A friend of ours was over yesterday and wanted to see the really cool bamboo pad Jen bought for me. I saw a lot of neat ideas from her so I wanted to take another crack at drawing on it and wanted to play with color. Nothing fancy but I figure Plue (from Rave Master and Fairy Tale) was a good start.
This past week my SIL has been here visiting the kids and while she was here I offered to look at her . She said it was running a little slow and that also the USB port on the front right had stopped working. Now I pulled the hard drive out an scanned it but didn’t find any virus’s so I slapped it back in and deleted the device driver for the USB ports thinking that maybe a re-installation might help. Nope. Next I took a little Cisco led USB powered goose neck light I got from Networkers and plugged it in. Nothing. Nadda. So it wasn’t just a data issue there also wasn’t any power as well.
So I talked it over with her and discussed the risks to taking a laptop apart. Finally took the plunge and when I got the thing fully disassembled the USB port fell right out of the laptop onto the ground. Yup, it turns out that the entire port was pretty much disconnected inside the case and the metal shell and contacts had all been sheared off.
Here is a macro zoom. The replacement USB port is on the left and the one on the right (with the 45 degree angled front ground posts) is the old one:
still haven’t figured out where pieces of that vanished too
Now I’m not quite sure how exactly you achieve this but I’m 90% sure it involved a situation like this:
We can go out to dine right after I transfer this
I was lucky enough to find a replacement on ebay for only $6 bucks or so and it even arrived in only a couple of days. It’s not that laptops are so hard to work on it’s just that they have so many damn screws. Maybe I’m getting old or careless but I just can’t take something apart with this many screws haphazardly so as you can see I taped a couple of pieces of paper down to my desk to use as a map and put each screw in a circle that represented where it came from. The second pic is the USB port after I cleaned out the old solder and remnants of the original USB port and then finally you see the new port installed and the motherboard back in the chassis.
About half an hour later the damnedest thing happened….it actually turned on and worked. So hey not a bad repair for only seven bucks right? I just don’t think she should take her laptops to Sparta again anytime in the future. 
So a couple of weeks ago while I was running to the library I noticed my car’s IMA light was on (2001 Honda Insight) and it was performing like crap. After almost getting T boned on the way home I started thinking about what I could do. Since the dealership near me charges $80 bucks to pull the diag codes from the OBD I didn’t want to pay that but it turned out a friend of mine had an OBD reader that he’s be willing to use.
So I drive out to his house and we pull two codes. The first is a P0134 which means that the oxygen sensor is bad (bye bye $400) and the second code is even worse because it’s a P1449 which means the battery pack overheated and usually it’s a full replacement. Thankfully for me thanks to a class action lawsuit I still have 2 months warranty on my battery pack. So I went into the dealership confident that I’d be able to scrape past this issue barely but it turns out that they say the battery isn’t bad but the ground strap was severed and the O2 sensor needs replacement.
Now I don’t know that much about cars but it seems to me that fixing the cheap part first and clearing the codes seems a better course of action. After all if the ground strap to the engine block had broken off then wouldn’t that possibly impact the O2 sensor that is connected to it? Why not replace the ground strap and see if the error throws again?
I don’t think that looks right
They wanted $60 bucks to order the ground straps and put them in. So $24 dollars later I had OEM straps being delivered to my house for me to install. In the mean time I cobbled together a temp strap out of some aluminum wire I had around (which actually worked quite well) and drove about 60 miles (getting 60mpg) with none of the errors coming back.
The installed the straps without much trouble. The hardest part of the whole deal is taking bits of the cold air intake apart (one 10mm bold next to the filter box) everything else is pretty much straight forward.
My temp ground strap
Old straps compared to the new ones
New straps installed
So far so good. I haven’t really traveled any great distances yet but the error codes still haven’t popped up quite yet. Of course the goal is to monitor for them and hopefully they’ll pop up in the next couple of months. To be honest a two seater car just isn’t cutting it with three kids so I don’t know for how much longer I’ll be owning this car…as much as I hate to say it. 
So this will be the first full fledged post since the recent server migration. So far I think everything is going pretty well considering I’ve never setup a web server before from scratch. Apache2 isn’t that hard to setup with virtual domains but I have to say that it’s quite the memory hog. I did a few tweaks for the SQL database to minimize memory util there and hopefully we’ll be ok. I tried to use the worker mpm with Apache2 but couldn’t because I needed PHP.
Thought about switching to lighttp or something else but we’ll see for now. Setting up the mail server was new territory although most people say that dovecot is cake. Heck I think the biggest problem I had was xname.org constantly going down so I couldn’t swing my DNS to the new server.
In the middle of all this we also decided to replace our dishwasher with a new one. It’s a Bosch SHE4AP06UC that we bought from ABT (as we have with damn near everything else) and at this point I have now personally installed every appliance in our house. So far so good…the only dishwasher was a cheap piece of junk and once the racks started rusting (to the point where it left brown spots on a pot) I had enough. No sense throwing good money after bad and trying to fix it.
Still got a lot of things going on but installing the dishwasher was pretty easy. The old one wasn’t even screwed in properly so it kept moving. Plus I only had to make one trip to Home Depot for a 90 degree 3/8 N.P.T to 3/8 compression adapter. A single trip is nearly unheard of!
Getting setup on a new server so expect a few bumps in the road here for a little while
