Category: Uncategorized

Fourteen months ago I bought a Lenovo IdeaPad 5, specifically model 15IIL05 81YK, from Staples. The other day it started making some cracking sort of noises as I opened and closed it and some of the plastic around the left hinge was deforming. Not much later, the left hinge gave away, barely supporting that side of the screen. I looked online and found that a lot of people have this problem with Lenovo notebooks and there are class action lawsuits about bad Lenovo hinges. On the Lenovo forums, people complained about the problem, but even for computers still under warranty (incredibly pathetic that a hinge would break in the first year of use!), Lenovo feels that physical damage is not covered by their warranty, though they sometimes will relent and fix the problem under warranty anyway. I usually use a credit card that doubles the standard warranty, but for some reason used a card that doesn’t do that in this case. Also I never get an extended warranty, but since this isn’t covered by the warranty, you would have to also get an accidental damage extended warranty. Since mine was out of warranty they would not let me add any kind of warranty now.

UPDATE: Lenovo seems to acknowledge that this is a manufacturing defect and will fix computers with the problem if they are still under warranty. Some people even were able to get repairs covered out of warranty, but this is not universal. You have to open a support case and then post the case number of the support forum and they will contact you to fix it. Dozens, of people have been able to get their laptops repaired via that forum.

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Eleven years ago I bought an Aeropress coffee maker. At first I only used it a couple of times a week since I was trying to limit my coffee consumption, but for the last year or so I started drinking coffee every day, using it to reduce my soda consumption. The clear plastic of the Aeropress has gotten stained over the years, a problem mitigated by the latest Aeropresses by using smoky colored plastic. Over the last few months I have noticed the top of the plunger starting to crack. I tried to repair it with superglue which was completely ineffective except in staining the plunger with cloudy white superglue stains that can’t be removed (and doesn’t touch the coffee). This week it broke off completely and I tried superglue again, but I heard some cracking noises as I was making coffee today, so I don’t think it will last. I feel like 95% of the time I try to use superglue, it doesn’t work. Here is my old one with plunger showing the superglue stains near the flange and the container part showing coffee stains:

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On July 30 I got an automated email from the web hosting service HostGator that my CPU usage was too high and had been too high for “an extended period of time.” Using one of their cheapest plans, I have shared hosting and my CPU usage was exceeding 25% and my website was being disabled until I could fix the problem. I wasn’t even aware of the problem so they basically shut down my website without any notice. That seemed to include any script-driven websites including maybe this blog and the flashlight wiki, but not static web pages like my movie reviews. Their unhelpful advice was to get a dedicated server which would cost a lot more money, though they also pointed out that sometimes scripts can be buggy or need to be optimized to reduce CPU load. They also sent some kind of log which provided virtually no information, but all seemed related to the Flashlight Wiki. I have no idea what was going on but I do know that I have tried for a couple of years now to update the MediaWiki software, failing at least partially because HostGator didn’t provide the latest version of PHP and their technical support seemed unable to resolve the problem.
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I have been writing movie reviews for 23 years now and have had a web page with reviews for 20 years. Often I will watch an old movie and write up a review, but at first I didn’t bother writing reviews of old movies. I started getting DVD’s from Netflix in 2006, and since I could only have 2 movies out at a time, I tried to watch a movie the day I got it and return it the next day. I was able to watch a movie almost every other day that way. I couldn’t keep that up all the time, so I would only join for a few months at a time. I watched a lot of movies that way. By the third time I joined they had started letting you watch movies online, but I still had dialup! Around that same time, I moved my movie reviews from static html web pages to a database that would generate web pages that I would then upload to my web server. A little later I started including the date I wrote the review which let me put the 10 most recent reviews on the home page, which I still do. But I didn’t try to add dates to the older reviews and after a movie fell off of the most recent ten, the date didn’t really matter much except to me and never appeared in the review. Lately I thought I probably should include the date in the review, just to give some sense of when I wrote it. I had dates going back to 2007, but the oldest reviews had been saved to text files from writing them on the Macintosh User Group. I started saving the reviews in 1998. I still have those text files and they often (but not always) include the date of the posting, so I was able to enter some of those.
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Last year I sold a bunch of silver and some gold coins back to Provident Metals, one of the dealers who had sold most of it to me. As spot prices rose, I sold off four batches of coins. I held onto most of the coins that I had paid a higher premium for, primarily coins from Australia and 5-ounce silver America the Beautiful quarters from the US. Last month I tried selling 5 of the ATB quarters on eBay and the selling prices weren’t great and eBay takes a big 12.5% commission, driving the realized gain down to around what the dealers would have paid. Plus with eBay you have to take pictures, write up an ad, package things up, etc. You can take coins to coin shops, but I feel like most of them would offer even less than the online dealers since they don’t handle the same volume.

One alternative was to try to sell on a forum of silver coin collectors. I found one that seemed okay, but you had to post four messages before you could sell anything there. There was no charge to post items for sale and a lot of the sellers insist on payment methods with no fees like Venmo, Zelle, or Paypal Friends and Family. It used to be you would get in trouble with PayPal if you had to many PPFF transactions, but they seem to have stopped that. However, you do lose any ability to dispute the sale and get your money back. In order to get around that, the forum set up feedback where if you buy an item from someone and everything turns out okay you both give each other positive feedback, similar to what eBay does, but unlike eBay the forum has no way of verifying that a transaction even happened. If you don’t have a feedback history then you are expected to pay or ship before the other person. If neither of you have a trading history, then you just have to figure out something, possibly going to a disputable PayPal transaction and paying 3% in commissions. I always keep a balance in my PayPal account so I can pay someone right away with those funds without a fee. But I think most people use a credit card to to fund PayPal purchases so there is a mandatory fee from the credit card company. PayPal can also transfer money from your bank account and wait for that to process, or process it immediately if you also have a credit card for backup. Zelle is nice because it eliminates PayPal and you just send money from one bank account to the other without revealing anything more than your email address or phone number and there is no wait involved.
Continue reading “Selling Silver”