Category Archives: technology

PC Resuscitation

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I get a lot more satisfaction out of fixing things than I do replacing them. Part of it is the challenge, part of it is the learning experience, and part of it is the savings. But I think the biggest part of it may be genetically programmed into my DNA.

I do realize that sometimes it’s cheaper to replace something than it is the repair it. The other day I was looking over a broken electric can opener that we had replaced for the princely sum of $15 and realized that it was not worth repairing. I didn’t know what I’d do with an extra used electric can opener if I did repair it when they are available new for as little as $6 at Target.

I got an inquiry last week from my cousin in Pennsylvania about whether a power supply for a Compaq PC manufactured in 2002 should cost $185. I am usually able to pick up PC power supplies for as little $15 to $25, and so this price seemed way out of line. Upon further investigation I found that back in 2002 Compaq was using a non-standard connector and case size in their desktop power supplies. This makes the power supply rare and therefore very expensive. After looking over the pinout of the motherboard connector for the Presario 5000 model, it appeared that the majority of the pins were consistent with the ATX standard, but there were enough changes that it would take some fiddling to adapt a standard power supply to work like the Compaq model. The failure mode didn’t seem consistent with a normal power supply failure though. Usually when a PC’s power supply fails, the computer will show no signs of life. In this case, the computer would power on, but in a short time would shut itself down. This made me suspect that perhaps there was a bad electrolytic cap on the motherboard that would short and cause an over-current condition after things warmed up. If that were true, even a new power supply wouldn’t fix the problem.

My uncle is quite handy designing and fixing all things electrical and mechanical and offered to help. Despite having very little experience with computers, in a relatively short time, he and another relative were able to determine that the power supply’s fan had stopped spinning. That would explain why it was powering on but shutting down after a while. He went to Radio Shack and found a similar fan but it would not fit inside the power supply’s case. No problem, he mounted it outside the computer’s case over the power supply vent. It still fulfills the need of moving air through the power supply to prevent it from overheating. The fix worked and the PC has been successfully resuscitated.

It may be his nearly 70 years of ham radio and tinkering experience that came to the rescue because once you understand how things work, you can fix them even if you’ve never done a repair exactly like it before.

And then, of course, there’s that DNA thing too.

Aviation handheld radios

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At Oshkosh this year, one of the things on my ‘to do’ list was to replace my aviation handheld radio. I had loaned my Vertex Standard (AKA Yaesu) Pilot VXA-210 handheld radio to a friend who subsequently passed away and couldn’t imagine a way to broach the subject about getting the radio back.

I have long been a fan of Yaesu ham radios and own quite a few of them. I’m the keeper of the FAQ for the Yaesu FT100 which is one of my most frequently visited web sites. I had my heart set on getting the VXA-700 aviation/ham handheld radio, something I’ve wanted for a long time because it could serve double duty in the cockpit. It’s a lot of fun to talk with fellow hams on the ground when one is flying around overhead. However, I was shocked to find that the ham radio (2-meter) functionality had been removed from the VXA-710, which is the follow-on radio to the VXA-700. Details about why it was removed were sketchy, but a few competitors said that the FCC had intervened and fined Yaesu for some reason. That left the choice up to the VXA300 since I wasn’t about to step down to a COMM-only radio when the radio I previously owned had also had a NAV feature.

I don’t know why Yaesu has decided to dilute its well-known brand name by using the name ‘Vertex Standard’ for its aviation and marine radios. They’d have been much better off sticking with something that can leverage their strength in the ham radio market.

Vertex Standard has 4 aviation hand held radios in the line-up that have no consistent naming convention. For example, they have the following aviation products:

  • Pro V aka VXA-150 (simple COMM-only radio)

  • Pro VI aka VXA-220 (a COMM-only radio with a bigger display)

  • Pilot III aka VXA-300 (NAV/COMM)

  • Spirit aka VXA-710 (NAV/COMM with business radio receive (?!) + FM receive)

    • The 4 radios look dissimilar enough that they might have been designed by 4 different companies. I don’t know what they are thinking at Yaesu, but giving products two different numbering schemes and using another brand name without the name recognition of Yaesu isn’t really helping them in any way.

