Trash rack victory!! Half price monitor and memory of a free one

Someone threw out an HP Z27 monitor for the understandable defect of something having struck the upper left of the screen and ruining it there. I bought for about half the cost of the original monitour a replacement LCD direct from China for the thing, which arrived to at work. After doing some real botchwork with a sewing machine on a skirt I sortof succeeded in altering, I reassembled the monitor and it works now. 3840 × 2160 and I have to run it at 25/100 brightness (via OSD) to be able to look at the thing.

Slow, modern Heptameron story eleven XI

The first electronic calculator I remember, and the only one I remember seeing or using for years, was my mother’s. It folded in half on a plastic leather hinge and I think was a Casio SL-100B. I remember the folding hinge getting two cracks on each end, leaving these little tabs that I don’t remember ever trying to pull on.

It was solar powered with no memory, so had no real way to damage it. I played with it often to see what I could do to get the “E” to show up. Dividing by zero was easy, I think after that I found out I could keep multiplying things by large things and that would do it, and at last, taking the square root of a negative.

The best memory I have of it is putting in some huge number (it had 8 digits if it was an SL-100B, so 99,999,999 was the highest it went) and repeatedly pushing √ until I got to 1. I remember the numbers would fall rapidly, then become 1.0000something, and after falling below 1.000,000,050, became just “1.”.

This was more entertaining than multiplying things to reach an overflow because I didn’t have to come up with another number as multiplier, I just put in the initial number and watched it change with “√” until it reached the unchanging “1.”. In this, I now realized, I had a zero-player game, similar to “Conway’s Game of Life“: pick an initial state (99,999,999) and the rules (“√”) and everything in every turn afterward is unavoidably known (fixed value) and the same (no randomness or chance [stochasticity?]).

A keyboard failure is Nemesis

Last night, as I got home – about exactly but a little after mid night – my key board was dead. I was too tired from a late Fri day at work to bother so I used a spare on hand to do something I wanted to but then went to sleep.

Just an old-time professor

For a few years in the mid 2000s, I took a number of courses at the county college (2-year, Associates-granting public institution) taught by this 1 professor, H. I propose to tell some storys about him, that he told me or that we had.

Fixed an HP LaserJet from 1998

So there was a printer I said I would fix that, besides being old and sitting on a shelf for maybe 5 or 10 years, would print but jam alot. First the old toner cartridge from 10+ years ago that was left in it all this time was replaced, then the duplexer stabilized, but after some time attempted use, it ended up jamming every sheet and was so annoying.

Disassembling it showed that the inside of the fuser roller (the one that actually heats up and burns the toner onto the paper) had a mess of burned toner. Cleaned that up and reassembled the toner. Still would always fold over the top left corner of the paper and jam just as it got to the fuser. Looking along the paper path where this fold would have been made, I noticed a blunt projection – that had been manufactured there – that might be doing it.

HP does not usually misdesign their printers, so I slept on it for about 2 nights and 1 day. Deciding I couldn’t make it less useful for them, I used a makeshift file to wear it down. I cleaned the area up and reassembled it and it has not jammed once for me after printing ~80 sheets from all the different paper sources. I give it back tomorrow in what I think is fully functioning shape.

How does Windows decide a drive’s capacity?

When testing drives of uncertain trustability, on one that was unreadable and disassembled for metal Disk Management on Windows 10 2004 gave me this when playing with it:

Evidently this disk has a cumulative capacity of over 80 billion megabytes. This would be 80 thousand terabytes, or 80 “petabytes” per SI (power of ten) standard definitions of “mega”.

I do wonder what the physical drive passed up the data bus for Windows to display these very bizzare sizes to me. Right now (October 12, 2020), the biggest 3.5 in. hard disk (so electromechanical) on Newegg is 18 TB. This disk was reporting/reported as 4444× larger than that.

Also the numbers were not displayed according to my user account personalization, which specifys decimal separators.

How to get Windows 10 on a Toshiba Satellite A665 that won’t even boot

I went through some irritation to get Windows 10 installed on a discarded old laptop, so am putting it here for every one else.

Windows messed up my icons unneededly

I just exchanged my monitor of many years for my grand father’s. The one I had been using was almost exactly square, this one is closer to 2:1 horizontal to vertical. After turning my PC back on and signing back in, I find my desktop icons are all scrambled around, even though the old arrangement could have been maintained within the new default resolution.

Jumpin’ jivin’ dumpster divin’

For no reason I have found yet, someone threw out an EPSON Perfection 4990 Photo scanner device. FireWire didn’t seem to work, but big deal. USB connection is fine and I can directly scan from Windows instead of using a 3rd party tool. My older one is a 1560 Photo, so this looks like an improvement.

I forgot to mention: this one has a power switch! The old one didn’t, you had to unplug it or buy an external switch! YaY!

Second update: Unlike the 1560, the power cord is hard wired and the supply fully internal!! It doesn’t have a power “brick” like the old one!! This is cause for great celebration.

(NSFL) I recommend all persons do this

I worked at home, by direction, the last 4 days of the workweek. To day, Sun day, instead of working on the outside telephone lines, I did something of personal health importance: I cleaned my human interface devices (HIDs). A nasty photoe or 2 ahead, hence the NSFL note. Also may annoy people with trypophobia, but the holes are regular and clearly non organic.