Dirty Keyboards?

On Wednesday, Shannon at Rocks In My Dryer had commented on some of the strange stuff she puts in her dishwasher to clean and sanitize and invited people to add comments on other non-dish stuff they put in theirs. So I added mine. My keyboard!

Well, on this post she actually linked to my blog about it, so I figured I'd try to write up something for those that may have questions. (though she called me a she when I'm really a he, but granted Terry and be either and she has mostly female readers, I'll let her slide hehe)

First of all, this isn't something I do all the time, but after a while, your keyboard can get all nasty. or worse, stuff spills on it.

So, I put it in the top rack of the dishwasher, keys down. I don't use soap, the hot water and water pressure is usually good enough to do a decent job. I also do not have the heated drying cycle on.

When it's done, I take the keyboard out, and take it apart. Just unscrew the few screws on the back and take the back off so it can dry REALLY WELL.

The 2 most important things to this is to NOT use the headed drying cycle, and to let it dry completely before plugging it back in.

(And DO NOT use a hair dryer on your keyboard to help dry it. My daughter did this once after spilling a large cup of sweetened tea on my keyboard. She didn't unplug it (so electricity was still running through it) and then used the hair dryer on high heat to dry it out. I tried the dishwasher, but it was too late. Needless to say, I had to buy a new keyboard.)

One of the ladies at my wife's work spilt Chinese food in the keyboard about a month ago and she called me up asking how to wash it. They washed it up, and it still works.

I've done this probably half a dozen times, if the keyboard was just dirty, it has worked every time for me. (see the story of the tea above)

So, still have questions? Ask away.

UPDATE: There are a few things I wanted to add. First, I've not heard of them, but if your keyboard has a battery in it, take it out. Second, I've not tried this on wireless keyboards, so I'd do more searching on the 'Net before trying it on that. Third, I've done this close to a dozen times and have never had a problem, but I guess there is always a chance there could be a problem. If it's completely dry before you put electricity to it then I would not expect you to have any problems.

Flash

I found out today that there is a vulnerability in the Flash player if you don't have the latest version.

You really need to check which version of Flash you are running (on all browsers you have installed) Firefox's flash can be a different version than IE. And when you patch one, that does NOT patch the other one. You can check which version you are running at http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507&sliceId=1

And if you need to upgrade to the latest version you can do that at
http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash

BTW, when you check, the latest Windows version should look like WIN 9,0,124,0

Computers

Tonight, I did some computer work for a mother of one of my friends. She got a new computer (Windows Vista) and was having problems with her printer. It was an old printer and a new computer. She'd gone to Best Buy and got a LPT to USB converter, and had it working once, but kept going and got it messed up. I had it mostly working once, but had problems, so I stopped messing with it after a while.

Then her biggest problem was that she couldn't get some games from Pogo.com to work. So, I looked at all the usual suspects. Virus scanner, fire wall, spyware blocker, IE settings. Nothing I changed seemed to help. Then I tracked it down to the version of Java she was using. So, I upgraded her java. No dice. Ended up removing java and installing an older version. That finally did it.

Of course it was going to take 40 minutes to download version 1.4 over her dialup, so I left, came home, downloaded it and put it on my USB drive, and went back to her house in about 15 minutes.

Did a few other misc items, but on the bright side, it'll pay for the brakes I'm planning on putting on the truck Friday.

More Mozilla

As many of you know, I love Firefox. I use it for about 95% of my web browsing (that other 5% is at work where they can't manage to write apps that work on anything but IE).

Anyway, I recently got Mozilla's Thunderbird for an email client at home. I have Outlook, and have the 3 email accounts I check and my wifes on it. However, every time I went to send an email, I'd forget to change from the default account (my wifes) to mine, so it always looked like she was emailing people.

So, to reduce confusion (mainly for the people that never understood why my wife was emailing them), I downloaded Thunderbird. And so far I like it.

While looking at add-on's and the like tonight, I saw reference to 2 other projects. The SeaMonkey Project and Calendar Project.

The SeaMonkey Project is "Web-browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple -- all your Internet needs in one application."

The Calendar Project is broken into two, Sunbird and Lightning
Sunbird is a stand alone calendar program while Lightning embeds the calendar into Thunderbird.

I installed Lightning tonight, and linked it to my Google Calendars with a add-on I found called Provider.

It appears that all will run on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

So, don't have (or want) Microsoft Outlook, you might want to give one of these a try.

XP Background prolems

Yesterday or the day before, my work computer freaked out and afterward, I was not able to change my background. Everything was greyed out. So, after searching my blog for the solution (cause I was sure I've talked about this before) but was unable to find it. So, I hit Google. I tried one solution, no dice.

Then I found http://www.thespykiller.co.uk/files/cleandesktop.exe you download it, and run it, and it will fix it so you can change your background.

You can read this forum which is where I found it.

Microsoft Time Zone

While hitting the topics this morning before I get extremely busy, I saw a link to download Microsoft Time Zone. This app is cool.

Where I work, I deal with people in Australia, New Zealand, and TiJuana. My cousin currently lives in Guam. It's really hard to keep up. I'm always asking "What time is it there?"

