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Monthly Archives: August 2008

Why silent function keys are a BAD THING!

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Recently I spent 40 minutes on the phone dealing with my Aunt’s laptop, which had mysteriously stopped getting on their household WiFi Network. My mother also had a problem with her laptop’s touchpad–it had stopped working, and she could only use the laptop with a USB mouse attached. What did both of these problems have [...]

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Passat Clutch Problem - Bleeding the Clutch on a Manual

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Friday morning I got into the family car (1998 VW Passat with manual transmission) and, depressing the clutch, started the engine. The car rocked backwards (I normally leave the gearshift in reverse when parked, plus the parking break was on), the engine died, and the clutch petal stayed on the floor (not good!). The clutch [...]

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Silicon Dust replacing HD Homerun power adaptors

Friday, August 15, 2008

Back in January the power adapter failed for my Silicon Dust HD HomeRun (a network HTDV tuning device).
They replaced my power supply and claimed that they were seeing only a 1% failure rate. As late as March 28th they were sticking to the "less than a percent" figure. Eventually on June 3rd they [...]

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Roomba wiggle behavior, fixed

Saturday, August 2, 2008

My iRobot Roomba 4150 started to exhibit a behavior that I hadn't seen before. After starting up, the robot would "wiggle" as it went forward for a few feet, then turn, then move forward a few more feet while wiggling. After a few turns, it would stop and issue a double "uh-oh" sound. After cleaning [...]

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