hardware

Replacing Bad Caps in a Good Monitor

About a month ago, my three-year-old Samsung 214T 21″ LCD monitor started flickering so badly that it could induce a seizure in a lump of granite. It’s been my primary monitor for some time and I love it for several reasons, not the least of which is that it’s a 4:3 and has a built-in pivot on the VESA-compatible stand. So if I want portrait mode I can have it, and all of my machines including the older Dells support it at its 1600X1200 native resolution.

I set the ailing 214T aside and swapped in my downstairs monitor (the older and slower but otherwise similar Samsung 213T) followed by some research on repairs. I had a hunch it was bad electrolytic capacitors. Freaky hardware behavior these days has a high likelihood of being bad electrolytic capacitors, for reasons I explain here. And sure enough, a chap on eBay was selling a caps repair kit specifically for the 214T for $14 shipped. I ordered it, and when it arrived in today’s mail I wasted no time getting to work.

The “kit” is just a Baggie with six caps and a short length of thin wire solder. If you don’t know soldering you’re going to have some trouble. However, the vendor has a very nice tutorial specific to the similar Samsung 204T/214T units here. It helps that we’re dealing with a power supply board and not a logic board, in that power supply board traces are usually big enough to see. Anybody with a spoonful of bench tech experience won’t have any trouble unsoldering and removing the old caps and getting the new ones soldered in. That took me maybe 10 minutes, granting that I’ve been soldering for almost 50 years and had top-shelf bench tech training at Xerox. No, your real problem will be getting the damned thing apart to where you can remove the PC board to work on it. And the first step is the worst: prying apart the two black plastic halves of the monitor’s case. LCDAlternatives suggests a putty knife in their tutorial, and that’s precisely what it took. And even though I’m very good with disassembly (bruising up a customer’s machine was a serious no-no at Xerox) I scratched up the 214T pretty thoroughly just getting into it. Alas, these units were not designed to be repaired.

Two of the six caps on the power supply board were obviously bad (above left) in that they were domed on top, and one had begun to leak. The others had no visible defects, but that doesn’t guarantee that they hadn’t failed, or wouldn’t fail soon. The kit had six, and I replaced all six.

Total time for the repair was about an hour, including disassembly/reassembly. When I got it plugged back in and powered up, it worked like new, including being a little brighter than it had been shortly before the flickering began. (This is in line with what I’ve read about the effects of bad caps on monitors.) All in all I consider it a big win: Absent the repair, the monitor would have been scrap. I might not have bothered on a smaller or older monitor, but this one I feel is exactly right for what I do, and an hour spent giving it a few more years of service was an hour well-spent indeed.

The Importance of Sideloading

Jan 11th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

You haven’t seen much of me here since the first of the year because I set myself a target for writing fiction, and, micracles of miracles, I’m sticking to it. Blogging is second priority, and if I spend my creative hours working on stories, I’m likely to post a lot less in this space. (What posts I do write I hope to make longer.)

Anyway. CES 2011 is now history, and I followed it more closely than I might have in past years because I’m actively shopping for an Android slate. (I hate to call them “tablets;” we’ve had tablet PCs for almost ten years and there’s one on my desk.) I played a little with a Samsung Galaxy Tab at a Verizon store in Tampa in late November and was much impressed, even though the demo unit did not have any kind of ebook reader installed. (Wireless carriers are pushing video hard, because video will use up a lot of deliciously profitable minutes.) I’ve played with Apple’s iPad as well and have been just as impressed, but there’s a huge worm in it for me: Apple wants to absolutely control its content ecosystem, and sideloading of apps is a gnarly business. Sideloading an iPad is easier with books and music, but I’d like to try my hand at slate apps, and I’m not going to work in a playground with barbed wire around it. The open-source Android just suits my temperament better. I have some faint hope of programming Android apps in FreePascal, but Android is really a Java-like platform (apps run on the Dalvik VM, which has its own specific register-based bytecode set) and a Pascal-to-Dalvik compiler is unlikely, as much as it has precedent in the ancient UCSD P-system.