So, long story short, you set up Microsoft Time Zone with the Timezones you want to track. Then you right click the app in your taskbar, and click on Show My Locations, and all the locations you set up pop up, and you see the local time.

It also appears that you can set the timezone of your machine to these locations as well. But since I do little traveling, I don't think I'll use that feature.

Pretty spiffy. I think this comes with Vista, but since I don't see me installing Vista anytime soon, I grabbed it.

Surgery is over...

Right as the surgery began, I took this picture while waiting for my soldering iron to heat up.


I know many of you have been on pins and needles as the surgery has been going on. Initially, everything was going well, but while closing up, we had some problems which required me to open the patient back up.

After some more stressful moments, I was able to close. It appears the the patient will make full recovery. I'm not sure how much, if any this has shortened his life. I'm hoping this will make it till next year. Oh, and not only is it doing well, but Alton Brown was the first image my TV showed after the surgery. Isn't life grand? hehe


I'm really excited that I was able to replace those 2 parts. The solder job is probably really crappy, but no one can see it, and all it has to do is hold the parts together. Not trying to win a contest or anything.

Here is the page I found online while searching for "Phillips Magnavox tv burnt plastic". As I said in an earlier post, I found that the part they talked about in that page is the same on mine that was burnt. I also went ahead and replaced the resistor that was next to it since it had burnt it. I wasn't sure if the part was gone or not, but figured it was best to err on the side of caution, and since I already had the TV open, I might as well replace both parts.

I'm really rather excited right now.

Surgery Begins

The surgery has begun.

You can read more about the Death and Autopsy of my TV if you haven't already.

I love technology

Wow, what a week.

There were 2 items that really caught my attention this week.

The first is commercial airplanes that have anti-missile systems on them. I first saw this article at CNN this week. Fed-Ex is flying the planes with this new system on them.

"An MD-10 cargo jet equipped with Northrop Grumman's Guardian anti-missile system took off from Los Angeles International Airport on a commercial flight Tuesday"

The article goes on to state that no passenger planes have ever been downed by shoulder-fired missiles outside of war zones. It will be a long time before this is on a lot of planes, not the least of which is cost associated since these systems will not be cheap. Still a cool idea.

The second is a rail gun that was tested Wednesday. You can read the whole article at fredericksburg.com.

The railgun works by sending electric current along parallel rails, creating an electromagnetic force so powerful it can fire a projectile at tremendous speed.

This is truly sci-fi come to life. From how I read this, it looks like the Navy may be planning on changing the big guns on their ships to rail guns.

We are talking about a 200 to 250 nautical mile range on these bad boys. The 5 inch guns have a range of about 20 nautical miles.

These rail gun, with a range of at least 200 nautical miles, can hit a target in about 6 minutes. It takes Tomahawk missiles 8 minutes to travel that distance.
And the cost of each rail gun round will start around $1000. Tomahawk cruise missiles cost nearly $1 Million each.

Sweet!

TV Update

I just ordered a capacitor and a resistor that hopefully will allow me to fix my TV and save me having to buy a new TV.

Don't get me wrong. I would LOVE a new TV. A nice LCD HD TV. That would be awesome!

But I really don't want to spend the money to go HD yet. And if you know me, you'll know it would be hard for me to get a HD TV and not upgrade the Satellite to HD too.

Anyway. The best part about this is? The parts with shipping only cost me $10.11. It would have been less, but I had to order 10 of the capacitor. I lucked out and was able to get just one of the resistors.

Once the parts come in I'll give you all an update.

UPDATE:
The parts cost 10.11, but once shipping was added, it cost $18.72. Still not a bad price if I can get it to work. Parts should be here Wednesday.

Profanity Filter

Do you ever got to web pages that had profanity on them?

I know one of the pages I read several times a day sometimes has some. It irritates me.

Well, while reading Lifehacker today, they had a link to a Profanity Filter. I haven't installed it yet, but it sounds interesting.

Once the script is installed, it uses a list with pre-defined words you don't wish to see. It replaces these words with ***.

Lifehacker made a sentence to see how it worked. The sentence came out:

This *** is the ***. Every *** on the planet should install this ***.

Sorta cool. You are suppose to be able to easily update the filtered word list. Allowing words by default it doesn't and adding words as well.

Autopsy

I got up this morning and decided to do an autopsy on the TV to make sure it was the same problem I had read about online. As you can see the behemoth's insides.
If you click on these pictures, you'll get a better picture, but below the back of the tube there are several metal "walls" where the capacitor is located.


Here is the culprit. Again, if you click on the picture, you'll get a much better view, but #2 is the capacitor that has gone bad and is sparking. You can see in this picture that #1 has burn marks on it from the sparking #2 has done. I hope this is easier to fix than it looks like it is going to be.

Death in the Family

A very dear friend of the family died tonight... Our 32" Phillips Magnavox TV.

I woke up about midnight and smelled something not right, but I wasn't sure what it was. I got up, and I'm sniffing the WHOLE HOUSE! (my house is over 100 years old so you never know).

