Why are parts so expensive?

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Kevin

I have a Whirlpool dishwasher that’s about 12 years old. The racks that hold the dishes are corroded and broken. The jagged edges are a hazard to users of the machine. The dishwasher works well: the only problem is the racks. I called Whirlpool who referred me to an authorized distributor who quoted me a price of $377 for the three racks.

I can buy a brand new Whirlpool dishwasher today for $360, less than the price of the racks.

Given the age of the dishwasher, it makes economic sense for me to buy a new dishwasher rather than replace the racks. But the bigger picture is that if I do what is in my best economic interest, a usable dishwasher goes into the landfill, which is just not a good thing. This is not a rant against Whirlpool because the problem is everywhere. I needed a new rubber seal for my refrigerator door—about half the cost of a new refrigerator.

A fellow ran into the back side corner of my car at low speed a couple weeks ago. The repair bill (fortunately paid for by the other guy’s insurance) was over $3,500!

I have a wristwatch that my grandmother gave me at graduation. Just having this watch serviced (cleaned and oiled) costs more today than the watch cost new. These days watches, radios and televisions are much more reliable and don’t need as many repairs, but when the time comes for a repair, chances are that the repair is not economically feasible.

Growing up, my family was in the repair business. My father repaired watches and my uncle repaired radios and televisions. They learned from my grandfather, who had a sign in his store: “We fix everything but a broken heart.”

If we as a society are going to get a handle on our trash, we need to address the issue of the cost of repairs.

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Surface v. Surface 2

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Kevin

I’ve been somewhat of a fan of the Microsoft Surface RT tablet computer. What I like about it is its productivity features, a big screen, nice keyboard available, Microsoft Office built in, and the ability to plug in USB peripherals. So for the things I do, watch movies, play games, blog, read email, social media and the occasional document or spreadsheet, it’s perfect. With one of the keyboard covers, it becomes something of a laptop replacement, even more so with an external mouse.

All of those good things said, there are a few things I wasn’t too happy with:

  1. The screen resolution is a little low for book reading. I found the Kindle app book text a little grainy.
  2. The resolution on the cameras isn’t all that high.
  3. It’s a tad slow starting programs.
  4. Connecting the charger cable is finicky.
  5. The battery life isn’t as long as I would like, and if you took it on a very long airplane trip (say across the ocean), you’d run out of juice.

So I’m selling my Surface on eBay—because—I got a Surface 2.

imageThe Surface 2 addresses all 5 of my dislikes for the original Surface.

In addition, the Surface 2 has a USB 3.0 port where you can plug in one of those huge-capacity portable hard drives. (You can plug those into the Surface too, but it’s only USB 2.0.) My son, the Microsoft guy, gave me a keyboard like the one at the right for Christmas and it works equally well on the Surface 2. Of course, by logging into my Microsoft account, all the settings and installed apps came across. I had to enter passwords into the apps again, and set up my network printer, but that didn’t take long.

The Surface 2 comes with two one-year freebies. You get 200GB of OneDrive cloud. Microsoft normally charges $100 for this much storage. I’ll never use it more than the 7 GB everybody gets. The other is unlimited Skype calls to phones for a year and access to their two million hotspots. This latter feature is one I will certainly be looking for when I’m traveling. The two hotspots nearest me are in hotels that provide free Wi-Fi to their guests anyway. The ones in the Atlanta airport are more interesting.

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Some of my best friends are black

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Kevin

A Story of Race and Inheritance

I grew up in rural Alabama in the days when George C. Wallace was governor. I actually heard him speak once at my high school football half time. I remember hearing his trademark campaign slogan: “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats.”

George C. Wallace with Citronelle High School Football Team
Alabama State Archives

Like many folks in my town when I was little, we had a black maid (her name was Minnie J____) who came once in a while. The only two other black people whose names I even knew in my town were the school janitor and the taxi driver (reputed to be the fellow to go to for a “prophylactic”). But apart from them, I knew no black people because my town and my school were segregated. The black state residential mental health facility was located about 15 miles away (Searcy Hospital in Mount Vernon, Alabama). It’s closed now. I was in quartet of local church boys and we would go over some times and sing at their worship services. That was the first time I shook a black man’s hand. (I also remember vividly a high school psychology class visit there to see a demonstration of electroconvulsive therapy.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Old_Mount_Vernon_Arsenal_Administration_Building_Front.jpg/320px-Old_Mount_Vernon_Arsenal_Administration_Building_Front.jpg
Searcy Hospital

When I went to college in Mobile, I was in the Baptist Student Union (which we didn’t call the “BSU” because that was already taken by the Black Student Union). Those were the days of “radicals.” There were a couple of kids in that group, Willie and Martha, who were black and we all sat around and sang Kumbaya and such. I was at Martha’s house once briefly. Willie wanted to be a mortician and I learn to spell his rather complicated last name, but they were just casual friends.  The relatively few black kids on campus rather stayed to themselves, and there were no black students in the Math department, my major, where most of my friends were.