Sideloading is important in a number of ways. (The term as I use it simply means the ability to get apps and content onto a device locally through a cable or a plug-in memory unit, rather than from a tightly-controlled online store or cloud locker of some kind.) I don’t have a lot of ebooks yet, primarily because the e-ink display on my Sony Reader makes my head hurt. Furthermore, the ones I do have are a very mixed bag, from many different sources and in many different formats. I have novels, but I also have tech books, many of which have intricate art and layouts that don’t reflow. A lot of things I’ve picked off Usenet are image scans of transformer catalogs and ancient manuals for Fifties Heathkits, none of which are legible on low-res e-ink screens. I need a good high-res color display, but more significantly, I need the ability to install arbitrary apps to render any arbitrary content format, including minority formats like DjVu, which I don’t favor but must deal with occasionally. I could readily sideload the files on an iPad, but the apps to render them are another matter.

Sideloading of ebooks is still a geek thing, primarily because the ebook business is so damned young. If you can get everything you want from Amazon or Apple, cool–and almost everybody is starting from scratch, with little or no existing ebook library to deal with. In years to come, people will be jumping from device to device and reader to reader and store to store, and at each jump must face the question of how to pack along the books they’ve already paid for. DRM makes this hugely more difficult, but even in a world without DRM, different kinds of content would require local storage transfer and different rendering apps, not all of which will be readily available from the current vendor’s store, especially for new devices incorporating new OSes.

Sideloading also allows local scanning for malware, which will become increasingly important in coming years, certainly for apps but probably for compromised content files as well.

Any slate I buy will have to support sideloading of both apps and content. Android seems to be the OS for that, and I’m now watching the Motorola Xoom, a dual-core 10″ Android slate running the Honeycomb version of Android. There’s some weirdness involving the SD slot (the CES prototypes didn’t have it) but without that, there’s no sale. More intriguing for many reasons is the Notion Ink Adam, (above) which does have a MicroSD slot and 2 USB ports, and the intriguing PixelQi display. Its Android OS is a custom version that anticipates some of the Honeycomb features but is technically V2.2 Froyo with a proprietary UI. (Their blog is worth following if you’re interested in slate technology.) I just hope they don’t do a FusionGarage thing, but if they can hang in there they’ll be a contender.

I must emphasize that I’m being careful and I’m not in any particular hurry. Much of my personal Jedi self-training in recent years could be summarized as Stop wanting stuff. Buy, or buy not. There is no “want.” When jump I, know you will!

Odd Lots

Nov 23rd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Maxwell’s Demon as Web comic. (Thanks to GMcDavid for the pointer.)
Here’s a tutorial on adding a MicroSDHC card to the Nook ebook reader. Looks like a mechanically touchy business (be careful!) and nothing substantive is said about sideloading content on the inserted card. Sideloading of content is something I’m less and less willing to compromise on, as I do not want a censor between my slate and material that I want to read.
I’m due-ing diligence on the very impressive, Android-powered Nook Color, but the frontrunner in the Great Jeff Slate Project continues to be the Galaxy Tab, especially since Samsung is offering this keyboard dock. That said, Nook Color is the right idea for ebook freaks: Approach a general-purpose slate from the ebook side, starting with a killer ebook store and working toward everything else. (Supposedly, V2.2 and access to the Android app store is coming soon.) My view: Dedicated e-readers like Sony’s and even Kindle will eventually give way to more general-purpose slates of similar size, though slates may “lean” toward one enthusiasm (like ebooks) or another.
Back in 1983 and 1984, I did about 10,000 words on a since-abandoned novel that included a species of road surface that charged your car’s batteries as the car moves over the road. A pickup called the “board” (after surfboard) was suspended beneath a vehicle and hovered over the road surface via maglev to generate current like a linear alternator. I was pleased to see that Wired posted a news item on some guys in New Zealand who are developing almost precisely that. Not sure how well the math works out (especially with respect to infrastructure costs) but it’s a cool idea. I added another small touch: Ohmic losses in the “voltway” surface kept it snow-free in winter.
Pope John Paul II was an idealist. Pope Benedict XVI is a pragmatist. My SF prediction: As he grows older and sees the problems besetting the Church getting no better and possibly worse, he will begin considering other reforms that his uncompromising predecessor would have considered impossible. Hey, Bennie! How ’bout Vatican 3!
People who have lots of moles have longer telomeres. Or at least look younger than they are. Carol and I are both so blessed, mole-wise, but I think it worked better on her than on me.
If you spend a lot of time in the car but off the Interstates, take a spin through RoadsideAmerica, a bemused compendium of eccentric stuff you can see on road trips. I liked the entry on smiley-faced water towers, since we pass one in Adair, Iowa every time we blast back and forth to Chicago. And Adair is far from the only one.
From the above site: When we left Arizona seven years ago, some people nodded and said, Cool! Colorado isn’t as crazy as Arizona. Well…I’m not sure that’s true.

