The Internet Data Bill of Rights

Something I thought up:

The Internet Data Bill of Rights

1. All Data Is Created Equal.
2. All Users Have a Right To Equal Access to All Data
3. No single ISP may decide who gets access, nor control the speed, nor the limit to that data.
4. Thou Shall Provide Free Native Network Access to Usenet Newsgroup Servers.
5. Thou ISP shall provide reasonably priced access to unlimited high speed data.
6. Thy ISP is not allowed to invade the privacy of its users IP Addresses, nor throttle the data by use of any software from a user's device connected to the network.
7. Thy ISP shall not decide on a whim to use alternate Domain Name Servers in an attempt to thwart access to websites any entity finds objectionable.
8. All Users have the right to fair market ISP competition; no single ISP may pay illegal kickbacks to local governments to block out competition.
9. When such conditions are unable to be met, be it through equipment breakdown, sabotage or damage, or an act of nature, the ISP owes it to its users to explain the problem, offer credit on bills for inadvertent denial of use of the service, and attempt to correct the problem as quickly as humanly possible.
10. All ISPs must maintain the maximum speed and data capacity of their networks, and also prove their claims of both, and must continually find ways to exceed those requirements without continual unjustified rate increases without also finding ways to reduce rates.

Fixing my Kuroneko Figma

For some reason, a week or so ago I was inspired to buy a Kuroneko Figma I found on the Chinese shopping site DHGate for only $16.90 and free shipping. Figma figures are very detailed and have lots of articulation. They're also rather easy to break as the plastic joints aren't always made of sturdy plastic. Also they tend to run $30 and up, but in general they're not exactly high price expensive. A comparison brand to Figma would be Revoltech. I have 2 of these and they run about $20 or so.

At any rate, the packet for my Kuroneko Figma finally gets here and I tear open the package. Hmm... the box shows some scuffs and wear. It's used. I don't exactly remember seeing this important piece of info on the DHGate page, but whatever. Then I get to finding out why Kuroneko was so cheap.

The pieces for the neck joint keep popping apart. The left elbow joint proceeds to crumble apart into 4 pieces as it was stuck together, presumably with glue, and didn't move freely. The left leg fell off due to the hip socket crumbling apart. And the right hand refused to stay on the wrist joint due to manufacturing irregularities.

Now, there IS a burgeoning market for replacement Figma joints. You can get on eBay and find random assortments of varying sizes and prices. But being the person I am and having the skills I have from my years of building figure kits, I decided I would fix Kuroneko's problems myself.

Examining the neck joint, I see one part has a bit of a crack on one hub piece. I tried using Testor's plastic model cement on it, but this plastic doesn't respond to that well. So I tried another trick - heating a straight pin tip and entrenching the tip in the pin of the other piece, then trying to bend it at a right angle. This way the wire of the pin would act as a retainer and prevent the joint from popping apart.

I managed to get this to work and reassembled Kuroneko's head. The pin later fell off to my annoyment, but the joint remains together. Apparently, the pin of one joint piece that goes through the hub of the other is spread apart enough to hold it together. It moves freely, too.

The left elbow joint was more of a problem. The insert pins ripped off the rotating joint parts and I had to dig them out of the arm pieces to which the joint belongs to. So I had to fix each piece before putting the joint back together.

Again, Testor's plastic model cement was not working, and super glue would work but it would not be strong enough on its own. So I decided a figure kit technique would work - use wire to support it internally. Wire thin enough to work came from bread wrapper twist ties. I got out a candle, heated a wire tip and worked it into the pins. I had to use a straight pin to help with the process of burying the end in the plastic. And I had to do this for both ends of each bit of wire I was using with super glue. Both insert pins eventually got reattached to the joint part it went with.

Then there's the issue of making sure the joint is going to rotate freely which required some fine grit sanding. After all, if the joint isn't going to move freely, it will rip itself apart again. Then came the task of not only putting the rotating joint together, but keeping it together. Again, I used a bit of heated wire tip bent at just under a right angle, and managing with needle nosed pliers to entrench the tip in the plastic. If I could avoid super glue at this point (and screwing up the joint), I was doing just fine.

The left hip was the most difficult to figure out. I tried a piece of pen tip barrel plastic from a spent ball point pen, but it ended up crumbling when I tried one way to attach it to the part I also had to pull out of the upper leg piece so I could work on it. My 2nd attempt was to sand down a little piece so when it was super glued to the insert thingy (no idea what Figma parts are called), it would fit. Also sanded out the inner diameter with my rotary tool so the ball from the joint would go in this repaired piece and cut a slot in the top like the old part had.

