What happens when you hand an educational robot to a group of developers and ask them to build something fun? At Arduino, you get a multiplayer robot showdown that’s part battle, part programming lesson, and entirely Alvik. The idea for Alvik Fight Club first came to life during one of our internal Make Tanks, in […] The post Alvik Fight Club: A creative twist on coding, competition, and collaboration appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Past ads get a second chance.

It was time to upgrade Hibernate on that one Java monolithic1 backend service that my team was responsible for. We took great precautions with these types of changes due to the scale of the system, splitting changes into as many small parts as possible and releasing them as often as possible. With bigger changes we opted for running a few instances of the new version in parallel to the existing one. Then came Hibernate 5.2. Hibernate 5.2 introduced a new warning log to indicate that the existing API for writing queries is deprecated. Hibernate's legacy org.hibernate.Criteria API is deprecated; use the JPA javax.persistence.criteria.CriteriaQuery instead Every time you used the Criteria API it would print the line. Just one little issue there. Can you see it? Every time you used the Criteria API it would print the line. In a poorly written Java backend service, one HTTP request can make multiple queries to the database. With hundreds of millions of HTTP requests, this can easily balloon to billions of additional logs a day. Well, that’s exactly what happened to our service, resulting in the CPU usage jumping up considerably and the latency of the service being negatively impacted. We didn’t have the foresight to compare every metric against every instance of the service, and when the metrics were summarized across all instances, this increase was not that noticeable while both new and existing instances of the service were running. Aside from the service itself, this had negative effects downstream as well. If you have a solution for collecting your service logs for analysis and retention, and it’s priced on the amount of logs that you print out, then this can end up being a very costly issue for you. We resolved the issue by making a configuration change to our logger that disabled these specific logs. This does make me wonder who else may have been impacted by this change over the years and what that impact might’ve looked like regarding the resource usage on a world-wide scale. I’m not blaming the Hibernate developers, they had good intentions, but the impact of an innocent change like that was likely not taken into account for large-scale services. Last I heard, the people behind Hibernate are a very small team, and yet their software powers much of the world, including critical infrastructure like the banking system. I’m well aware that we’re talking about Hibernate releases that were released around the time I was still a junior developer (2016-2018). Some call it technical debt, others call it over half a decade of neglect. unmaintaned monoliths suck, but so do unmaintained microservices. ↩︎

