Author Archives: editor

Tivoli Audio Model Three and Pal Power Fix

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We own several Tivoli Audio products. One of our Pals and our Model Three both suffered from power problems. In both cases the cause was cracked solder joints. Moving around the Pal (which is portable!) or the nightstand Model Three must have put pressure on the power jack, wiggling the solder joint until it cracked.

In both cases, I added a drop of solder on the failing joints and the radios were good as new. The following photos show where I spotted the cracked joints:

Model Three Repair

I removed all screws from the back. I did not need to remove anything from the front. However there are several cables that go from back to front that have to be disconnected to get access to the board with the power jack, so I took reference photos like this. This is the top of the unit looking down (although the radio is sideways.)

iPhoto-13

This photo is from the other side (the bottom) where I could see the cracked solder joint spark as I plugged it in and removed it. I had to remove this board in order to get to the solder joints with a soldering iron.

iPhoto-12

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Credit Card Tune-up 2011

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Clark Howard recommended the website creditcardtuneup.com where you can plug in your spending patterns, and the site will point you in the direction of the best rewards program. I did this almost three years ago and decided to switch our “first card out of wallet” from Discover Card to American Express Blue. At the time I did not realize I could only get cash back annually, unlike Discover who allows you to get cash back as you go. But, the estimated $1,000 cash back by the estimator has proven to pay off.

I just ran our spending patterns (which are still largely grocery, department store, and gas) through the tune up again and got the results below. Where is American Express Blue? It didn’t even show up in the list. (I’m just showing above $500 payback below.) I wonder how much of this is driven by advertising campaigns paid to Credit Card Tune-up or referral fees? Perhaps Amex is not pushing Blue right now, because it has certainly continued to pay back. Hmmmm…..

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Kitchen Aid Dishwasher Spring Cable (Rope)

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A while ago our dishwasher door quit going down smoothly when the spring on the right seemed to have broken. Then it got worse last week when the left spring seemed to have gone.

I backed out four screws and was able to slide / roll (back wheels) the dishwasher out half way. The electric cable prevented it from coming out any further, but that gave me enough access to see and get to the door springs.




The heavy-duty metal springs were fine. Instead, the “hinge cable” broke on the right and the “tension wheel” slipped on the left. The cable is no cable at all. It’s a small, thin braided rope clamped with plastic hook/loop things on the ends. I can’t believe they even last 10 pulls under tension.

In the attached photo, the rope slipped out of the hinge hook on the right. The tension wheel has a plastic peg (on back in this photo) that sits in a hole in the frame. The peg bent under pressure and will not stay in place.

ktichenaid-cable-hinge-tension.jpg

I feel ridiculous ordering the replacement parts because they seem so poorly engineered. If I was a *real* engineer, I’d rebuild using galvanized cables and pulleys. But I’m not. $25.71 with shipping from RepairClinic.com.

Helpful video by Steve at PartSelect.

Our model is KitchenAid KUDL02FRSS0. Whirpool has the same model number.

iPod List (Test)

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This is just a test.

.podlist em {font-style:normal;color:red;} .podlist td {vertical-align:top;}

1-9-01 iTunes available for Macs
10-23-01

1G iPod 5 GB $399
 

1-18-02

Ted gets 20GB Archos $279

3-20-02

10 GB $499

7-17-02

2G iPod: 5GB $299, 10 GB $399, 20 GB, $499. PC versions available.

4-28-03

3G iPod: 10 GB $299, 15 GB $399, 30 GB $499. PC or Mac compatible. iTunes music store debuts, but for Mac only.

9-8-03

20 GB $399, 40 GB $499

10-16-03

iTunes for PC’s

11-12-03

Ted gets 3G 20GB

12-25-03

Ted lends Archos to Danny indefinitely

(Full list here.)

Anna Maria 2010 Photos Up

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Photos by Julie, Jeb, Claire, Carol, and Bob. Put them in Julie’s Gallery.

Anna Maria June 2010 Memory List

Ted:

Ice cream sandwich pie

Grant’s deliberate misreading of the Crazy 8’s rules

David sleeps all day and stays up all night

Kelly’s new braces

Andrew convinces Michael to swim in the ocean by offering

him $5

Watching sunsets every night

Playing Wii even though we didn’t have any games

First house with an elevator

House full of men helps push stuck van out of sand

Walking down the street for all you can eat pancakes

Pith boy

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Comment Spam on Increase

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Maybe it is related to the holiday season, buy the comment spam on Mac5 blogs has increased. In the past, automated spam was blocked with some special code I installed. I know there are businesses in poor countries that have rooms full of low-paid labor doing all kinds of things to manipulate Google searches. Manually posting comments with links is one such strategy

Comment-Spam-Example-1.pngI have made some changes in the spam protection settings that will, I hope, intercept this new wave of spam. The example shown here was a spam that was caught in early December. It was caught for two reasons: 1) Too many links in the comment and 2) the IP address of the commenter was listed on a spam notification service. I have turned up the scoring to be more aggressive.

Our friends and family should not get blocked when we are not including links. And even if we include links will typically get posted because we get positive credit with a known email address. Let’s hope the spammers don’t figure out our email addresses.

Getting Movable Type To Use 755

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Claire’s new entries in a new month would not display. Movable Type is storing entries in archive directories by month, and when creating a new directory in her blog, it was setting to 777. Since her banner uses php to randomly display photos, the JustHost.com server did not like running anything through the php parser in a wide open directory. It wants a minimum security of 755. I found an article that described adding the following to the mt.config file. Solved the problem.

HTMLPerms 0775

DBUmask 0022

HTMLUmask 0022

UploadUmask 0022

DirUmask 0022

The odd thing is other blogs were creating as 755 already, so not sure why Claire’s behaved differently.