June 2009 Entries
A: What can't vinyl tape fix?
The button board had been acting flaky for awhile, and often to set the clock I'd just open it up and short the accumulator pin to adjust the time. It turned out that the material between the buttons and the board itself had dried out over the years, thus squishing instead of depressing as expected. I tore it out and used some tape in its place.
(to Antony: this is the same one I modified earlier. Why buy a new clock if I can just fix up what I have?)
I can't help but feel that something's going on that we don't know about, when Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and now Billy Mays die when the news had just days earlier been covering a bloody protest in Iran, and North Korea is threatening to fire a missile at Hawaii on the Fourth of July. It's discomforting to consider that the deaths of these high-profile people could have been caused by some larger entity's will to get that news off the networks, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since Friday.
Here's something I've been working on this past week:
Questions, comments, concerns, yells at my lack of originality, or anything of the sort?
While on my way home from the post office today, I found a relatively new-looking ViewSonic LCD sitting out on the road, so I picked it up and carried it home with me. I plugged it in and, surprisingly enough: "No Signal" flashes on the screen for half a second, then the entire thing shuts off. With a computer attached: "No Signal", and again shuts off half a second later.
I find it interesting that, of the six or seven CRTs I've found in this manner, only one hasn't worked. By contrast, the three LCDs I've found, this one included, have...
I just got a call from HP's tech support. They asked me when I was going to send in my laptop - and of course, I shipped it FedEx Overnight Guaranteed (thank you for prepaid expensive postage, HP) two days ago. So far this doesn't bode well for the turnaround time.
I figured I'd get Linux running on my P1/MMX laptop just so that I'd have something to carry around while my other laptop is in the clutches of HP Tech Support. Debian 5 now includes LXDE in the main repository, so setting it up is a breeze: apt-get install lxde took care of not only LXDE but the installation and configuration of the entire X server, and I did a net-install so no CD burning was required.
The next order of business didn't go so well: getting Wi-Fi to work acceptably well. This particular laptop has trouble with Plug-and-Play on the...
I dropped my laptop off at the FedEx store today for shipping back to the HP repair plant. Some of you may remember some of the problems I had last time around, where my laptop took a month to come back after getting lost in Costa Rica, so I'll be interested to see how long it takes this time around. Antony seems to think that last time was a one-off incident, but I have a feeling this will take awhile.
In the meantime, I'm stuck using my Pentium 3 box at home, and I'll be taking my Pentium laptop around as...
I've already had a few requests for a copy of the crowbar image I was using while my blog was down, so here it is:
The FCC is shutting down full-power NTSC television broadcasts today, freeing up about 414MHz (69 channels * 6MHz/channel) of the airwaves for other uses. So, as I did a year ago when the FCC killed off the AMPS cellular band, I figured I'd stay up until midnight to see what would happen.
Strangely enough, the same thing that happened last time repeated itself: those channels are still broadcasting after midnight. Waste of my time, indeed.