Uncategorized Category - CNX Software

April 5, 2022April 5, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 20 Comments

How to get your domain suspended in five easy steps!

Regular readers may have noticed CNX Software was inaccessible for several days, and the reason was that my domain was suspended. I’m a bit late for April Fools’ day, but I’ll show how you can get your domain suspended too in five easy steps! I’ll also provide some background to what happened, and several errors of judgment made along the way What happened? On March 28, as I woke up I noticed I could not access the website and I had also received several emails and mentions on social networks that the website was down. I first tried to restart the LEMP stack of the server nginx, mysql, php, but it did not help. I quickly figured out there was a problem with DNS, so I went to the Cloudflare dashboard which is where I manage the DNS records, but I did not see any problems there. Eventually, I saw […]

September 2, 2021September 19, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

Gearbest’s parent company is in “bankruptcy review”

Gearbest parent’s company appears to be in serious financial troubles, with “bankruptcy review” documents filled in Guangdong court for Global Top E-Commerce Co., Ltd, after several years of losses. Gearbest.com is one of the most popular online websites based in China selling to overseas markets. It is owned by Global Top E-Commerce Co. Ltd (previously Shenzhen Globalegrow Electronic Commerce Co. Ltd) and was launched around 2014. At the time, it was all fun and games with a growth strategy meaning they’d send products to anyone with a platform, and here at CNX Software, we got plenty of TV boxes, mini PCs, and 3D printers for review. But eventually, samples dried out as the company switched to focus on profitability, Google started promoting YouTube reviews rather than written reviews, and a new law in Thailand prevented me from importing TV boxes in a time and cost-effective manner. In recent years, I’ve […]

August 3, 2021August 6, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

Shipping costs from China are going through the roof

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve had a worldwide chip shortage that increased the price of components, followed by long lead times. My Twitter feed is often filled with complaints of expensive components (e.g. STM32 being 10 times more expensive), and ever-increasing lead times of up to two years. But lockdowns and some governments paying people to stay home have completely messed up the supply chain, and with China having reopened a long time ago, many containers are shipping with products from China, only to return half-empty, or not at all. This behavior can be seen in the US trade deficit that almost doubled in the last year or so, and freight rates have gone through the roof for a while, but especially in the recent weeks/months. The chart above shows a container rate of over $10,000 for a 40-foot box from just around $2,000 for years, or […]

May 19, 2021December 4, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments

去赶潮！CNX Software is now available in Chinese

Short story: CNX Software is now available in Chinese at CNX SOFTWARE中文站—嵌入式开发者的新闻知识库！ thanks to a collaboration with RAKwireless. And now for the longer story. I was born in a small town in the middle of France on the morning of a snowy spring day. Alright, maybe I’ll skip the part about my childhood 🙂 I’ve been writing a lot about Chinese processors, boards, and other electronics products over the years, but my story with China started in November 2002 when I went to Shenzhen to work for a French company spending my time developing hardware and software for CD and DVD players. Eventually, I worked for Hong Kong companies with offices in Guangdong province and Hong Kong for products like VoIP phones, and later IPTV boxes as well as Karaoke systems. But when I moved to Thailand for personal reasons in 2010, CNX Software was already running as a backup […]

April 14, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Events Calendar Launched for Open Source or/and Embedded Systems Exhibitions, Workshops, Seminars…

Last month after writing about Arrow Embedded To Go online event, I was told: “it would be great to have a ‘event’ area on the site…” So I looked into it and installed a plugin to provide just that with an Events Calendar page. Currently, there are two events listed, but if you are organizing any events related to embedded systems, open-source hardware, the maker community feel free to submit your event on the page. The events can be offline or online and range from larger exhibitions like Embedded World to seminars, webinars, or even local workshops. If you have one or more such events planned, please try to submit it, and report any issue you may find in the comments section. Thanks! Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, […]

March 18, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

A Typical Day Working from Home

If I read the news right, a couple of you guys and gals have to stay at home for the next few weeks either twiddling your thumbs or working from home. In the suburbs of Chiang Mai, life is pretty normal right now, we haven’t been ordered to stay home, and virtually nobody is wearing masks except the few who want to protect themselves against the air pollution. In the area I live, few are concerned about the coronavirus, but I do have extensive experience working from home so I thought it may be interesting sharing a typical schedule. It’s stating the obvious but once you start working from home, your house is also your office, and it can be hard separating the two. So I’d recommend setting a room for work only, or if not possible a space reserved for work, and setup a schedule to introduce some routine. […]

February 21, 2020 by Dejan Petrović - No Comments

The Things Industries Launches Global Join Server for Secure LoRaWAN

Co-Founder and CEO of The Things Industries Wienke Giezeman announced the launch of Global Join Server (GJS) which is a secure component of the LoRaWan server. As an ecosystem, Global Join Server allows activating devices of any LoRa network from anywhere on the World. According to Giezeman, it works with the Things Network, the Community Network, cloud hosting solutions, etc. It works no matter if it is a part of a network server outside the Things Industries, as long it uses LoRa standard interfaces. The Global Join Server’s role is to store root keys, generate session keys and send them securely to the Network Server and Application Server. There is no more need to send keys by email or to print them on the boxes, they are already in a secure place. The Things Industries offers to device makers, module makers and distributors, access to a network-agnostic Join Server of […]