Category: Uncategorized

For a while the city of Avondale Estates had a community bulletin board on its website. It wasn’t all that active, but it was a good place to go for information sometimes and every now and then there would be a good discussion. But about a year ago, the bulletin board was removed and it looks like nothing has taken its place. I know one of the city council members was active on that bulletin board, so I looked up his e-mail address and asked him if there was a new one. He said he had invited people to start their own Yahoo or Google groups when the city pulled their site, but it doesn’t look like there is anything all that active except for a few very specific uses.

Based on my experience with the Engineer’s Association bulletin board, I knew it wouldn’t be that hard to get a domain and install some bulletin board software. avondaleestates.com has been taken for a while, but I thought lakeavondale.com would be a good substitute since the lake is kind of a place for people to get together. It was available, so I went ahead and bought it for a year.

I can host it along with igirder.com on my asmallorange account. Nobody will know they are related since they will look completely indepdent. I had used PunBB for the Engineer’s Association because it was free, simple, not hard to install, and handled all the basics. Last time I checked there was a fork of PunBB called FluxBB and they were both still updating their software. Would this still be the best option?

I found MyBB as a more powerful alternative. It is also free, but allows users more customization, so I figured it would be better for a community.

Continue reading “Avondale Bulletin Board”

Well Susan is moved to Texas for the most part. She still has a lot of furniture in her Atlanta house to make the house look lived in while it is on the market. Once the house sells, she will have everything moved out to her professionally. Unprofessionally we packed up a big U-Haul trailer attached to her Jeep and drove out last Thursday. We wanted to leave by 7 AM, knowing it was 820 miles and all needed to happen in a day because it would be hard to stay anywhere overnight with all of the animals. After helping her pack until almost 11 the night before, I was back at her house at 6:40 Thursday morning. There was still a fair amount to do, but the trailer was packed up and ready by 7:30 anyway, so I offered to take it while she got the cats and house ready, knowing the Prius would be able to catch up pretty quickly anyway.

Continue reading “Ex is in Texas”

I got the charger yesterday and started putting it through its paces right away. My oldest batteries are 1500 mah. My newest came with a cheap charger that was free with my flashlight. I picked two from each of those sets. Time to put the testing regimen into action.

I have worked on 4 old generic green 1500 mah cells that came with my Archos and therefore are 7 years old. I got capacities from 571 to 1220, so all over the place. I may throw away the weaker of those. I have 4 more, so we’ll see how it goes. It would be nice to have a set of 4 strong ones. Doing a Refresh/Analyze cycle actually seemed to hurt a couple of them.

Continue reading “Maha MH-C9000 Results”

I wrote all of this up based on reading up on the Maha C9000 charger, but before I got it. Once I start getting some results, I will post that later. I have a collection of 40 NiMH batteries ranging in age from 9 years to just a couple of weeks. They all take a charge on my old charger, but some are pretty weak. A couple of sets that Susan used in a quick charger are pretty damaged and don’t hold a charge for very long at all. I was interested to see what kind of results I could get in reviving them with my new charger, the Maha MH-C9000.

If a battery hasn’t been used for 3 months or has just been purchased, Maha recommends starting out with break-in cycle. This cycle is based on some international standard used to measure the capacity of batteries.

Continue reading “Battery Rehab”

In 2005 Sanyo introduced Eneloop NiMH rechargeable batteries. Part of their marketing was that they are already charged when you get them and you can use them right away. The reason for this is they charge them at the factory and that the batteries have “low self discharge” (LSD), in other words it takes them much longer to lose a charge sitting on a shelf than other NiMH batteries. Sanyo claimed that Eneloops will retain 85% of their charge after a year. I bought some last year and have no reason to doubt the claim. I have two HP calculators that eat through AAA batteries so I wanted something rechargeable but also something with a fairly long shelf life. I thought it would be good to have a set for my Archos Jukebox too since I have been charging its batteries separately instead of by using the AC adapter it came with (gets very hot and can’t be good for the batteries).

Continue reading “Eneloop Batteries”