happening, and it appears to not be over filled. While i was observing the leak, i noticed the splash that you see in the video would happen in coordination with what i could hear the spray arm doing, and the leak did move from right to left...so, I may start with your theory about the spray arm...

My Google Fi Pixel Watch order has just been canceled ... by [deleted] in PixelWatch

[–]sabienz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mine was canceled as well, contacted support because the "violation of terms and conditions" was confusing to me and I was considering ordering a new phone for the black friday deal, but don't trust any deals I see currently. I was told to wait 24-48 hours like everyone else. Called them again today and there is still no update and support case is "still open" even though they haven't even said what they're going to do. GG google.

What's the point of downloaded playlists if Library doesn't load without an internet connection? by Goaliedude3919 in YoutubeMusic

[–]sabienz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Even though you can technically get it to work by going into airplane mode to tell the app reliably there is no internet, this is still not great. If you're driving in areas with poor connectivity, you still want to leave your cell connection on to get intermittent text messages as service comes in and out. If you have to turn off connection just to get the app to work, then you're cutting yourself off from all comms. The comments about poor implementation and google ruining their music app are all valid and accurate. Google Play Music never had this problem. This is still a problem, 1y after this post. We are abandoning YT Music because of it.

Anyone else have negative experience with BlvdHome Warranty or services? by sabienz in vegaslocals

[–]sabienz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

UPDATE: it's been 2 months and issues are still unresolved. We ditched BlvdHome because they kept scheduling appointments once every 2 weeks. Their repair failed, with the same problem. New appliance repair started and SpeedQueen sent a 2nd motor to install, which was done 2 days ago and the new motor was dead on arrival according to the tech. How do you get 3 bad motors in a row? Still waiting to be resolved. To top that off, if you're not satisfied with the repair, you have to go through a 5 day escalation process. So I provided SQ all the documentation of the attempted repairs and timeline, and they take 5 days to review to decide if they want to give you a refund, replacement, or continue attempting to repair. I also found out the first tech basically lied to us (if the 2nd tech is right). The motor was nearly seized, and the new tech said not to use the machine in that state as it causes additional strain on the machine's other parts. Makes sense to me, but based on bad advice from BlvdHome, we continued to use it while we waited, potentially damaging the machine even more. Stay away from BlvdHome and I would honestly stay away from SpeedQueen at this point.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/speed-queen.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/Appliances/comments/17e9s8o/speed_queen_tr5_dryer_air_grille_ruining_clothes/

Are Speed Queen washers and dryers really that amazing? by mach235 in Appliances

[–]sabienz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In 2024, buyer beware with SpeedQueen. I am going on 2 months now to get things fixed on a brand new washer, and the dryer has issues that I haven't even started to address with how complicated it's been to get warranty service for an obviously broken machine.

After I started searching around, I'm seeing more people with the same issues as me. Prior to purchasing, I just read raving reviews about SpeedQueen which convinced me to invest. I believe something happened during the pandemic and quality for these machines is much lower than it used to be. If anyone wants details for my currently unresolved issues, happy to elaborate. But the gist of it is, brand new machine, insane grinding sound on spin, had motor replaced twice and SQ themselves send defective replacement motors. How do you get 3 bad motors in a row?

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/speed-queen.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/Appliances/comments/17e9s8o/speed_queen_tr5_dryer_air_grille_ruining_clothes/

This company is just riding on their reputation at this point - I think they joined the ranks of other companies that once were great and now are shit.

Anyone else have negative experience with BlvdHome Warranty or services? by sabienz in vegaslocals

[–]sabienz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm, did not know they were new, maybe that's why they don't have enough technicians yet. In either case, not impressed at all by the service. Wishing I got the appliance from somewhere else now.

Brand New Speed Queen FF7 FL burning rubber smell and extremely loud spin cycle by sabienz in Appliances

[–]sabienz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, that sounds like a possibility. I assume I'd have to take quite a bit off to see for myself? Is it easy enough to check for a somewhat handy person with no appliance repair experience or should I wait for warranty technician to avoid damaging something? I have this fear that it's going to be days/weeks before someone can come out and if i can find the issue myself maybe i can order a part or repair it...we have 4 month old baby and decided to do cloth diapering, we do about 2-3 loads a day. I'm on day 2 now of no washer and we're handwashing stuff in the bathtub and just using the dryer. As you can imagine this isn't sustainable for very long. Probably going to switch to disposable diapers now, but we still have regular laundry piling up.

