Author: gregjsmith

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Local Camerman Gets Arrested

Albuquerque only seems to get national attention when something bad happens. This time the local NBC affiliate KOB channel 4 had a cameraman who was arrested by a police. The “raw video” shows the cop gets into a scuffle with the cameraman while the cop tries to arrest the cameraman.

There’s something missing from this video, like what lead up to this indicent. KOB’s story only says:

The photographer says he was asked to leave the scene and go to a media staging area. However, he says officers did not tell him where that area was located.

I bet there’s more to it than that. The cops probably told the cameraman mutiple times what to do any he probably continued to mouth off to them and ignore their instruction. I’ve never heard of this sort of thing happening in Albuquerque before and I doubt the police officer just walked up to him decided to arrest him becasue he asked for his badge number.

My opinion of KOB is they like to sensationalize the news and this seems to be leading in this direction.

Update 6/12/08: Guess the cops did make a mistake.

The Chief of Police Ray Schultz has viewed a videotape of the confrontation and concluded that several mistakes were made during the confrontation.

Update 7/2/08: The charges against the photographer has been dropped.

A judge has thrown out the charges against an Eyewitness News 4 photographer accused of disobeying a police officer at a crime scene.
The officer is now on paid leave, and is scheduled to have a disciplinary hearing next week.

Update 9/13/08: The officer has been fired.

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Resolving The 6X Red Blinking Light Of Death On My Sony TV (with pictures)

Find Sony TV Parts

The following is meant for informational purposes only and not meant to be an instructional guide. This information is meant to give a basic concepts on how the thermal fuse is replaced, It doesn’t cover everything thing and can vary on other TVs. If you decide to replace your own thermal fuse based on this information you do so at your OWN RISK.

For information on the Sony Wega flat CRTs with a similar problem (in this case a model KV34HS420), visit Lee Devlin website and view his posting titled “Fixing a Sony Wega with a 6 or 7 blink code“.

A few weeks ago I was watching my Sony 60 inch rear projection TV (model KDF-E60A20) when the screen turned blank and the normally green power-on indicator started blinking red. I thought, this has to be a bad thing. My first assumption was the bulb died.

The bulb did not die, there is a whole other indicator light for a dead bulb. What was actually happening is the power-on indicator light was blinking 6 times. Some googling on this subject indicated that the thermal fuse had blown and it needed to be replaced.

Sony apparently has a service bulletin (E29102171) that covers the replacement. In order to access this information you have to be some sort of authorized service personnel. I did find a website where you could obtain the service bulletin but they wanted $12 to join the site first. Let me go on for a moment and say why I think this is a total scam. It seems the damaged thermal fuse situation is a design flaw and Sony’s replacement part is totally different from the original. This website is profiting off the situation by providing information was created by Sony. I won’t link to the site here, but if you search google for this issue you will surely find the site in question.

This is something that Sony should be fixing for free. I’m reading people are paying around $400 to get this issue repaired. I repaired mine for $17.91. The part itself was only $4.80. I ordered part 191002393 from Sony’s service site (It’s available from Amazon.com for $5.95). Here’s how I replaced mine.

First, the thermal fuse is simply a small electronics part on the end of two wires that connects to the harness in the TV. The wire comes wrapped up in a small package about the size of two dimes. Shipping costs $11.95 to ship it in a giant box full of bubble wrap. Thanks Sony for wasting resources getting this to me.

Replacing the thermal fuse on a sony TV1

The thermal fuse is located under the lamp housing in my TV (and can be seen using the procedures for replacing the lamp in the manual). It’s a dime sized device mounted to the bottom of the TV with two wires coming out of it. It took me a while to figure out that this monstrosity is the thermal fuse considering how tiny the replacement is.

Replacing the thermal fuse on a sony TV2

Unfortunately In order to get to the wiring harness I had to remove the rear panel of the TV. There’s about 10 screws that hold that on. Then I removed the fan housing to gain access to the original thermal fuse. I followed the wires back up to where they connected to the wiring harness. I unplugged the original fuse and plugged in the new one and ran the wires to where the original fuse is.