    When it comes to aviation handhelds, it would be better to have a high end model and a low end model with similar user interfaces and accessories that are common. In addition, it would help if the people who staffed the Yaesu trade show booth actually knew something about the products. This has been an issue for the past several years. The guys are neither hams nor pilots and they don’t provide any staff to the larger vendor booths. I began feeling so dismayed by this inept marketing approach that I started looking more seriously at the competition, namely ICOM.

    ICOM made a big splash this year with a new panel mount radio called the A210 which, unfortunately, appears to cost about twice what their current A200 radio and doesn’t really do much more. ICOM had been the price/performance leader in aviation panel mount radios for many years with the A200. It costs approximately half of what the competition charges for a similar radio.

    The venerable A200

    I don’t know why the components that can be sold in a handheld radio need to cost 8 times as much when they are wrapped in a few more dollars of aluminum and have fewer features, but that is the case with nearly all panel-mount aviation radios.

    ICOM currently produces only 2 aviation handhelds, the A6 and A24, which look identical. The only difference is that the A24 has the NAV feature, and the A6 does not. In talking with their reps, they claimed that they designed the radios using focus groups with real pilots and found that the 3 most requested features from pilots were:

  • ease of use

  • easy-to-read display and keys

  • long battery life

    • Ease of use for this kind of radio is important since it’s a backup radio used infrequently and you don’t want to have to refer to its manual during an emergency like a complete electrical system failure. The backlit LCD display is easy to read as are its backlit keys.

    The battery takes up more than half the mass of the radio giving its battery life an advantage over attempting to make the radio as small as possible and compromising battery life in the process.

    After mulling this over for a while and considering the discounted show price and a $40 rebate, I decided to switch camps. I bought the A24 and so now I’m an ICOM owner again, something that I haven’t been for more than 25 years.

    Adaptive Interfaces

    How to make mailing labels with Excel and Word

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    I’ve done mailing labels over the years when I was the local chapter EAA newsletter editor and then a few times for Christmas cards, but each time I do them now, it seems that I can’t remember the steps it takes to repeat the process and as a result, it feels like I have to learn it all over again. So today I carefully went through the procedure because I’m helping out with my high school reunion and we will need to print out mailing labels several times in the next few months. I figured other people might want to know how to do it, so I will give the step-by-step method here in the blog.

    First of all, you will need to put your mailing database in an Excel spreadsheet. Even though you’ll use the MailMerge function of Word, a spreadsheet is much easier for manipulating lists of data compared with trying to work with tables in Word. You should title the columns with intuitive names such as, LastName, FirstName, Address1, City, State, Zip code because if you do, MailMerge will usually correctly guess the order to arrange the data when it comes time to put them into a mailing label format.

    I like using type 5160 Avery adhesive labels which are arranged in 8.5″ x 11″ sheets with individual labels 1″ x 2.625″ spaced 3 across and 11 down for a total of 33 labels per page.

    [Note: When I first wrote these instructions, I was using Office 2003. Now that I have Office 2007, I can see that some of the menus have been changed. I’ll add some extra instructions below for those with Office 2007.]

    Here are the steps for producing labels using the Mail Merge program in Microsoft Word:

    Launch Word and use File->New to create a Blank Document

    Tools->Letters and Mailings->Mail Merge Wizard

    [Office 2007: Mailings -> Start Mail Merge -> Step-by-step Mail Merge Wizard ]

    You’ll see Step 1 of 6:

    Choose the option ‘Labels’ then select ‘Next’ at the bottom of the menu.

    Step 2: Make sure ‘Change document layout’ radio button is selected and then and select ‘Label options…’ below it.

    This will take you to a Label Options menu that allows you to select a label type. I use ‘Avery Standard’ and type ‘5160 Address’. Then select OK. Office 2007 asks you if it’s OK to overwrite your document at this point. Select OK.

    In Word 2003, a grid should appear in your document that shows labels borders spaced in 3 columns, 11 rows per sheet. This grid doesn’t appear in Word 2007.