Odd Lots

Nov 20th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Here’s how the ancient Greeks calculated the distance between the Earth and the Moon. If the notion surprises you, well, you were reading comic books during geometry class, weren’t you?
Although I’d heard of the Millionaire Calculator, a sort of mechanical uber-sliderule used circa 1890-1940, I did not know that it had helped to discover Pluto.
From The Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: materteral, of or pertaining to an attentive aunt–basically the female analog of avuncular. Less commonly, materterine. Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for calling them to my attention.
I was going to cite Sion , Philip Boast’s outrageous but hugely fun riff on the whole Da Vinci Code thing, as an example of a print book you can’t buy in the US (see yesterday’s entry) but I was wrong: You can get used copies here for a dollar. No extra charge for either the zombies nor the angels with pubic hair.
Dell has not handled its notorious SX270 capacitor problem especially well. “Hide the corrosion” might have been the company line, and the results could be Capacitorgate. That said, Dell is not the only vendor to have had this problem. (There’s a whole forum devoted to bad PC capacitors.) I’ve been lucky so far…but I’ve also switched to SX280 machines, which are not as prone to the problem.
They Don’t Make ‘Em Like This Anymore…and when they did, I missed them. Dayum. (More if not quite as cool at Gizmodo.)
Alfred Powell Morgan basically got me started on electronics when I was 11, through his decades-spanning series of books on electronics for boys. Here’s a nice bio sketch of the Dan Beard of electronics from the ARRL Web site.
The late Thomas Gold (author of The Deep Hot Biosphere) may have been right. I certainly hope so.
Honda, I know you’ll never actually build that car, so that being the case, could I have an SUV painted the same color?
If ski season seems to have come early this year, you aren’t being singled out. It’s snowing on Comet Hartley 2. (Hey, spin that dogbone and make a habitat out of it!)
70 is the new 40, and zombies are the new vampires. Let’s talk about this again when I’m the new 40.
I’ve never been a beer guy, but if I did drink beer, it would probably be this one.
And pertinent to the above, here’s an elegant solution to a problem that I myself will never have.
This, on the other hand, is something I could definitely get into.