Replacing the thermal fuse on a sony TV3

I did not remove the original fuse. It’s somewhat difficult to get to and doesn’t hurt to keep it on. I wrapped the new fuse wiring around the old one. There may be a actual place to mount the new fuse but i didn not see the service bulliten so I cannot say for sure. It’s important to point out here that the purpose of a thermal fuse is to shut off power in case of an over heat situation. If for some reason the lamp overheats you don’t want it to catch the TV on fire. Having the thermal fuse in close proximity to the lamp seem logical. If you happen to know exactly where the fuse should go, please leave a comment.

The preceding is meant for informational purposes only and not meant to be an instructional guide. This information is meant to give a basic concepts on how the thermal fuse is replaced, It doesn’t cover everything thing and can vary on other TVs. If you decide to replace your own thermal fuse based on this information you do so at your OWN RISK.

Find Sony TV Parts

If you found this usefull, you can support this site by purchasing something from Amazon. How about a new Sony LCD Lamp?

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Master Bathroom Remodel: Electrical Nearly Complete

Recessed fixturesbroan exhaust fan

The two recessed lighting fixtures are installed. The fixture over the toilet is a Broan 744 Recessed fixture with exhaust Fan. It’s supposed to have a noise rating of 1.5 sones, which isn’t the quietest but not the loudest. It’s the quietest recessed fixture I could find. I’m done with all the attic work in this location so I put the ceiling back up hopefully I won’t change my mind about something and have to take it out again.

I still want to put in two electrical outlets, one for a heated towel rack and one to put in a cabinet (so I can put all my rechargeable stuff and hide it). I have to decide where I want to tie into the existing GFCI protected circuit.

I special ordered some bathroom fixtures from Lowes on Wednesday. I can’t believe how much I spent on them, but I just didn’t like the cheap in-stock stuff. Bathroom fixtures just simply are not cheap. They were supposed to call me on Thursday and let me know how long before they arrive and it’s Saturday and I haven’t heard anything back.

I’ve put together the base cabinets I bought from IKEA to figure out how to lay them out. I’ve drawn out several ideas but it’s hard to tell without actually seeing it.

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Master Bathroom Remodel: Pocket Door Frame Complete

Pocket door frame install

It’s taken me a long time to complete what now seems pretty simple. I can finally call the pocket door kit install done. Instead of going with a prebuilt frame that can be had at Home Depot, I went with a Johnson Hardware Universal Pocket Door Frame Kit. One reason I didn’t go with the prebuilt frame is because it looks like it’s not something I could take into the house and install by myself. The Johnson kit comes in a box and in pieces which were easy to install by myself.

I’m not sure how much the Home Depot prebuilt kit is, but the Johnson Hardware kit was $60 through Ace Hardware’s online site.

Next up, the electrical

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More Gopher Fun In Albuquerque

Looks like I’m not the only one with gopher problems.

An irrigation ditch in the South Valley overflowed Friday morning flooding a residential neighborhood near Isleta and Rio Bravo. Officials are blaming the incident on damage caused by gophers. Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District crews worked in the predawn hours to repair the damage and staunch the flooding.

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My Radon Gas Test Kit Resutls

Free Radon Test Kit (New Mexico)

In January, the New Mexico state Environment Department offered a free Radon test kit to residents, coincidentally January was also National Radon Month. I emailed the person who is running the program and obtained a kit. Before I get to the results, what is Radon?

Radon is a odorless, colorless gas that comes from the decay of radium. Radon is present all over the earth. it’s extremely common and it the second most common cause of lung cancer. Check out the EPA’s website or Wikipedia’s page on Radon for more information.

As I understand it, radon is a gas and decays pretty quickly once in the air. If in a contained area it can be real bad. Knowing parts of New Mexico are in a possible “hot zone”, I decided to take the free kit. THey weren’t that expensive to start with but free is free.

The kit is just a charcoal canister. I placed the kit 6 feet in the air away from major air flows and in a central part of my house. After some amount of time, I think 48 hours, I put the kit in a aluminum foil envelope and sent it off to a testing lab. They then email me the results.

Your radon test result is – 2.7 pCi/L

Radon Level (pCi/L)

  • 0.4 Average outdoor radon concentration
  • 1.3 Average indoor radon concentration
  • 4.0 EPA RECOMMENDED ACTION GUIDELINE

My results are in between what’s considered normal and before I need to take action. What am I going to do? Nothing at the moment except test some more.