Seeing the ball go into the repaired socket for the hip and then stay inside it was worth the work (over an hour or 2) taken to make these fixes. The right wrist will get some wire work as soon as I can find out where the little wrist joint piece flew off to when it flipped out of my fingers. The little bugger of plastic shouldn't be that hard to find... but it's a tiny piece of plastic.

Having a rotary tool to custom prototype repairs like this is both handy and fun. You just have to not give up until you get the results you want. Maybe I'll get a photo of one repair up here.

In order to clear up the confusion around here...

I had the chance to connect Mom's original HD to another computer and recover data I thought was lost due to the CD burner making the computer not boot correctly. Here's a note I printed up for the ladies who came in to help Mom with food and such. You can see why this note was necessary. The date for this text file is Aug 20, 2009.

In order to clear the confusion around here:

1. When making a sandwich with the deli-sliced lunchmeat, 
    sandwiches are typically made with 1 or 2 SLICES of meat.
   This Does Not Mean Enough Slices to Stack up to 1 Inch in Height.
2. When dishing up cold Meatloaf leftovers as lunch, such as
    a sandwich, a PIECE refers to a SLICE, and as such leftover meatloaf will typically be sliced.
    This Does Not Mean The Entire Remaning HALF of the Meatloaf if it is Not Sliced!

3. If there is a Baking Dish with Pieces of cooked Chicken Breast
   in the fridge, A Lunch Does Not Mean Both.
   Each piece will make a sandwich And Someone May Be Saving Their Piece.
Measuring utensils and the like go in the drawer under the Microwave.

Breakfast bowls (purple, most of them) go in the cabinet above the dish drainer.
Mixing and other bowls (various colors) go in the cabinet door above the right sink.
If unsure where a bowl goes, leave it in the dish drainer.

Funnels go in the drawer under the microwave.

If unsure where something goes, put it on the stove for the time being.

Plastic Jugs for Water use - If over by the sink, it means I'm trying to remember to rinse them out with a touch of bleach before using them. It's OK to leave them there. I do not save milk jugs or non-diet drinks in jugs.

This list may be updated from time to time.

-----

I would come home to find things in the wrong place. Nobody would ask where things went - to me, things would go missing until I found them in places I would never think of putting an item. When in someone else's house, ask where things are, and ask where they should go.

I had totally forgotten about the missing pieces of chicken, but I still remember the meatloaf incident as well as the missing lunchmeat.
 

The thought of Meatloaf in any form still makes me mad

Last night I made a meatloaf of ground turkey, spinach, mushrooms, and mozzarella cheese from a recipe I found that my mom had printed out some time ago. I looked over the list of ingredients and deemed it within my interest zone and a way to use up the frozen spinach I've had in the freezer for a few years after making a cake with spinach in it (it came out a nice green) due to seeing it made in an episode of Ojamajo Doremi #, if I remember right.

It was some sort of stuffed turkey meatloaf (Murkey Teetloaf?) and it had been the first one in a while that I made, because the last one I made disappeared so quickly it made me mad. 

I was still working or something when I made it (a ground beef variety, likely from a box dinner thing when they were still being made) and Mom and I had it for supper one night. Being a guy, if there's one thing I like, it's cold meat loaf sandwiches the day after. The ketchup is already on the thing - just cut a slice, slap it between 2 slices of bread, and deliciousness is granted.

Only the last time I made it, it was on a Friday night, which means on Saturday there would be left overs or something. Either I left for work or went off to do some sort of thing on that Saturday. Mom had her helping hands ladies coming in to help her with things, and I guess her lady that Saturday helped her with lunch.

Now, I have no idea what the exact details ensued about this lunch, but I imagine that Mom asked for lunch, probably with "a piece of the leftover meatloaf" or something. 

Here's where I get angry. THERE WAS HALF OF THE MEATLOAF LEFT. HALF - Not A Piece. Most sane people would call it a SLICE. Most people would CUT A SLICE FROM LEFTOVER MEATLOAF - Much like the way people CUT SLICES FROM A LOAF OF BREAD.

SO ANYWAY - My mom likely asked for a Meatloaf Sandwich, comprising of SAID PIECE OF MEATLOAF and bread. The lady who helped her that day SERVED UP THE ENTIRE REMAINING HALF OF THE MEATLOAF. Apparently, that's a Piece of Meatloaf to her. MY MOM SAID NOTHING. She could have spoken up like "Uh, that's half of the meatloaf. Not a piece (slice)." BUT NO. SHE SAID NOTHING.