Odd Lots

Nov 5th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Finland has some of the coolest sky phenomena on Earth.
Sterile neutrinos? I think particle physics has gotten away from me. At least they didn’t discover it on the bridge of the Enterprise, with the Klingons closing in, right before the last commercial. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
Are hipsters gone yet? Does their Weltanschauung capture the Zeitgeist? Or is it only a façade hiding the real bête noir? Will we miss them? Are you sick of dumb-ass questions yet? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
And just when you think politics (even in my own relatively sane state of Colorado) can’t get any weirder, well…
Several people sent me links to reports of an Irish chap who’s spotted a passerby in a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film talking on a cellphone. Gomog’s Razor (i.e., when all possibilities are equally unlikely, the craziest one is true) suggests time travel, but the little old lady in question may also be holding a compact mechanical trumpet hearing aid. Or maybe her ear is just cold. I’ll bank on time travel, and I know what she’s muttering into her Thiotimoline Smartphone: “Look, you idiots, I said send me to the year 2819, not the year 1928!”
Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Tab is getting a lot of press these days, but note that this review does not mention ebooks. At all. Wow.
The Pontiac marque officially died this past Sunday. My grandfather Harry Duntemann always bought Pontiacs. His ’53 had an amber-colored glass Indian as a hood ornament, and my mother owned his loaded ’57 Chieftan from 1961-1967. It was a cool car with a very big engine, and given that my mom was used to driving tiny little Nash Ramblers from the mid-1950s, it was easy for her her to daydream and suddenly realize she was doing 80. I’ll miss Pontiacs. And my next car will almost certainly be a Ford, for reasons I don’t need to explain.
Sportscasting can be hazardous to your hairdo.
What if we stopped trying to immunize people against malaria and tried to immunize mosquitoes instead? Takes only one gone link to break a chain.
“UCLA Seeks to Avoid Turnovers.” Me, I’m leery of cheese Danish.
Dude, where’s my external tank? (Thanks again to Pete for this and the above link.)
This is not a hoax. Really, it isn’t. I checked.

Odd Lots

Sep 21st, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

So far, two people have written to request that I post photos of my rash. Ummm, no. You’d barf. And most of us take far too many trips to Three Mile Island already these days, Web discussion being what it is.
And no, I’m not getting better. In fact, I may still be getting worse. But I do think it’s time to dump what’s in the Odd Lots file:
While I wait patiently for more sunspots (and thus better ionospheric conditions for long skip) scientists tell me that I may have to do without them for awhile. (This from a link in a post with more graphs and links at WUWT.) The last time I had a really good antenna during a really good solar maximum was 1980.
Intel is doing with its CPUs what IBM did with its mainframe processors in the 1960s: Disabling CPU features (in IBM’s case, it may have been as simple as inserting NOPs into the microcode) and then offering to turn them back on for a fee. (In this case, $50.) This is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but may not work well, and will certainly not make them any friends. (Odds on how long it takes the hardware hacker community to provide a crack?)
PVC pipe fittings are wonderful big-boy tinkertoys, and come in any color you want as long as it’s black or white. If you want to broaden your spectrum a little, here’s how to permanently stain white PVC pipe any color you want.
The battle between portrait mode and landscape mode in the online magazine world may come down to simple economics: It costs more to lay out (or somehow code up) a digital file that reads well both ways. Between the lines, however, I sense an attempt to twist Apple’s arm to cut their 33% cut of subscription revenue. Obnoxious question arises: How are iPad-targeted mags different from ambitious ad-supported bloggish Web-article sites like Wired, Slate, or Io9?
While driving to our HMO’s Urgent Care facility the other day, I counted three MMDs (Medical Marijuana Dispensaries) on the eight-mile trip. Which means that Colorado Springs has a marijuana store every 2.7 miles. I guess we’re not so conservative here after all.
One of the MMDs had a big banner across the storefront reading, “ICE CREAM!” Somehow I don’t think it’s French Vanilla.
Pertinent to both of the above: The kettle is trying hard to prevent legalization of…the pot.
It’s not the fat. It really is the fructose. (Thanks to David Stafford for the link.)
Last Tuesday night we spent a little dusk-and-evening time at Cottonwood Hot Springs in Buena Vista, Colorado, and I highly recommend it. Not as slick as Mt. Princeton Hot Springs, but for looking up at the stars while immersed in hot water, you can’t beat it. (They keep lighting around the springs pools to an absolute minimum. Walk carefully if you value your toes.)
Do you still smoke? If cancer doesn’t scare you enough, consider what it will do to your looks.
I moderate comments on Contra pretty harshly, but I have to say, a recent spam comment from an IP in Vietnam is a testament to something. Maybe automated translation: “The content on this publish is really a single of the top material that I’ve ever occur across. I love your article, I’ll appear back to verify for new posts.” Heh. No, you won’t.