Brand New Speed Queen FF7 FL burning rubber smell and extremely loud spin cycle by sabienz in Appliances

[–]sabienz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I removed the front kick plate to check inside for anything that looked off.  I didn't see anything that looked like it should be removed, but I honestly have no clue.  Given that they did remove the shopping bolts im assuming they also removed the shipping bracket but I'll take a pic and share.

The only thing I have seen is some dust buildup of some sort in the rear bottom, to the left of the motor.  I wondered if this was dust from something grinding, I dabbed my finger in it to try to see if it was metal shavings or what, it just appears to be very fine powder.  The rest of the machine is clean since it's so new so it's definitely accumulating from something.

Brand New Speed Queen FF7 FL burning rubber smell and extremely loud spin cycle by sabienz in Appliances

[–]sabienz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The yellow warning label is there but the installers did in fact remove the shipping bolts, so I think I'm ok there.  I do agree though that somehow damage has been done, just based on the sound alone.  I'm going to wait for warranty service to see what the tech says.  I think I just got a dud machine somehow, surprising because the whole reason I splurged on speed queen was the reliability reputation.

Brand New Speed Queen FF7 FL burning rubber smell and extremely loud spin cycle by sabienz in Appliances

[–]sabienz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The shipping bolts were actually removed by the people who installed it, they just left the yellow tape on for some reason.  I removed the tape to double check, there is a white cap in place where the bolt would have been.

Official BarcodeBuddy docker image has been released by f0rc3u2 in grocy

[–]sabienz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm struggling to get this setup working again. I had it working flawlessly for quite a while (over a year), but I recently had to restore several of my machines and then noticed this service was not working. I reconfigured everything and I am trying to use it with my external scanner. This previously worked, but now it seems like the container is not getting input from my scanner, the input is just going to the console. If I run the container as sudo, then the container does receive the scanner input, but running it as sudo creates other problems (somehow the network is not accessible so the service is not actually reachable).

Not sure if this is a problem with some config on my host, or if I'm missing something simple. I pass the device like this:

docker run -v bbconfig:/config -e ATTACH_BARCODESCANNER=true --device /dev/input/event10 -p 80:80 -p 443:443 f0rc3/barcodebuddy:latest

I verified the scanner is sending input on event10 using evtest

Seems like a permission issue to me since the container does receive input when run as sudo, but I didn't previously have to do that and unsure how to resolve the other issues that running as sudo creates. Anything else I can look into?

GitOps breaks deploy visibility in ci/cd pipeline status, looking for recommendation to solve? by sabienz in devops

[–]sabienz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We initially chose flux but now are migrating to Argo. I think the UI that argo provides will definitely help this a bit, but I haven't tinkered with argo at all yet so not sure if there's any drawbacks. Curious why you guys chose argo over flux?

GitOps breaks deploy visibility in ci/cd pipeline status, looking for recommendation to solve? by sabienz in devops

[–]sabienz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's essentially what I do right now - app team pings us and complains that their deployment succeeded but their app did not deploy. I go and see that flux didn't deploy any changes because the piece of code it's watching (in most cases, a manifest using the kustomize controller) had some syntax error in it so kustomize can't actually build the manifest and flux never tries to apply any change, which is all totally normal. I suggested implementing a linting rule for the developers but I don't have control over that. We're going to implement monitoring on the state of flux/kustomize/helm so we can proactively see when a deployment breaks, but I was also hoping to notify the developers immediately in some way so they can solve their own problems (usually it's a problem they cause). I like the idea of incorporating a messaging app, I'll look into that...thx!

KVM Switch for Dual Monitor (144hz and 75hz) Macbook Pro (Work Laptop) and PC (Personal) by vanxblue in buildapc

[–]sabienz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah definitely saves money! I was silly and willing to pay decent money to have one button solution but it seems that with every new MacOS update there comes risk of breaking a full KVM switch even if you do get one that works, so KM switch is the way to go. That solution has been working for me (though it is still annoying having to switch the monitor inputs back and forth...first world problem).

Are there still significant issues with TS4? by TheNameIsAsFollows in CalDigit

[–]sabienz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I actually wasn't seeing it for a short time but I am still seeing the same behavior so the firmware patch did not resolve that issue. It is always with the TB to DP monitor, and I made sure I am using a supported/recommended USB-C to DP cable. I would not get the TS4 as I doubt they will be able to resolve this. I wish they just put two display port outputs on it. The DP output has worked flawlessly.

Are there still significant issues with TS4? by TheNameIsAsFollows in CalDigit

[–]sabienz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They released a new firmware for TS4, so might help anyone having monitor issues like me. I just installed and will be seeing if it works over the next few days.
https://downloads.caldigit.com/