Viewing 8 posts tagged with 'laptop' (Oldest First :: Newest First) Show related: del.icio.us links, tags

Monday, December 04 2006, 11:26 PM

Wow. It's been like three weeks since I posted last. I think I've had more than five people ask me if I'm going to post again, or whether I'm gong to close the website down. I'm not closing the website down. I've actually been somewhat busy, and things have been somewhat eventful. Combine those with a general lack of motivation for posting, and you get three weeks of inactivity.

Right now I feel like crap. I had some sort of illness late last week, and its remnants have firmly implanted themselves in my lungs, giving me one of my death coughs from hell. I had a splitting headache for most of the weekend because of it. Today my head doesn't hurt as bad since I'm not coughing as frequently. I am, however, coughing more violently, and it seems to be making my throat swell up. Every time I swallow, it feels like I'm trying to swallow a golf ball or something else similar in size. Ugh.

In another sucky occurence, one of my cats, Marshall, broke my good laptop. It's been broken before in a similar fashion, but this time it's really hosed. I had the laptop next to my bed on my makeshift nightstand, and he was sitting on the far side of it. He apparently felt the need to visit, and he tried climbing over the laptop. He planted a paw on the top of the screen and tried pushing on it, and it opened far more than my makeshift repairs would allow it to go, and the plastic around the hinges pretty much disintegrated. The laptop still works, but it's pretty much useless as a laptop though. This has allowed me to convert it into a more powerful and much more compact mythtv frontend than the full-sized machine I had before. I have it set up in a diskless network-boot conifguration, so it can sit right next to my center channel speaker and not be adversely affected. I've still got my old beast of a thinkpad that I acquired from Jon, but I'd sure like to get a new laptop. Perhaps I'll look around after Christmas.

I've got a few more things to talk about, but I feel like laying down for a bit right now. I'll try to touch upon them soon.

cats illness laptop mythtv

Sunday, April 16 2006, 2:03 AM

Before I went on my cleaning spree today, I went over to CompUSA and Marshall Music. I've been trying to avoid places like CompUSA and Best Buy since I'm somewhat broke at the moment, and I have a bad tendency to walk out with things I wasn't planning on buying and certainly don't need. Today was different. I had a purpose. Earlier on this morning the AC adapter for my Thinkpad (a.k.a. Craptop) gave up the ghost. I didn't hold much hope for finding an AC adapter at CompUSA for such an old model laptop, but I didn't think it would hurt to look. They didn't really have anything that was tailor-made for it, but there were a few generic laptop adapters that might have fit the bill. Let me clarify - they may have fit an expensive bill. The one that looked like it might work the best was $99. There's no way I'm going to pay that much for something that might work. As it turns out, I found a site later on the day for a company that makes all sorts of batteries and adapters for laptops old and new. Their price was much cheaper ($35), and they guarantee compatibility. I picked up an adapter from them, and also a replacement battery. The battery on the craptop was really bad, and quite inconsistent in its performance.

The trip to Marshall Music was just for strings and picks for the old Gee-Tars. While I was there, I decided to renew an old experiment I'd begun some time ago. Along with my normal strings, I picked up a pack of 7-strings so I could bottom out the Carvin. I've done this a few times before, and it's always proven interesting. I really like the low sound that the baritone tuning provides. I put the strings on when I got back from the store, but the intonation was pretty bad, so I adjusted the truss rod a bit to tighten things up. It sounds a lot cleaner now. The only bad thing is that the Carvin only has one pickup in it right now, so I'm kinda limited in my tonal capabilities. Perhaps I'll be able to pick up a couple Fender Lace Sensors once Greg delivers the cash that he owes me... :) In any case, I'm hoping it will insipre me to play more. I might also be inclined to record some clips, and if I do so, I'll be sure to upload them to the site for your listening (dis)pleasure.

guitar laptop

Friday, April 22 2005, 12:33 PM

I guess I forgot to post about this a while ago, probably since I was so despondent over the issue. A few weekends ago, after repeated passages through gravitational and subspace anomalies, the structural integrity fields on my laptop began to fail and it suffered significant damage to the outer hull. There were many casualties, including the first officer, chief engineer, and Ensign Rickey. It was barely salvageable, and has been in spacedock ever since.

Ok, yah, that was really lame. Only the Phils (my father Phil, my coworker Phil, and perhaps JK) are likely to fully appreciate that, but hey, it was funny. YES, IT WAS FUNNY! Actually, my laptop did break, and the outer hull reference wasn't that far off.

