Design for the dump?

Cars don't, but the orphaned yard machines that appear on my doorstep do, and often the carb is the reason.

jsw

Actually, my boss had a pair of pretty fancy LCDs, and just out of warranty one of the backlights quit. He asked me to look at it, it was obvious that some uncut leads on the back of the inverter board had poked through some flimsy plastic insulation and was sparking to grounded shield material. I snipped the leads flush to the PC board, then replaced the plastic with heavy mylar film and put it back together. The next day I did the other monitor just to prevent a repeat at a random time.

Now, if you bust the glass or something electronic in the LCD display itself goes out, it would be next to impossible to fix. The row and column driver chips are attached to the glass by tiny flex circuits, and the active matrix ones have transistors printed on the glass.

Jon

An LCD meter display may appear bad if the zebra strip connection opens.

jsw

[ ... ]

Well ... I think that my cell phone is coming up on five years now, and I hope that it continues for many more years. It is perhaps one of the first with the digital mode instead of analog, and I don't

*want* many of the new features (such as GPS, built-in cameras, etc.) I don't even *use* Texting. I had them (Verizon) disable it, because all I was getting was spam -- once a month, and I got charged $0.20 per text.

I've already replaced the battery (this summer), and hope that another will be available when the next four years or so pass.

I would be less upset if I could get another one which is just like this one.

Indeed so. I am using quite a collection of older computers, some fifteen years old or more. (Mostly Sun SPARC based systems.)

Hmm ... how many write cycles will the SSD survive? I know that a lot of Compact Flash cards have a limit on the number of writes, which makes them very poor choices for running a unix/linux/BSD box, since every time a file is read, the last-accessed time in the inode is updated -- unless you can mount the disk read-only. I would suggest frequent backups to some other medium until you know for sure.

Enjoy, DoN.

[ ... ]

They *already* think that I'm crazy, so they don't bother mentioning specific examples. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

You're just being modest. ;-)

I've never had anybody explicitly call me crazy for fixing my own stuff, but when the pipes under my mobile home froze and split, I had to be crazy to fix them! (about 18" high crawlspace, on sand.)

Thanks, Rich

Try 14 inches below the floor joists in mud in January, in Ohio. While recovering from the flu.

OK, you win. My sand was dry, but if it had been warm enough for mud the pipes probably wouldn't have frozen. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

I still have a Nokia 5190 - one of the first GSM phones in North America Actually I have 2. One unlocked and used on Rogers,and one set up for Fido and never used - purchase date July 3 2001. I think the Rogers one is older than the fido.

Thanksgiving weekend, 1971 was spent in a swamp, in the rain in Dundalk Ontario transplanting the front suspension in a 1961 Rambler American. Has to be the most miserable and memorable job I ever got talked into - and then my brother went and replaced it with a Valiant the next week - - - - - .

Wow, sounds like you work on toys. The timing chain one IIRC was the difference between carb and injected. I almost milled it down, but I traded it back for some skate (those tiny cars like a GEO) front seats cause I hate the bench seats and ordered a new cover. The ones now I'm pretty sure they are both 22Rs just one is a van and the other a truck. Anyway, seems silly to change the mold for the plastic box that holds the air filter.

I'm getting so cheap that the next project is trying to weld up the last 3' of the exhaust system. Finally today I found a friend with a pile of exhaust pipe that he said he dumpster dives for. All I need now is some thinner welding rod.

Back when I was really poor I'd start collecting rabbits and Sciroccos for $50-$200 and take them all apart to make one good car. I even changed the FI head and put on the carb head, amazingly that worked. Id love to have another. There where a number of times someone with a new vet would rev their engine at a light and to my crappy car and I'd leave them in the dust.

SW

I never rebuilt a picture tube CRT but I have changed a large number of them in the early sixties and the core charge was a pretty good dollar. Now days they don't even want the core.

I've have been repairing and fixing things since I was a little kid. One thing I learned to do was to sew up baseballs so they looked like new. There was always on lying around with the cover coming off.

One time I repaired a modulator valve on a heating/ac system on an auto mechanic friends vehicle. I had to rewind a little coil on the valve. He told me that that part was not repairable. :)

One of the big problems today is that there are not many skilled repair persons out there, most of them are parts changers, but as I think back the TV repair shops were mostly tube changers. I made good money repairing TV sets that the shops could not repair. I could do a complete alignment right in the customers home. ]

John

(...)

In my yout, I worked for an outfit repairing telephone test gear. Boss brought in a stereo, claimed it had lightning damage.

He was right. Every chip in the I.F. amp was fried. I replaced them with 'workalike' parts and the thing came to life! That was 'way more fun than replacing a corroded switch in a breakdown test set. :)

--Winston

...

Endurance of flash memory chips has increased a lot, so that SSD lifetime and MTBF is better than some hard drives now.

Per , endurance of a flash memory cell was typically 10,000 write cycles in 1994; 100,000 in 1997; millions of cycles now. A few years ago, "typically 3% of blocks in a flash SSD might only last 100,000 cycles but over 90% would last 1 million cycles." SSD's (solid state disks) use over-provisioning, bad block testing and management, and transparent wear leveling for longer equipment life. Due to wear leveling, for example, even though the logical sector number of inode doesn't change, the physical sector it is written in may change from time to time. Example in above link is a 64GB SSD written continuously with expected lifetime of > 50 years. (A 64GB MZ-5PA064 SSD with 250MB/sec sequential read and 170MB/sec sequential write speeds is $139 from samsung.com. If the numbers in example are applied to it, lifetime is ~ 25 years, due to it being 2 times faster than in the example.)

Some SSD-specific filesystems are available that avoid frequent writes, but might or might not be worth pursuing. Per , "The concept of changing the way that you write to your SSD to prolong lifespan comes from people using SD and CF cards as SSDs. These have write lifespans so short that it is a real issue. Good SSDs like you would use in a normal computer do not." "Modern SSDs have MTBF so long that using them for regular swap space is no problem." "An SSD will outlast a normal HD by orders of magnitude." "When you talk of sparing the SSD of writes it is like saying that you want to make sure that it lasts for 40 years instead of 35."

[ ... ]

A very interesting read, and it shows that my information was certainly out of date.

I may look into using them in my next system. (And even see that FC is among the supported offerings. :-)

Thanks, DoN.

No. I lost. I was sick for the next six months. I lost over 50 pounds and was so weak I could barely walk. I was fired for not showing up for work while unconsious for five days with the flu. I lost 20 of thosue pounds in that five days. I lost my home, and most of my posessions as well.

I remember my father doing an alignment on the kitchen table. I don't think we ever had to buy a TV, at that time, they were a significant expense.

My most prominent memory of "The TV Repairman" was that he had B.O. ;-)

Cheers! Rich