When I went to work for the State of South Carolina, I hired a black fellow. I wouldn’t call him a good friend, but I did help him move a piano into his house, and I guess a friend is someone you can ask to help move a piano. He just couldn’t say “Vietnamese” right although the lady he was dating was that. He worked three jobs one of which was playing for some of the Masses at St. Mary’s Catholic Church.

But afterwards, we didn’t have any black employees for any significant period of time, not by design, but because there weren’t many good black software developers in the area, and the ones that there were got snapped up by companies with affirmative action plans.

In the South neighborhoods and churches are still mostly segregated, by history if not design, and I really didn’t get to know black people. There just aren’t that may black Lutherans in upstate South Carolina. (There’s the humorous true story about the Yankee who was given directions, to go 2 miles and turn right at the black church, and was puzzled at never having seen a church painted that color.)

I meet the infamous anti-birther, Rikker, and his son, but that was pretty brief and in a large group. For whatever reason, the anti-birthers I know are mostly white. And in fact it’s only been since I joined the Civitan Club in Greenville that I had the opportunity to really get to know black people socially, and finally I can say that some of my best friends are black.

The subtitle of the story comes, of course from President Obama’s book Dreams from My Father. I can hardly imagine two Americans with such a totally unlike experience growing up as we two.

Update (2024)

In the years following I joined the Greenville Civitan Club, a group that was perhaps 25% black, and made some good friends, some of whom are still my friends on Facebook 5 years after I moved away. Now all my black friends are folks who work for or participate in Habitat for Humanity in Charlottesville. My neighborhood here in Virginia is once again all white. That’s just how it is.

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Fixing the ELCA News webfeed

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Kevin

This article has been made obsolete with the new ELCA RSS Widget Builder. Check it out.

I run a couple of ELCA church web sites that use the ELCA news webfeed. It’s a nice way for a Lutheran church to add some dynamic content to its web site. Here’s what it looks like:

image

The problem is that at some point, the display became corrupt with certain characters appearing as a diamond with a question mark in the middle. That’s an indication that the character being displayed isn’t in the character set used to display it.

There used to be good resources at the ELCA for webmasters (webstewards as we call them), including a special forum for folks who run ELCA web sites. I don’t know what happened, but the forum’s not where it used to be, and the few documents on the ELCA site link to non-existent pages–particularly the one about web feeds is gone. I finally gave up searching the Internet and decided to fix it on my own.

The sites I run use WordPress, and I implemented the feed with some custom script in a Text widget in the sidebar. Here’s the old code:

<script language="JavaScript1.2" TYPE="text/javascript"
src="http://www.elca.org/scriptlib/co/ELCA_News/encNews.asp?Option=1&Dynamic=1">
</script>

That snippet doesn’t specify a character set, so the web page’s set is used, and in my case it’s UTF-8. To fix the problem, I just had to specify the character set like this:

<script charset="ISO-8859-1" language="JavaScript1.2" TYPE="text/javascript"
src="http://www.elca.org/scriptlib/co/ELCA_News/encNews.asp?Option=1&Dynamic=1">
</script>

You might ask where “ISO-8859-1” came from: it was a lucky guess of a common alternate encoding.

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Playing Heroes of Might and Magic III on a tablet PC

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Kevin

I have the UBISOFT DVD version of Heroes of Might & Magic III and IV Complete and a Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet PC running Windows 8.1. Can I play HMM3 on it? Yes, I can, and here’s a simple way to do it.

imageThe only real barrier is that the Dell Venue 8 Pro doesn’t have a DVD drive on it; however, thanks to a new Windows 8 feature, this is not much of a problem. The first step is to copy the DVD to what is called an ISO file, an image on disk of the DVD. You’ll need a computer with a DVD drive to do this. A number of programs can make ISO files, and I chose a freeware program called MagicDisc. After installing MagicDisc, run the program, which creates a small icon in the system tray. Right click on that icon and select “Make CD/DVD Image.” All you have to do is point it to your DVD drive, pick a place where you’ll save the file (which will be about 8 GB in size); I called mine HMM3.ISO. It will take a while to make the ISO file, but once it’s done, you copy the ISO file to the tablet.

Disk space is limited on tablets, and I chose to copy the file to a Micro SD card mounted in the tablet. You can either copy your file across a network, or write the SD card on your desktop computer and move it physically. Of course, you can put HMM3 on a SD card used just for playing the game, and load it when needed.

Now here comes the cool part. Windows 8 has a new feature that lets you mount an ISO file as if it were a DVD on your computer. Just right-click (or click-hold) the ISO file that you located with File Explorer and select “Mount” from the pop-up menu. (If the “Mount” doesn’t appear, go to Control Panel | Default Programs | Set Default Programs, then select “Windows Disc Image Burner” from the program list on the left, then click “Set this Program as Default” then OK.)

Once you mount the ISO file, it will appear in your file system just like a real DVD would. Then you run the SetupNow.exe program from the newly mounted drive to install Heroes of Might and Magic III as you would on any PC. When it asks about installing DirectX, say no. It may offer to install Rundirect (or was that Directrun?): say yes. You don’t need to install Adobe Acrobat—Windows 8 has something to read the PDF files. When you’re done, it will create an icon on your desktop, double-click and the game runs.