I get home from whatever, mouth expecting the deliciousness of a cold meatloaf sandwich - and there's nothing. It's GONE. IT'S JUST FUCKING GONE!!! Mom made no qualms about it, and it took more than a few minutes of loud ranting to find out what the fucking hell happened. 

Needless to say, I didn't make another meatloaf for mom since that happened. And if I had, I resolved to at least SLICE UP THE DAMN MEATLOAF AND FREEZE SOME OF IT. 

So making the stuff murkey teatloaf last night still made me think of that and rage. At least this time, nobody's serving up an entire half of it.

Internet On again!

I don't know what knocked out the cable modem, but someone did a little magical checking of things and it's back on. Yay!
 

Internet Out!

Internet modem not getting a connection. Looks like it'll be out for 2 days until a tech can get out here.

Uninspired lack of updates gets some motivation

So what happened during the Month of May and June? Well, I gave up trying to figure out which other capacitors in Mom's Magnavox MX 36 inch CRT still need replacing, which in all equalness would likely end up meaning I needed to find another part to replace, something other than a capacitor. As my luck would have it, at the beginning of May, some electric company line workers came to the door to let me know they would be shutting off the power towards my end (and the house in turn) for about 15 minutes while they worked on the transformer on the pole. My only thought was "My Mom's TV won't survive being off for that long..." even though I've been woken up in the middle of the night due to a storm-induced power outage, pleading for the electricity to recover some hit points and come back. Which it did.

This time, I wasn't that lucky. The MX wouldn't turn on long enough to stay on. So like back in February, I got on Craigslist, and unfortunately the other 36 inch CRT TVs I had seen weren't on there anymore. I had to settle for a 32 inch Magnavox TV for a pittance. Let's summarize it this way: I'm not ready for a widescreen LED or LCD or whatever TV just yet, and I'm not in that financial league to afford one anyway.

This TV had been stored away for a while, unused. It's compatible with my current Magnavox remotes, so that was a big plus. It is also 4 years newer than my mother's TV, so it lacked some features I will miss, and some we used for an all too brief time. Picture in Picture was nice. The Over the Air Digital TV Guide stuff was neat, but since the switch to digital TV, is now sorely obsolete, which is a shame. I had finally figured out how to set the ZIP code so it would get the right program info to display.

At least now if I should happen to want a 36 inch TV, my Exploder has enough room for it. And it's best to transport a TV with the picture tube facing towards the back seat and across the width of the vehicle. Otherwise it'll flip over to the face of the tube as soon as you make a left or right turn.

There were several times during the month of June I felt like posting an update, but for some reason I felt it not that important. Maybe there's something to copypasta from my Foosebook postings. Oh well.

The main reason I felt like writing something was discovering how to soft-cook or it could even be called poaching an egg in the microwave.

You need:
1. Egg
1 Tupperware plastic hamburger keeper (sold in sets with the press handle)
1 slightly bigger thingy to put over the keeper

Break the egg into the keeper. Do not stir or scramble. Instead, quickly puncture the yolk. Bonus points if it doesn't begin immediately to leak out. I like some pepper on my egg, so season with pepper as you like.

Carefully place into microwave. Hopefully you have a turntable. Cover with the slightly bigger thingy. You want to keep whatever steam is released during the cooking time in with the egg so it doesn't dry out.

Here's the tricky part. I have no idea what power level the microwave beams its energy into the cooking area, but suffice to say this. I set it to cook the first time for 11 seconds, then lift the cover to see if the white of the egg has begun to coagulate due to the cooking energy. The edges should have cooked first. After inspection, cook for another 11 seconds. More of the white should now be cooked. Then I cook for another 11 seconds.

Now at this point, you could have all the egg white having cooked and turned white and the egg yolk yellow is no longer visible. It could be only slightly jiggly at this point but somewhat hot. IE you have a "cloudy" egg and not Sunny Side Up. If So - You are done! I typically assemble into a sandwich with mayo and cheese on one side, and the egg, carefully pried out of the burger keeper thingy and laid face down on the other slice of bread. The yolk is sufficiently cooked but still a bit liquid. Sometimes I can get it to just creamy but not solid. I've yet to have a problem with getting sick, so take that as you want.

If the egg is still Sunny Side Up and jiggly, cook for about 9 to 10 more seconds for a 4th time. I've tried blasting the egg straight through in one go, but I ended up with a bit of uncooked egg white in the middle somewhere. Doing it in short bursts appears to work best.

So there you have it. My version of poaching an egg in the microwave.