The laptop has actually been slowly breaking for quite some time, due to what I would consider a poor design. The actual computer innards of my laptop (a Sager 5680) are great, but the casing is not. The first thing that went was the latch that holds the screen down when the laptop is closed. That went about three months after I bought it. I was rather peeved, but I was able to fix it quite easily with a well placed rubber band.

A month or two later I started noticing some stress fractures appearing on the casing opposite of the LCD panel near the hinges. I was rather annoyed with that as well. The subtle fractures matured into full fledged cracks, and it got to the point where I had to pinch the affected area back together while closing the display to make sure the cracks didn't advance further. It finally came to a head a few weeks ago, when the front and back casings of the display would physically seperate by a half inch or so when closing the laptop screen.

I had enough at this point, so I decided to take the thing apart to see if there was any way to fix things, or whether I was totally screwed. When I opened it up, I found that the metal piece that connected the LCD panel to the hinges had completely broken. Things didn't look good. I thought about turning it into some sort of entertainment center computer due to its small size, or perhaps into a car computer, but it certainly wasn't going to be a functional laptop again. Or so I thought...

I was talking with Chris at work about some completely unrelated stuff, and the subject of my broken laptop came up. I described the broken piece, and he offered to try to weld it back together. He stopped by after work and picked it up, and I was quite happy when he said that he was able to fix the part! Tears of joy ran down my face (well, not really) and I rushed home to pick up the parts to reassemble the beast. I had loosened up the hinges earlier to try to relieve some of the strain on the part, but when I got the thing back together, I realized that they were way too loose. The screen wouldn't stay open at any position other than vertical. I was a little peeved because I had to take the thing completely apart again to get at the hinges, but that wasn't too much of a big deal.

Once I got home I started phase two of the reconstruction - structural reenforcement. I ran over to Lowes to buy some nuts, bolts, and washers in the attempt to curcumvent the plastic that took so much of the stress earlier on. I ended up running a single bolt through the entire display where a much smaller screw previously sat on each side of the display. I snugged the bolts in with plain and locking washers and a single nut on the outside, then cut off the excess bolt length. So far, everything seems to be working very well.

What did I learn from this? First, never buy a laptop with crappy internal design. Kind of hard to judge that based upon external appearances, but it's still a lesson. More specifically, don't buy one of the Sager 56xx series unless you want a broken laptop. Another coworker has the same laptop as I do and recommended it to me before he started seeing the same structural problems I have. Well, he and I both think the case is a piece of junk, as do many other people on the 'net who have complained about their cases breaking in the same manner as mine. Second, coworkers with welding equipment are cool. Third, fixing things yourself is more rewarding than sending stuff away.

Since my laptop now has metal bolts protruding from the back of the screen, I think it's only fitting to give it a new name - FRANKENTOP! Corny, but fitting. And when am I ever not corny?

frustrations laptop self-repair

Sunday, November 30 2003, 10:08 AM

Yes, the title says it all. I'm freakin exhausted. And once I finish this last godforsaken midnight shift, I get to drive down to my aunts house for Thanksgiving part deux. I probably won't get to sleep until like 9 or 10.... if anybody's counting, that's 27 hours of being awake, barring any naps or falling asleep at the wheel. Good thing I have monday and tuesday off - I'll probably wake up sometime tuesday once I get to bed tonight.

I've been working on the Gentoo install on my laptop over the past few hours... (it's probably the only thing keeping me awake!) I've made a bit of progress, but there are few things that I need to get working still before I'm happy. I've got sound, video, and the synaptics touchpad/usb mouse working right, but I still need to get the wireless ethernet working. There seems to be a couple open source projects that have drivers that are still in their infancy, but they don't seem to be very stable yet. There's also DriverLoader, but I don't have my WLAN drivers here at work and I couldn't find them on the web. Blah. Once I get wireless going I'll be happy, and can go onto other things, like installing MythTV on here and using it as a mobile frontend system... :-D

That's all for now... let's hope I don't pass out at the wheel or something.

driverloader family gentoo laptop linux mythtv work

Saturday, November 29 2003, 1:39 AM

After a bit of confusion, my laptop has arrived. I was spamming the UPS tracking site with requests to see where my laptop was. I saw it come into lansing around 6:40 this morning, but it didn't update after that. I stuck around work until 9:30 or something, hopeing it would show up. Well, it didn't, so I went home. I checked the status when I got home, and I noticed something - the ontime status changed to "Rescheduled" and the delivery date changed to Monday... I was quite pissed. I called up UPS customer service to see if there was any way to pick it up, and the lady said that it was probably still on a truck, so there was no way. I was mad, but I dealt with it and went it sleep. When I woke up, I was very suprised to see that there was a message from Steven saying that my laptop had arrived. That made me quite happy.

