Five years ago, I got a JP1 cable to connect my computer and JP1-compatible remote control. That remote stopped working (some of the buttons wore out, but I was able to remap those functions to other buttons for a while). I was at Mom’s house recently and wanted to help her JP1 remote learn to run her new iPod boom box. The easiest way is just to learn the signals from the device’s remote into the universal remote by pointing them at each other and pressing some buttons. But because I had done this to learn everything for her HDTV to analog converter box, there wasn’t any memory left for the boom box.
Year: 2009
AJC Discount
I recently let my subscription to the newspaper lapse. They wanted a lot more than I had been paying in the past to resubscribe and their discounts were lousy. Mom showed me a flyer today with a 50% off discount, so I have re-upped. It is for new subscribers, but they had an ominous warning that they would charge for amounts past due (which I have because they always keep delivering the paper after it lapses), so we’ll see what happens with that.
These are 13-week prices, but you can also get 26 weeks for a little less:
7-day: $2.49/wk
Thu-Sun: $2.25/wk
Sunday: $1.47/wk
Just go to ajc.com/discount. You don’t seem to need an offer code, but the one I got from Mom was 2130.
Portable Hard Drive
After ending up with a couple of extra notebook computer hard drives when I did the Archos upgrade, I ordered some cheap ($4.90) cases from China on eBay that would let me convert the hard drives to portable drives. They arrived this morning. I got a blue one and a black one. One will hold the 40 GB drive and the other the 20 GB drive (the blue 40 GB drive is for Nicole).
To set it up, you just take the end off of the case, plug the hard drive into it, slide it back in place, and screw two tiny little screws into the sides to hold it securely (they include a small philips head screwdriver). They even threw in a cheap looking leather sleeve for it. My computer had no problem recognizing it and I didn’t need the extra USB plug that can provide extra power (the only thing kind of non-standard is that they used the wide USB A end instead of a mini USB or USB B plug for the drive). The connection is USB 2.0, so data transferred very quickly. I moved 3.81 GB of videos over in 3 minutes 39 seconds, so 17.4 MB per second. That is at least a few times faster than the tests I did on my flash drives and way faster than when I connect the USB 1.1 Archos where 3 GB of data would take 20 minutes or so. USB 2.0 will allow faster speeds than that, so the limiting factor might be the hard drive itself or my computer. It is noticeably snappy when opening folders on it, similar to folders on the computer’s hard drive.
Anyway, this is pretty neat and a good use for a hard drive from an old laptop computer.
New Dishwasher
When I moved into my house about 12 years ago, the Frigidaire dishwasher was pretty new. It worked fine for the most part, but the soap tray wouldn’t stay closed, or if it did, it would never open during the cycle and would still have soggy soap in it when the cycle was done. At one point it wouldn’t come on at all and I had to call a repair man. I watched him take it apart and he showed me that the handle that you turn to lock it down wasn’t pressing down hard enough on the safety switch. He said I would need a new handle for $120. I said don’t worry about it and when he left I took it back apart like he had done and put a piece of cardboard underneath the switch so it would sit up higher and now the handle would trigger the switch. So either a $120 handle or a piece of cardboard would have fixed it. It’s worked for years after that.
Shuttle Carrier Aircraft
Tonight the space shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California after being waved off two days in a row from Florida. This got me thinking about the 747 that carries the space shuttle. Wikipedia points out that there are two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. Both were originally flown by airlines, the first by American Airlines, and the second by a Japanese airline. The engines had to be upgraded and all extra weight was stripped from the plane, but there are still a few seats left in the first class section in the front of the plane. There have only been these two and the first one was the one that launched the unpowered shuttle prototype Enterprise back in 1977. The shuttle has landed at Edwards 54 times.
One funny thing in the Wikipedia article is the following picture of one of the mounts on top of the 747 where the shuttle connects to the plane:
