Hardware Blizzard

Last night I dreamed that I was snowed in by computer parts. Peripherals, motherboards, connectors, and cables. Chipsets, jumpers, expansion cards, and power supplies. RJ-45, slave, master, and , SATA drives. A droning voice dully intoned IDE, AGP, VESA, and USB. DDR, DIMM, CRIMM, and active matrix. WTF?

There were green circuit boards all around and falling down from above. There were black memory chips endlessly slapping down on my dome. There was the smell of PCBs, electronics, and silicon dust.

Remind me not to go to bed right after computer hardware class.

Cheap Phone Chargers and Predictive Texting

In less than a month I've gone
through three mobile phone chargers.

The first one to go kaput on me
was a wall adaptor for an LG
KE970 Shine. To be fair, it's not the charger the phone came
with. The AC adaptor shipped with my phone came from another planet
or something so I bought the only one I could find at Target. It
worked fine for about a year. Then the metal piece that goes into the
phone became loose. It would move inside its little black plastic
housing. I swear I didn't beat or mistreat the thing. Being a budding
electronics technician, I decided to open up the housing and see
what's up. Basically, one of the tiny plastic holders inside broke. I
still used that charger for a few months. I just had to open it up
every time I wanted to use it and get the insides resituated. Right
around New Years, the wires inside the charger came loose from where
they were soldered. I don't have a solder iron and I don't really
know how to do it so that charger was retired.

Fortunately, I had a back-up
phone, a CECT
P168 (iPhone clone) with adaptors for regular outlets and car
cigarette lighters. The home adaptor lasted maybe a whole day. Once
again, I don't think I was being rough with it. I missed the outlet
when trying to plug it in and its plug became loose and unusable.
Whatever. I still had the car charger. That one lasted a few days
before I accidentally yanked the cable and the USB socket it plugged
into became loose. I pried it open and saw that the circuit board had
snapped. Great. I returned to the wall adaptor to see if I could fix
it. I unscrewed it and opened it up nice and professional-like and
had a look-see. Like the adaptor for the Shine, an important little
piece of black plastic had broken. I tried to tape it (!) but my
pathetic attempt was mocked by reality.

So I returned to the Shine. I
went to Best Buy and bought a Rocketfish
USB charging cable. I'm satisfied with its quality. It feels
solid. It's lasted a few days. It seemed to charge the phone faster
than the wall adaptor did. I hope that doesn't lead to my phone
exploding.

While going through my phone
charger travails, I was switching back and forth between the Shine
and the iClone and I got to thinking about the merits of predictive
texting. The iClone's touchscreen worked quite fine. I might even
say it impressed me. I can't compare it to an iPhone's because I've
never used one. I found it a pain in the ass to use versus my Shine's
conventional keypad. It wasn't just a matter of not being used to
using touchscreens. The touchscreen requires more effort. There are
the 26 letters, plus keys for 0-9, and punctuation. The Shine has 12
keys. I don't need separate keys for every number and letter. It's
fine when I have both hands to use as on a conventional computer
keyboard but I don't need all that on my phone. I just need the bare
minimum of big fat keys to press. Qwerty keyboards on phones seem
silly and I prefer the feel of real keys versus touchscreens. I'm
happy to be back texting with my LG Shine. I missed the vast library
of personal and ridiculous words I've loaded into its predictive
text.

And I was thinking about the size
of various phones out there. The Shine is big enough. That iPhone
clone was even bigger. I want a phone that fits easily into the front
pockets of my jeans.

Author's Note: This post was originally created in NeoOffice. I wanted to try cutting and pasting it to see how it'd turn out. I'm too lazy to fix the formatting.

MAKE explains LEDs

In honor of this being the first day of classes at PJC, I'm sharing this video from MAKE:



MAKE presents: The LED from make magazine on Vimeo.

My class tonight is called Digital Fundamentals. According to the online course description, the course's "Major Learning Outcomes" are:

At the end of the course the student will be able to:
Use basic trouble-shooting equipment such as the DVM, Logic
Probe, Logic Pulsar, Current Tracer, and the Oscilloscope.
Covert from decimal to octal, hexidecimal, BCD, and Gray Codes
and vice versa.
Analyze and develop a basic understanding of the basic logic
gates circuit operations and functions.
Design basic functional logic circuits given a Boolean equation
or truth table.
Define basic terms and terminology used in logic circuit
operations.
Identify logic symbols used in logic circuit diagrams.
Analyze the operation of a logic circuit diagram.
Identify the characteristics of the major logic families.

Sounds like fun! (Seriously.) Thanks to the electronics class I took last semester, I have at least some clue about what'll be going on.

I cleaned the keyboard!

The keys on this HP Pavilion laptop occasionally don't work, so I decided to clean the keyboard. That involved removing the keyboard, which wasn't difficult but it wasn't easy, either.

After some googling I found a service manual online and saw which screws had to come out. There was one on the back of each lid hinge. Once I removed them it was just a matter of popping off the plastic piece which has the speaker grill, one-touch buttons, and power button. And then there were four more screws to remove. Glad I got that set of mini-screwdrivers. When I finally freed up the keyboard I about tore the ribbon that connects it to the motherboard (or whatever it is the keyboard is connected to). So be gentle when you go to lift the keyboard from the computer. To loosen the ribbon I slid up a white plastic collar that holds it in place and the ribbon popped from on its own. Sweet. The keyboard was finally free of the rest of the computer!

I took some CleanSafe dust remover to it and blew the crap out of the keys...or at least a bunch of it, which appeared to be mostly cat hairs. Nice.

I put it all back together and here I am, testing the keyboard. It's performing better than it was before, but there are still some occasional hiccups. There are probably still some stray hairs in it, but I can live with its current performance. Maybe it was just a crappy keyboard to begin with.