Anyway, I could not track down the smell. I finally decided it was strongest in the living room. My daughter was still awake, so I had her come in and sniff it. (she thought I was sniffing something else if you know what I mean). But when she came in, she agreed it smelt like burnt plastic. It wasn't anything overwhelmingly strong, but I have a super sensitive nose.

Anyway, I started sniffing everything that had electric. When I got to the entertainment center (this took a bit) I heard a clicking as well. I moved the entertainment center out so I could see what was wrong behind it, but when I did, I found the clicking was coming FROM the entertainment center. Well, I tracked it to the TV. Which is where the smell of burnt plastic was coming from too.

From looking online, it appears that I've had a capacitor burn out.

Now I'm left with a difficult choice. Buy a new TV, or try to replace the capacitor. The capacitor will be cheap (if I can find one. Others that have had this problem said repair shops didn't want to part with it without installing it themselves and charging a huge amount), and a new TV will not be.

The TV is over 7 years old (but under 9). So it's lived a good and relatively long life.

Guess I'll go sleep on it. At least I know the house wont burn down. That would be a lousy present for my son right before his birthday.

1 TB Hard Drive

Hitachi is expected to launch a 1TB hard drive during the first quarter of this year.

Holy Cow!

1 TB?!?!?! (That stands for terabyte.) And this is for home computers.

According to the ars technica article the specs are:

7200 rpm
32MB buffer
SATA 3.0Gb/s or Parallel-ATA 133

And with a price tag of $399. The price wont be too bad either.

That price translates to about 40 cents per gigabyte, or 0.04 cents per megabyte.

Not bad. Not bad at all. That will get rid of your hard drive headaches... at least for a while.

I remember our first first 120 MB hard drive. I thought I'd never need a larger hard drive again.

How long till 1TB sounds small? The article also talks about a 37.5 TB drive expected to be launched in the next decade.

Web startup pages

I was reading an article today that suggested people change their web browser start-up pages from the default to something different.

That sorta surprised me. I've always changed my startup page from the default to something different.

One link I didn't know about that was a suggestion was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage which does just what you would expect. It opens a Random page from wikipedia. Neat idea.

For years I've used the http://my.yahoo.com page as my startup. And since it is customizable, it lets me choose what I want to see. Lately, I've moved over to the http://www.google.com/ig since I use so many of Google's products, I can get a birds eye view from a single page.

So, have any other suggestions?

Cables

I've recently found what appears to be a very good source for ordering cables.

monoPrice.com

I recently ordered 2 - 50ft RCA cables and a 75 ft monitor cable for a projector installation we've done at our church. I got the 3 cables with shipping for only $57.59

I've installed the cables, and the monitor cable looks great. the RCA cable is for use with a VCR (if needed). Anyway, the quality appears very good. I wanted to pass it along. I got all the cables cheaper than I expected to pay for just 1 cable.

Oh, and BTW, they have other stuff besides cables.

Google Maps - Wireless

OK. I found this 2 days ago, and I'm afraid I'm just getting around to sharing... sorry.

I'm not sure if you have ever used Google Maps. Well, if you haven't it is great!

They have added another wonderful piece to their already wonderful puzzle.

It is Google Maps for Wireless Palm devices. It was specifically made for the Palm Treo, but it also works on my Palm TX. Only difference is I'd have to be at a hot spot to use it.

Anyway, it works on a boat load of devices.

Anyway, very cool!

Check it out.

Firefox 2.0

It is finally out. Firefox 2.0

There are several things that have been updated, but one of my favorite is that you can change one of the settings to open the tabs from the last session you had open.

So, if there are a hand full of pages you read, you can open them in separate tabs, close Firefox 2.0, then when you open it next time, all your tabs open.

Google Chat

I had heard about Google chat back when they first came out with it. But I already was running ALL the other chat programs possible, so a new one didn't appeal to me.

Until today.

My brother-in-law is currently in Iraq. He does a lot of sitting at a desk, and he has communicated with his wife via Google Chat. They use the voice chat capability it has. Anyway, because of that, my mother-in-law wanted it on her machine. She had a P2 running Win98. Google Chat wont run on such a thing. And her computer wouldn't run XP. So I helped them go shopping.

Anytime I get to buy a computer with other peoples money, well, that is always a good day for me. :)

Anyway, We got a new computer home and set up, and I got Google Chat installed for her. We called my sister-in-law that was online and gave it a try. Once I got past the mic problems I was having on her machine (machine/user problem, not Google chat), this thing is great! It sounded like she was in the same room as me.

Yet another reason not to have a long distance provider. Go out to Google Talk, download it and sign in. It uses your Gmail account name as your user name. If you don't have a Gmail account, you can get one here. if you have a cel phone that can receive text.

Gmail drive shell extension

Stumbled across an interesting article at Lifehacker today.

Long story short, it lets you use your Gmail email account as an online hard drive.

Once you install this tool, you drag and drop the file using Windows Explorer, and it basically emails you the file, but you can see it like a hard drive. Download it as an email attachement elsewhere.