A few months ago my HDTV receiver stopped working. I had been switching it off with my surge protector after finding out how much energy it used and maybe it didn’t like that. It would take it a long time to reboot, but at some point the green light started flashing rapidly and there was no picture no matter how long I waited. I tried turning it off and unplugging it to reset it, but got the same result. I spent some time today trying to figure out solutions and found some discussion areas that said the flashing green light means it is dead and there is no way to fix it. I took the cover off to see if there was anything I could see that stood out and could be fixed, but the only thing I saw I could fix was a small fuse and it was not blown.
World Cup
Today I am furloughed from work, so I thought it would be a good chance to watch the USA World Cup game against Algeria. I turned on the match just after the US had a goal called back because a player was offsides, although a replay showed he was just barely onsides. I watched the rest of the scoreless first half with the USA playing better than Algeria in general. At one point, in referencing the bad call, one of the announcers mentioned the 1982 game between Austria and Germany that prevented Algeria from advancing from the pool play portion to the bracket play. Eventually Dish Network’s signal was lost somehow and I missed the rest of the game, but the USA won 1-0 with a late goal and advances to the second round. England won by the same score with the same record, but USA won the pool because they tied one of their games 2-2 and England tied one of their games 0-0.
Anyway, I looked up the 1982 game on Wikipedia. The deal was that Algeria had already played their match so both teams knew that Germany (West Germany at the time) would advance if they could win the game, but Austria was already a lock so they had nothing to lose or gain. Germany scored early to go up by 1-0 and for the rest of the game, basically nothing happened. Although the teams deny they were colluding against Algeria, neither played with any sort of aggressiveness and one announcer refused to call the game anymore while another told viewers they should turn off their TVs.
After that game, they started scheduling the last of the pool games for the four teams in a group at the same time so they couldn’t safely collude.
Publix Ice Cream
This week Publix had half gallons of their premium ice creams 2 for $5. It’s about as good a price as they offer it and they still use real half gallons, unlike Breyers and others who shortchange you by keeping 25% of your ice cream.
A few months ago I got a really intense chocolate ice cream called Chocolate Trinity which is dark chocolate ice cream with a magic shell type of crunchy swirl and chocolate bits. This past week I bought one they call Cappuccino Fudge Blitz that is really good. It is a coffee flavored ice cream with white chocolate cream nuggets, mocha espresso brownies (like cookie dough), and chocolate marble. There are grainy things in there that turn out to be real coffee grounds. This is about my favorite ice cream there is right now. Well, until I have something else in my freezer.
Flashblock
As someone who sometimes gets money for internet ads, I don’t mind ads on websites, but I hate pop-ups and pop-unders. So I keep those blocked. And I also don’t like the ads that expand over the content of the web page. Usually these ads only expand if your mouse is over them and once you move the mouse out of the way, the ad shrinks back down. So I never did anything about that. But today I was looking up information about HDTV receivers that could also record (my HDTV receiver doesn’t work anymore and my TV can’t unscramble HD by itself). I was on a discussion area and there was an ad that would expand all by itself every now and then. You could click close, but you had to keep clicking on it. I thought I would block traffic from doubleclick.com who were producing the ad, which I remembered being pretty easy, but I couldn’t do it in either Firefox or McAfee after looking around a little. I did a search and found software called AdBlock, but then found something called Flashblock which only blocks content made for Adobe Flash player. The good thing is it replaces the ad with a Play icon so if you run across Flash content that you actually want, you can hit play and see it. I found it on Mozilla’s website, so I figure it must be okay.
Flashlight Rebuild
Previously I wrote about building a P60 drop-in from some different component parts. The P60 format is designed for that kind of tinkering. But when I bought the LED for that drop-in, I also got a second one just like it and looked around for a home. I thought I could put it in the AKOray K-106 3-mode programmable light I got earlier and had already taken out its LED and installed a brighter Cree XP-G R5. But when I did that I found a hole in the “pill” that the LED is mounted to and the XP-G R4 is on a smaller chip that barely covers that hole. That makes it harder to glue the LED in place but also greatly diminishes how fast heat can be transferred to the pill and then to the body of the light. This is very bad because even though the LED is very efficient, it produces more heat than light and if that heat has nowhere to go, the LED will cook in place and burn out.