I've got XP installed on it, and my windows environment is pretty much moved over on to this machine. It's quite fast, although the 4200 RPM drive is noticeable. It takes a little while to access stuff from the hard disk. Otherwise, it rocks. I may start the Gentoo install tonight or tomorrow night, depends on how bored I am.

gentoo laptop linux windows

Friday, November 28 2003, 3:33 AM

Four and a half nights down, two and a half to go. I'll be glad once this crap is over. I haven't adjusted to the night shift this week like I have in the past, and it's really sucky. I'm so tired right now it's not even funny. I drove home to my parents house today right after I got off work, and only slept for about 3 hours before I was woken up for Thanksgiving Dinner, and I didn't get any sleep after that. Combine that with the Thanksgiving food coma, I'm pretty much screwed when it comes to staying awake.

No update on the Laptop yet... it's supposed to be here today, but UPS hasn't updated the status in about 22 hours. Probably just giving people the day off for thanksgiving. I'm sure it'll still make it on time. I'll probably stick around and wait for it to get delivered, since I'm impatient, and nobody's scheduled to be in until 9am. Lets hope UPS comes before that.

family frustrations laptop work

Thursday, November 27 2003, 1:15 AM

The title says it all. I'm here again, tired as hell. I only got about 3-4 hours of sleep today before I was woken up by the guys below us bumpin some lame ass dance/trance music. I was pissed, but it was 1pm, so I couldn't really be all that angry. I woke up for a while, then zonked back out around 6 and slept until 10ish. I guess I got my sleep for the day, but I don't feel rested, that's for damn sure. Night shifts suck like that. I can't wait until I'm back on days next week. I looked at myself in the mirror when I got home today, and the dark circles around my eyes made it look like I got punched or something.

Laptop Update: My laptop shipped last night, and is somewhere called 'OSHTEMO, MI'. Ever heard of it? Yah me neither. UPS says it'll be here friday. I'm geeked. I'm thinkin I may put Gentoo on it earlier than I was planning. I work two 12 hour shifts this weekend to finish off my week of midnight hell, so I'll have a lot of time to kill. Installing Gentoo would probably fill that time nicely. Or I'll just install some games on it and play around to keep myself occupied... :)

frustrations gentoo laptop linux work

Tuesday, November 25 2003, 4:24 AM

Yah, as much as I would have liked to sleep through it and pretend it didn't happen - it snowed today. Normally the first snow of the year doesn't really stick, but it did today. I used to like the winter, but then I got older. I used to be able to go outside and play in the snow, make snowforts, pelt annoying neighbor kids with snowballs, sled down hills, go ice skating.... the list goes on. Now winter is just an extended period of freakin cold weather where I have to bundle up all the time, freezing my butt off while my car warms up and accumulates a covering of salt from driving down the road. Or, in the case of the Camaro, I could just be driving and hit black ice, careen off the road at 60MPH and hit a tree. No thanks. Give me ice-free roads, a bright sun, warm air. Give me shorts and a T-shirt. Give me summer. I have no use for winter anymore.

I'm on the night shift again this week and so far it's been pretty uneventful. I set up a server yesterday for Zac... that's about the only non-boring thing that's happened. I updated my website a bit tonight. I could be working one of a couple of projects I'm involved with here at work, but my attention span is quite short from being so damn tired. There's a monster glass of Mountan Dew within an arms reach, and that's just about all that's keeping me awake right now.

One cool thing did happen today though... After literally years of unwavering patience (read: lack of money), I finally ordered myself a laptop today. I'm pumped. I can't wait for it to get here. Eventually I'll install Gentoo on it and join the Elite Liquid Web Gentoo Linux Laptop Club (ELWGLLC), but I'll probably just put Windows on it at the beginning until the novelty of having a laptop wears off. Then I'll install Gentoo and dual boot. It needs to get here soon, because I'm crazy patient like that.

camaro gentoo laptop winter work

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