NT Vincit Omnia

My favorite memory of my M1 Pro MacBook Pro was the whole sensation of “holy crap, you never hear the fans in this thing”, which was very novel in 2021. Four years later, this MacBook Pro is still a delight. It’s the longest I’ve ever owned a laptop, and while I’d love to pick up the new M4 goodness, this dang thing still seems to just shrug at basically anything I throw at it. Video editing, code compiling, CAD models, the works. (My desire to update is helped though by the fact I got the 2TB SSD, 32GB RAM option, and upgrading to those on new MacBooks is still eye wateringly expensive.) But my MacBook is starting to show its age in one area: it’s not quiet anymore. If you’re doing anything too intensive like compiling code for awhile, or converting something in Handbrake, the age of the fans being quiet is long past. The fans are properly loud. (And despite having two cats, it’s not them! I clean out the fans pretty regularly.) Enter the thermal paste Everyone online seems to point toward one thing: the thermal paste on computers tends to dry up over the years. What the heck is thermal paste? Well, components on your computer that generate a lot of heat are normally made to touch something like a copper heatsink that is really good at pulling that heat away from it. The issue is, when you press these two metal surfaces against each other, even the best machining isn’t perfect and you there’s microscopic gaps between them meaning there’s just air at those parts, and air is a terrible conductor of heat. The solution is to put a little bit of thermal paste (basically a special grey toothpaste gunk that is really good at transferring heat) between them, and it fills in any of those microscopic gaps. The problem with this solution is after hundreds and hundreds of days of intense heat, the paste can dry up into something closer to almost a powder, and it’s not nearly as good at filling in those gaps. Replacement time The logic board! MacBook thermal paste isn’t anything crazy (for the most part, see below), custom PC builders use thermal paste all the time so incredibly performant options are available online. I grabbed a tube of Noctua NT-H2 for about $10 and set to taking apart my MacBook to swap out the aging thermal paste. And thankfully, iFixit has a tremendous, in depth guide on the disassembly required, so I got to it. Indeed, that grey thermal paste looked quite old, but also above and below it (on the RAM chips) I noticed something that didn’t quite seem like thermal paste, it was far more… grainy almost? Spottiness is due to half of it being on the heatsink It turns out, ending with my generation of MacBooks (lucky me!) Apple used a very special kind of thermal compound often called “Carbon Black”, which is basically designed to be able to bridge an even thicker gap than traditional thermal paste. I thought about replacing it, but it seems really hard to come across that special thermal compound (and do not do it with normal thermal paste) and my RAM temperatures always seemed fine (65°C is fine… right?) so I just made sure to not touch that. For the regular grey thermal paste, I used some cotton swabs and isopropyl alcohol to remove the dried up existing thermal paste, then painted on a bit of the new stuff. Disaster To get to the underside of the CPU, you basically need to disassemble the entire MacBook. It’s honestly not that hard, but iFixit warned that the fan cables (which also need to be unclipped) are incredibly delicate. And they’re not wrong, seriously they have the structural integrity of the half-ply toilet paper available at gas stations. So, wouldn’t you know it, I moved the left fan’s cable a bit too hard and it completely tore in half. Gah. I found a replacement fan online (yeah you can’t just buy the cable, need a whole new fan) and in the meantime I just kept an eye on my CPU thermals. As long as I wasn’t doing anything too intensive it honestly always stayed around 65° which was warm, but not terrifying (MacBook Airs completely lack a fan, after all). Take two A few days later, the fans arrived, and I basically had to redo the entire disassembly process to get to the fans. At least I was a lot faster this time. The fan was incredibly easy to swap out (hats off there, Apple!) and I screwed everything back together and began reconnecting all the little connectors. Until I saw it: the tiny (made of the same half ply material as the fan cable) Touch ID sensor cable was inexpicably torn in half, the top half just hanging out. I didn’t even half to touch this thing really, and I hadn’t even got to the stage of reconnecting it (I was about to!), it comes from underneath the logic board and I guess just the movement of sliding the logic board back in sheared it in half. me Bah. I looked up if I could just grab another replacement cable here, and sure enough you can… but the Touch ID chip is cryptographically paired to your MacBook so you’d have to take it into an Apple Store. Estimates seemed to be in the hundreds of dollars, so if anyone has any experience there let me know, but for now I’m just going to live happily without a Touch ID sensor… or the button because the button also does not work. RIP little buddy (And yeah I’m 99.9% sure I can’t solder this back together, there’s a bunch of tiny lanes that make up the cable that you would need experience with proper micro-soldering to do.) Honestly, the disassembly process for my MacBook was surprisingly friendly and not very difficult, I just really wish they beefed up some of the cables even slightly so they weren’t so delicate. The results I was going to cackle if I went through all that just to have identical temperatures as before, but I’m very happy to say they actually improved a fair bit. I ran a Cinebench test before disassembling the MacBook the very first time to establish a baseline: Max CPU temperature: 102°C Max fan speed: 6,300 RPM Cinbench score: 12,252 After the new thermal paste (and the left fan being new): Max CPU temperature: 96°C Max fan speed: 4,700 RPM Cinbench score: 12,316 Now just looking at those scores you might be like… so? But let me tell you, dropping 1,600 RPM on the fan is a noticeable change, it goes from “Oh my god this is annoyingly loud” to “Oh look the fans kicked in”, and despite slower fan speeds there was still a decent drop in CPU temperature! And a 0.5% higher Cinebench score! But where I also really notice it is in idling: just writing this blog post my CPU was right at 46°C the whole time, where previously my computer idled right aroud 60°C. The whole computer just feels a bit healthier. So… should you do it? Honestly, unless you’re very used to working on small, delicate electronics, probably not. But if you do have that experience and are very careful, or have a local repair shop that can do it for a reasonable fee (and your MacBook is a few years old so as to warrant it) it’s honestly a really nice tweak that I feel will hopefully at least get me to the M5 generation. I do miss Touch ID, though.