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OMG! I Actually Worked On The Master Bathroom

Last fall, I threatened that I would have the master bathroom completed by the end of the winter. Here it is spring and I did almost nothing to the bathroom. I have a variety of excuses that I wont go into now, however I did finally make some actual progress on it this weekend.

Before I can do anything I need to install the pocket door. Before I install the pocket door I need to relocate the wiring that exists on the wall where the door goes.

Original wiring location

The wiring consists of power in, a wire to the lights controlled by a switch and a power out to a outlet. The good news is the wiring was easy to move to the next wall, it was loose in the attic and there was plenty of room to move it. I thought I would leave the outlet unpowered for now, until I figured out how I was going to rewire everything, apparently the wire to the outlet is also hooked up to the living room.

Temporary wiring location

Now I have a problem that I need to wire that outlet back up, so i have Romex running along the other side of the bathroom along up to the switch. It looks pretty messy and dangerous in the pictures, I know. Trust me it’s safe and temporary.

I need to decide how to wire up a exhaust fan, will it go near the light switch or near the toilet? I also need to figure out if I’m going to use a fancy digital shower control. If so It will use the power from the outlet then I can wire it up properly.

Finally I can install the pocket door. I have the studs marked to cut down, but I’m waiting for some friends to come by and verify my measurements before I screw it all up. I will save the pocket door install for another post.

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Motorola. Fail.

Long ago, Motorola was the largest employer in Arizona. My grandfather worked there. My Father worked and retired from there. My Mom worked there. Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, a lot of my family worked there. I wanted to make computer chips so when I was 18, I applied to work at Motorola. I went to their employment offices and took their tests. They used to give math and other tests because they wanted highly technical people working there.

I grew up listening to my parents talk about their work at the dinner table and even though they were as far away from the CEO as anyone could be, yet they still knew that the company was poorly run. Engadget received a letter from the adviser to Geoffrey Frost, Motorola’s Chief Marketing Officer to Greg Brown the CEO of Motorola describing how screwed up the company is.

It really angers me to see that you’re really no different from the rest of the incompetent senior executives at Motorola — but instead of merely being incompetent, you killing the company. Your lack of understanding of the consumer business doesn’t give you a valid reason for selling the business; moreover, publicly disclosing your explorations of such a move, in an attempt to keep Carl Icahn off your back, shows how much you value the safety of your incompetence. You have no interest in fighting the good fight and attempting to mould Motorola into the market leader it can and should be; taking control of the handset division, as you have recently done, will accomplish very little — it will simply give you an ability to say “we tried our best” when you finally cart the business off to the highest bidder.

Motorola was once a great company that made great products. I remember a Motorola radio in my grandfathers workshop. Everyone wanted a StarTac when they came out (I eventually had one when they got cheap, it’s around here somewhere). 68k and PowerPC chips were very competitive with x86 chips from Intel.

Now they are splitting into yet more companies because they can’t seem to figure out what it is they do. Thanks to this greedy, stupid management thousands of people in Arizona lost their jobs. Some of the former Motorola factories are still there as Freescale factories, but many of them were simply tore down.

I thankfully never went to work for Motorola. Instead I went to work for another company that makes computer chips. I look at the failure that is Motorola and compare it to what is happening at my employer. I hope my managers all the way up to the CEO learn from these failures too.

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More Fun Comments In The Rio Rancho Observer

The Rio Rancho Observers “Letters to the Editors” section continues to entertain. I think this person was on drugs when they wrote it.

Drugs legalized?

Editor:

According to an article in the Albuquerque Journal, we should legalize and subsidize drugs in order to prevent drug addicts from being killed while in the felonious pursuit of stealing, or robbing, using weapons of minor destruction.

It’s about time someone came forward with a logical solution to this problem, gee golly gosh, all along we thought it insurmountable.

Well, it just goes to show if you think long enough about a problem a solution will present itself.

Well people, you can rest easy now, sell your handguns, get rid of that ball bat and start feeding your pit bull again. The world, well maybe New Mexico, is a safer place now thanks be to solid intelligence, not unmixed with a heavy dose of whatever it is in that pipe, has arrived.

Quis,quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo,quando?

(Who, what, where, with what, why, how, when?)

Bob Harpley

Rio Rancho