Odd Lots

Sep 2nd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Several people have written to say that green neon sign crosses are common in Europe (where I’ve been all of twice, sigh) and indicate conventional pharmacies having no necessary connection with marijuana. That would explain a lot; Europe has certainly led the world in marijuana tolerance. Here, however, green crosses have clearly become culural icons for the medical marijuana industry.
Here’s a very nice introduction to the meteorology behind the El Nino and La Nina Pacific weather events.
From the Epic Failure of Imagination Department: I’m holding out for STORMY, MACS, Laura, Launce, CardShark #17, and Sangruse V9…but William Gibson is throwing in the towel and settling for Google.
The fine structure constant, which governs the strength of electromagnetic interaction (and thus many properties of matter, including important things like star formation) may not be constant across the entire cosmos. We should be lucky that we’re here, because if we were somewhere else we might not be possible. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
Sheer marketing brilliance: A small brewer is printing a level indicator on his beer bottle labels so that you know how far to fill the bottle with water (or leave it filled with beer) to generate a given musical tone when you blow across the top.
I am much impressed with Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab Android slate, but I’m afraid it may force me to contact with the colleague for the urgent work during a cosy time.
So much for lounging around the house in your ratty underwear.
Evidence continues to accumulate that the BMI is not only utterly useless, but in some areas misleading. (It can’t even predict obesity.) There are better methods and just as simple. But like the “carbs good, fat bad” mantra, BMI just won’t go away, even if it’s contributing to early death. (Thanks to my own Carol for the link.)
Yes, it’s true: There was just something different about ’60s and ’70s SF book covers.

Odd Lots

Aug 30th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

Well, I got the Mallo-Ware bowls I bought from eBay, and they were in better shape than they looked in the listing, and Dash has clearly busted his last bowl. Which leads to a thought: I used to prowl garage sales for entertainment, halfheartedly hoping to find something useful. (I once got a completely functional early-50s tube tester for fifty cents.) Now I just decide what I consider useful and go to eBay or Craigslist.
Adobe’s Flexnet copy protection system evidently writes to the MBR, and thus can make a system unbootable if it gets in a wrestling match with something else that also wants to be there. Flexnet, in fact, looks disturbingly like a rootkit from here. If I wasn’t sanguine about moving up to Adobe CS before, I sure as hell don’t intend to now.
Courtesy of Esther Schindler (who apparently was the editor who commissioned it) I give you a crackerjack tutorial by Tom Bunzel on how to do pivot tables in Excel.
From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: A luthier is one who makes or repairs stringed instruments. From “lute,” which is one of the most ancient instruments in its class.
Now that Apple has anointed the slate category, the usual suspects are coming up with their own surprisingly interesting takes on the concept. This is my favorite so far, and brings up the interesting question: Why not include both FM radio and TV tuners? If these things are to be travel toys, that’s a must-have. (I also want real GPS, not just cell-tower interpolation.)
Here’s a list of 100 resolutions (102, actually) that anyone aspiring to be an Evil Comic Book Overlord should make. Resolution #2 is particularly important: “My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.”
My daily spam count felll significantly (about 30%) a few days ago, and I wonder if this had anything to do with it.
Somebody told me about this years ago and I didn’t pay attention. I have one of these in a drawer. Will attempt when time allows.
I used to call Hoag’s Object the “Here’s Looking At You, Kid” galaxy. I’m amazed that so few people have ever heard of it, or seen photos. You no longer have an excuse.
If the chemical elements played rock music (or if rock bands were set up like the Metal Men) this would be their periodic table.