    Step 3: Now select ‘Next: Select recipients’

    Make sure the option to ‘Select/Use an Existing list’ is selected and the select ‘Browse’ and find the .xls file on your computer with your database and then open it. Select the spreadsheet page you wish to use. If it has just one page, you will see $Sheet1 and you should select it. In Word 2003 you may select ‘entire spreadsheet’ if you have only one sheet. You will then see a list of names from the spreadsheet. Select OK. You may have to select OK again. A list of <> entries will appear in the document.

    Step 4: Now select ‘Next: Arrange your labels’

    Select ‘Address Block’. Look at the preview field to see if the example label has all the information you want. Because of the layout of the heading row spreadsheet, it should be correct. If it’s not, you can fix it by selecting the ‘Match fields’ option and editing them. Now select OK. You should see <> in the first label and <> in all the other labels. Select ‘Update all labels’. This will cause the text <> to be added to all the labels that previously had just <> in them. So the first field will have <> and all the others will have <><>.

    Note: If you wish to have more control over your labels, instead of selecting ‘address block’, you can select ‘More options’ and this will allow you to apply the exact amount of spacing, carriage returns, etc., around each field. I’ve found this helpful if you have international addresses mixed in.

    Step 5: Now select ‘Next: Preview your labels’

    Now you will see a sample page of the labels.

    At this point, you can select ‘Print…’ which will walk you through the steps of printing out the labels on a local printer, or you can select ‘Edit individual labels…’ If you select that, it will create a Word document file that you can edit or store away for future use or print from another computer. I usually use that option.

    I should mention that there was an issue with the zip codes that started with ‘0’ (zero). You should format that field in the spreadsheet as a ‘special’ zip code field, which is an option in the format command of Excel. Then during the import to MailMerge, I had to use these steps.

    Preparing DDE settings in Microsoft Word:
    If you perform a mail merge in Office 2003 and use Excel as the data source, some of the numeric data may not retain its formatting when merged. To resolve this:
    1. Open Word
    2. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the General tab.
    3. Click to select Confirm conversion at open check box, and click OK.
    4. Continue creating the mail merge as explained above
    5. Open Data Source.
    6. In the Confirm Data Source dialog box, click MS Excel Worksheets via DDE (*.xls), then click OK.

    You may have to answer a few questions when you import the .xls file but it will fix any issues with the zip code field, especially with those starting with ‘0’ (zero).

    Another trick to making labels is printing a single sheet of labels out on plain paper first to make sure the alignment is OK. You can hold the sheet of labels up to the light with the printed paper labels behind it and insure that the text will all end up inside the sticky label borders. You don’t want to be making mistakes on the label stock because it’s much more expensive than plain paper.

    Canceling an XBOX Live Gold membership

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    I got an Xbox 360 about a year ago with the hope of using it as a media player for my HP Media Vault because it is supposed to be a DLNA-compliant media server. It’s not. You can get it to work by installing Twonkyvision’s server on the Media Vault (which costs another $40), but it won’t stream Divx/xvid-encoded videos, which pretty much renders it useless as a media player in my opinion.

    I’m not much of a gamer myself, and so the Xbox 360 hasn’t gotten much use. For some reason that I cannot recall, I decided to upgrade my Xbox 360 silver membership (which is free) to an Xbox Live Gold membership which costs about $7.99/month. I figured I could always just switch back to the free membership if I didn’t use the Gold membership features. After a while of seeing that monthly charge appear on the credit card, I decided to cancel it. I first tried canceling it on-line via the webpage for Live, then through the Xbox console, and wasted at least a half hour before searching on the Internet only to find out that that only way to cancel it is to call up 1-800-4MY-XBOX (1-800-469-9269) to wait to talk to an operator. And that took an additional 18 minutes, most of which time I was on hold.

    I really hate it when a company makes such an obvious attempt to hang on to subscription fees that it causes that level of inconvenience when attempting to cancel a service. Signing up took a few minutes and I didn’t need to call anyone, but canceling took 48 minutes from my life. So I’ll post this here for three reasons:

  • To help someone in the future to not waste time looking for an on-line solution to canceling their xbox live membership.

  • To let Microsoft know that this is a really stupid policy.

  • To let any other company that is contemplating a similar strategy not to do it because customers don’t like it.

    • I hope someone Diggs this and maybe it will get the attention of the person Microsoft who can correct the situation. If they do, I’ll gladly remove this from my blog.