Ted's Blog

Eight years ago I bought two light switches to control my front porch and back porch lights, automatically turning them on at sunset and off at a certain time or at sunrise. These worked well for the most part, but didn’t track sunrise/sunset perfectly (you picked one of four zones in the US) and the clock lost a few minutes per month, so I would have to re-enter the current time and the time of sunrise and sunset a few times a year. They had a built-in battery backup which would usually keep the settings during a brief power outage, but not always. Lately, they have stopped saving settings during any power outages, so I think those batteries died. Taking one of them apart, the batteries are soldered in place and can’t be easily replaced. The switches still work, I just have to reprogram them every time the power goes out.
Continue reading “Smart Switches”

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.

Continue reading “Lenovo Hinge Repair”

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:

Continue reading “New Aeropress”

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.
Continue reading “Wiki Trouble”

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.
Continue reading “Movie Review Date”