Odd Lots

Aug 17th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

The hat size/shape measuring gadget that I mentioned in my entry for August 11, 2010 is called a conformateur, and here’s a whole bunch of pictures. It’s evidently a lot commoner than I thought, still in use, and works spectacularly well.
And another kind of Fedora anxiety: I accidentally installed OpenSuse 11.3 over my Fedora 13 instance yesterday. Might be a good trade; nothing irreplaceable was lost with Fedora, and I need practice in KDE 4 more than I need practice in GNOME.
A new, pre-shrunk iPad may be in the chute: 7″ diagoinal display but the same pixel resolution. Will fit in a smaller pocket, and may well render ebooks just as crisply. We won’t know until it happens. If it happens. But if it doesn’t happen, Apple will be way dumber than they look.
Worry less about hurricanes, at least this year: Accumulated cyclonic energy (ACE) is at a 30-year low and still falling. ACE is a good proxy for hurricane number and strength (look at 2005 on the graph) so while it’s low, breathe deep and take that tropical vacation you’ve been putting off.
This guy gets on my nerves sometimes, but he nailed it: We may someday create software that does much or most of what the human brain does, but we will not do it by reverse-engineering the human brain, at least the way that Ray Kurzweil thinks we will. (For a more detailed popular treatment of why the genome is not a deterministic description of anything, see Matt Ridley’s The Agile Gene.)
There’s something very likeable about this Icelandic proposal to build high-tension towers in the form of skeletal human beings. Most of the ones I see here in the US look like angry bull heads–and all absolutely alike–so this would be a huge improvement of something huge that has long needed improvement.
I see this little guy in sheet music fairly regularly, but never knew what it was until I hunted down this summary of just about all modern musical notation symbols. The symbol in question is called a fermata, but would you know a segno if you saw one? (Or, better yet, a hemidemisemiquaver?)
What do vegan zombies crave as they stalk about like undead celery? Grrrainnns!

Odd Lots

Aug 10th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

7 comments

My installation of Thunderbird 3 has correlated with a lot of weirdness, not only in system performance but in taskbar “stalls” in response to clicked links in messages. I’ve heard a lot of people having trouble with it as well, and we are apparently not in the minority.
How can I have lived the last ten years as an SF writer and never heard of John Titor, Time Traveler?
Stephen Hawking has told us that we must abandon Earth or die. Agreed. Now, Dr. Hawking, would you please invent us a hyperdrive already?
No, bichons are not groomed this way. (That’s for miniature poodles.) Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.
Microsoft is working on a tablet prototype with keys on the back surface, opposite the display, so you can type with the fingers that you’re using to grip the device. (Thumbs remain on the front.) This looks better than it tells; do follow the link. Will it work? No opinion until I try it.
If anyone here has not yet been to thereifixedit.com, Go. There. Right. Now. (Via Make.)
Many people have sent me a link to this item from City Journal , which may indicate that some sense is finally creeping into the nutrition world. Sugar and grains may be killing you. Meat, eggs, dairy, and animal fat are probably not. I’ve known this from my research for a long time. Now, to get the government to admit that they’ve been slowly killing their citizens for over 30 years…
Not convinced? Fructose seems to be the preferred sugar of cancer cells.
Still not convinced? The inventor of Cheese Doodles just died at age 90. So much for salt and fat being deadly. (The food dyes worry me more than either.)
Pete Albrecht points out that LA coffee shops are beginning to unplug their Wi-Fi access points and plaster over all their wall outlets. They’ve found that people buy more coffee and snacks when they actually talk to one another. No shirt, Sherlock!
Formufit: PVC pipe fittings for when you’re not using PVC pipe for plumbing. Fine stuff!
I think that what we’ll miss most about our deathwish-afflicted newspapers are all the silly headlines.
And anyone who has ever scratched his or her head over that famous if gappy Latin expression “Et in Arcadia ego” should look at the variations here. (I find myself thinking of a paraphrase of another classic expression from junk mail: “You may already be in Arcadia!”)
Heh. As long as Carol’s beside me, I am.