Category: Uncategorized

Last night I was watching the Oscars. I was a couple of hours in and Billie Eilish was singing her James Bond song (minutes before Will Smith punched Chris Rock) and the picture went out. I could still hear singing, but no picture. I turned the TV off and then back on, but got the same result, plus a sizzling noise. Eventually I noticed a pretty strong smell of burning electronics. The TV sometimes would have a darker than normal screen that I could reset by unplugging the TV, but this was worse than that and obviously something was physically wrong given the sound and smell. First I looked up whether it might possibly be under warranty. I had used my Best Buy credit card to buy it at Best Buy so I could get 6% cash back, but the Best Buy card does not double the warranty, which wouldn’t have helped either since it turns out I bought it more than 2 years ago. TV’s have been getting better and prices have been dropping, so I shopped a little to see what was out there, but it would clearly be $1000 to $2000 to get another 75-inch TV that was any good.

Then I started looking for other people who might have had similar problems. I did find some things, but not for this particular model of TV, the TCL 75R615. There are places that sell replacement circuit boards that can often fix the problem, but there are 4 main boards where the problem could be. The other possible problem source would be the LED’s that backlight the screen, which are harder to replace. It seemed like it would be the power board, given the sizzle and smell. It seems like the lower power electronic boards wouldn’t melt down like that and the LED’s probably wouldn’t all go out at once. I found some videos online showing how to take the rear cover off of the TV to reveal the boards and hoped I could see something that had burned out. I had to remove over 20 screws to get the cover off but didn’t see any damage.
Continue reading “TV Repair”

I have gone on some interesting trips with Paul and Brad. Last year we found the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River, not far off of the Appalachian Trail in north Georgia. This year Paul suggested we go see a rare flower called an Oconee Bell. This flower only blooms for a few weeks and only lives in a few counties in South Carolina, including Oconee County. There is a state park there called Devils Fork State Park on Lake Jocassee a couple of hours northeast of Atlanta that has a 1-mile loop trail that passes by some areas along creeks where Oconee Bells grow. We found a few at one end of the trail, and then continued through some woods towards the other end of the trail where there were even more. At the beginning the creek was kind of bizarre since it would completely disappear into the ground and then re-emerge 50 or 100 feet down the creek bed.

Continue reading “Oconee Bells”

Friday I heard some weird scratching around in the direction of my living room chimney. As far as I know, this chimney was never used and when I made some energy saving upgrades, they actually sealed it off with some foam core bard sealed in place with spray foam. After hearing it a few more times, I went up on the roof to shine a light down the flue and see if I could see anything. I could see all the way down, but couldn’t see anything at the bottom (there are two flues, one I think was for the furnace, but when that was upgraded they started venting out the side of the house, so the chimney has no real purpose anymore). I don’t think a bird or squirrel could have gotten down there because the screen over the chimney was still in place and seemed to still be effective. Then I went down in the crawlspace to see if I could see anything and of course that was no good either.
Continue reading “Chimney Critter”

With some of the coldest weather of the season on the way, on Thursday I noticed that the furnace wasn’t coming on. I could hear the exhaust fan starting, but the burner wasn’t coming on and no air was coming out of the vents. I got a very efficient Lennox system 8 years ago and it has had a lot of issues. Fortunately it came with a 10-year warranty, but I still have to pay for labor, which isn’t cheap. I called the people who installed it and they said they would send someone out the next day. It was 63 degrees in the house and would drop to 58 degrees by the next morning, which is pretty cold. They came out in the morning and said the gas valve was shorted out and would need to be replaced, but they would have to order the part from Lennox. It should be arrive Monday. The problem was Saturday it was supposed to go down to 24 degrees. I could move out of the house, but the pipes might freeze, so I was looking up how to drain the pipes. The repair guy asked if I had any space heaters I could use, which I don’t.

I looked up space heaters and found that about the highest capacity heaters they sell are 1500 watts. Walmart had some for $26, so I bought two to try them out. They are bookshelf size with a fan and a ceramic heating element and three levels: 700, 900, and 1500 watts. I have a good guide to which fuses or circuit breakers control which outlets and put the two heaters on different circuits, but my guide had a flaw and I wound up blowing a fuse when both outlets were using the same fuse. I have extra fuses and made a note to my guide. 1500 watts is about 12 amps and the fuses are only rated for 20 amps, so yeah, it was definitely going to blow. Anyway, they worked, so I went back to Walmart and bought two more so I could heat more of the house. I haven’t blown anymore fuses.

Continue reading “Furnace Out”

When I first thought about joining the Disney Movie Club, I took an average of different rankings of their animated features (the Disney canon) to prioritize what I should buy. I am now on my sixth enrollment in the Disney Movie Club and have bought about two thirds of the Disney canon. I had not seen a lot of the movies on the list or it had been so long that I didn’t remember much about them, so it has been fun going back and watching and seeing how the movies developed over time. The differences between the first movie, the hand animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and a more recent movie like the 3D computer animated Zootopia could not be more stark, but that isn’t to say they aren’t both good and they are both artistic in their own ways. The difference is kind of ironic in particular for Zootopia since it is based on noir movies of the time period when Snow White came out.

I was happy to get Disney Plus which has all of the Disney canon (except Make Mine Music for some reason), letting me watch some of the movies that I probably would never buy. I have had Disney Plus now for two years and still haven’t watched all of the canon yet, so that may never happen. So this list still has a few omissions (I really need to watch Pocahontas, which I own, but haven’t seen since its first release, before I was saving reviews. I was going to recalculate a ranking with the latest Disney movies, but instead, I decided to just plunge forward into my own list. Continue reading “My Disney Rankings”