The sort of shocking thing I didn't expect

Going through some of my burned DVDs and finding out that some, especially my older discs, have developed some sort of foggy residue on the data side. It wipes off with some spray cleaner and tissues (and air duster for the resulting detritus) and the disks still play. It may be due to the plastic chemical makeup for the cases used, as it affected all the different brands of media used in the cases. Some of my more recent cases and burns haven't yet shown signs of this odd fogging.

DVDs in cake boxes and the single slim trays don't appear to be affected at all.

At any rate, I finally found some place offering scratch protective adhesive inserts much like the one I got in the jewel case for my  Sailor Moon 1st season BGM CD. I am of the opinion at this point that the fogging can be prevented by keeping the data side away from the plastic case.

I'll be getting more supplies to clean the other fogged DVDs. Even though the single slim trays are ideal, I like to label my discs with printed inserts. It's a tradeoff I'll have to figure out.

Various things and whatever (I'll come up with a title later)

Still trying to start up my computer services business. Right now I have a sick Win7 desktop that is going to get a HD clone and transplant, then I have to fix a corrupted user profile. The HD going bad likely was the cause of that and I have 2 ways to get that user profile to work again. If I just restored the profile without a new drive, it would just go bad again.At any rate, IT'S MY FIRST NON-FAMILY, NON-FRIEND CUSTOMER!! Yay.

I still have a little work to do on the laptop I've been working on. The parts got here and the flux pen did its magic on the one broken off post I wanted to re-attach. Now to get the energy to remove the varistor, clean up the area and work on getting the new varistor fluxed and tacked in place. I have the thermal transfer stuff for the heat sinks. I truly hope after the time I spent on this laptop that it still works.

I need to get another O ring for the DVD drive I was handed to work on because the size of the one I got in the first place doesn't offer enough grip for the motor and mechanics to disengage the magnetic disk clamp from the top of the drive housing. So it needs to be smaller.

And then the power supply board for a DVD player a friend dropped off got the capacitors replaced (the originals had leaked everywhere) and I have to check more of it because when I put it back in place, the player wouldn't turn on. So I missed something though I'm sure the capacitors were installed and soldered in correctly (they're polarized electrolytic caps). It started out not being able to eject the DVD... I was hoping that the problem was with the power supply board and fixing that would help. One problem at a time.

But I'm more excited about a Flash Video file I was able to grab. It came with closed captioned subtitles. At first I thought I wasn't going to be able to grab the data for it, but I found the link for that data. A simple Java application turns it into an SRT file, and then I was able to turn that into a stylized subtitle file. Subs, got.

The video file was more of a pain in the butt. VLC played the video just fine, but conversion to AVI with one tool I like resulted in the video playing too slowly and got out of sync with the audio but somehow the subtitles remained in sync with the audio. Odd. I ran it twice before trying something else, after making darn sure I told it what I wanted it to do.

So I used another tool and got a raw MP4 from the original file, but that tool saw it necessary to insert 70ms gaps in the audio it converted, so the later parts of the conversion played out of sync with each other. But I was able to convert that to a subbed AVI where the subs were in sync with the video. I figured I'd do what I've done before - grab the audio from the original file as an MP3, remux with Virtual Dub and it would fix the problem with the audio - Which It Did!

So now that I can make a final subbed video with everything where it's supposed to be, I will spend some time fixing up the subtitle file. I got to about the 36 minute mark and ran into something that needs another style defined. By that point, I was too tired to continue, so I'll finish that soon but not now.
 

I might be able to fix this, too.

Working on my 2nd laptop so far. It's a Dell Inspiron 2200 found in the trash. With a replacement power supply and a DVD ROM drive put in that was found with it, it powers on and the screen is good.

Today the replacement hard drive arrived, and so I plunked it in and let Windows XP Home Edition do something with it. The BIOS saw it and knew the capacity (40GB). So I let the installer format the drive. It gets to 86% and then the power drops dead.

Problem: I knew the DC power jack was loose, so this was no surprise as it finally got warm enough with a hard drive in to affect the thermal expansion properties of loose power jacks. So I decided that I'll get the thermal grease later - I want at that damn power jack! So I get it apart and the last step - getting the motherboard out - was stumping me. The Internet Archive kept a copy of the Dell service manual for the 2200, and wouldn't you know it - one glance at it, then back to the motherboard and it lifted right out!

And the culprit - nearly no solder on any of the power jack bits on the circuit board! I also saw one other bit that broke off and will fix that, too. Now to remedy this and get it back together to the point just before putting all the heat sinks on it so I can get Arctic Silver on it.

I want to see this machine work.