There are some things to keep in mind. The game will be too small to operate with your fingers. I have a stylus that has fine enough control to make it playable. There is also a Dell active stylus that may work even better (sold out right now). With my stylus and my finger, there is no mouse hovering, so you actually have to click on something to get the description of it. I think the better option is to hook up a Bluetooth mouse and play it that way.

So far there are absolutely no problems. There is no need to crack anything. It just works.

Update

11 years later, still playing HMM3.

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Dell Venue 8 Pro vs. Microsoft Surface RT

Posted on December 15, 2013 by Kevin

The Dell Venue 8 Pro is the new tablet darling and I sprang for one and got a great deal at Costco. It was $329.99 for the 64 GB model, plus the charger, plus the Dell case plus a 2-year extended warranty.

One might think that it’s hardly fair to compare an older Windows RT machine with something that runs the full version of Windows, but you might be surprised.

First impressions mean a lot and immediately the Dell Venue 8 Pro stands out as being faster and lighter. The user interface is quick and nimble. So let’s talk features.

The Dell Venue 8 Pro is a nice tablet. Mine has 64 GB of storage and 2 GB of RAM. It runs full Windows 8.1. Now here are some features shared by both:

  1. Front and rear facing HD cameras.
  2. Microphone and earphone jacks
  3. External slot for a micro SD card–currently 64 GB can be added
  4. Includes Microsoft Office 2013 Home and Student edition
  5. Wi-fi and Bluetooth
  6. Encryption hardware

Now here are some things the Surface RT has that the Dell Venue 8 doesn’t:

  1. Microsoft Outlook
  2. Standard USB Port
  3. HDMI audio/video output

And here are some things the Venue has that the Surface doesn’t:

  1. Full version of Windows and access to all Windows software, not just what’s in the Windows store.

You can plug in a USB dongle for a wireless keyboard and mouse into the Surface and hook up a wide screen monitor and be quite productive with the supplied Office software. The screen is much larger for your video watching enjoyment.

The Venue also comes with a USB 2.0 port, but it is the “micro” size, and requires an adapter cable, what they call an on-the-go cable (OTG). With that, pretty much any USB device can be connected. I hooked up a Toshiba office copier/printer via USB and it worked. It is somewhat ironic that the smaller device supports full Windows but the screen is simply too small to use the Windows desktop.  Unlike the Surface which has HDMI output, the Dell requires some special optional hardware to connect a monitor, either USB or wirelessly. Here’s the oft-mentioned YouTube video of connecting a monitor.

Like all comparisons, what is best depends on what you want to do. If you want a truly portable device, the Venue works better because it’s smaller and easier to carry. The screen resolution is higher, so things like books appear sharper. The advertised battery life is longer (10 vs. 8 hours) but I’d take those numbers with a grain of salt—particularly on the Surface. You’ll want to stick to the Metro interface, though, because the desktop is tiny. I take it to a meetings.

For productivity, go with the Surface. It has Office and you can hook up a big monitor. Most USB devices are supported. The closely-integrated touch cover makes a keyboard available on the go without adding much to the size of the package and I think for travel, I’d take the Surface because of the integrated keyboard, and the ease of transferring pictures from my camera via USB. I can use it to charge other USB devices. Since the original writing of this review, I received a Surface Type 2 Keyboard, and this keyboard is a dream come true.

There are plenty of apps for Windows RT and so far, I haven’t put anything on the Venue that wouldn’t run on RT. Full Windows sounds nice, but let’s face it—you’re not going to edit video or develop software on a tablet. Here are some common tasks I do where both tablets work equally well:

  1. Internet browsing
  2. Mobile banking
  3. Facebook
  4. Weather
  5. Reading Kindle books
  6. Viewing PDF files, spreadsheets and Word documents
  7. Watching video, including Netflix and YouTube
  8. Carrying documents to meetings
  9. Remote access to my desktop
  10. Playing solitaire
  11. Listening to music

The three Venue limitations, no standard USB, no HDMI, no Outlook are a big deal and shouldn’t be taken lightly. The lack of Outlook is mitigated by the ability to install other Windows mail clients, like Thunderbird, USB is mitigated with an Adapter, and video can also be done, perhaps clumsily, with additional hardware.

Of course, now there is a Microsoft Surface 2 (thinner, faster, lighter), with a higher resolution camera and screen, and longer battery life. I think that if I were starting over from scratch and getting just one tablet, I’d get a Surface 2.

Update:

I sold my Surface on eBay and got a Surface 2. While the Surface 2 is nicer with higher resolution both on the display and with the camera, my overall conclusions haven’t changed. The screen on the Venue is just too small for productivity even though it’s great to grab and go, surf the web, read email and carry documents for a meeting. The Surface 2 is just too big and too heavy to carry casually. To take on a trip where I want to blog and do Office stuff, or project on a big screen at a meeting, the Surface 2 is the choice.

I just don’t see how one tablet can work when small size is too small for some things and the large size is too big for other things.

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Safely extending Windows RT memory with a micro SD card

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Kevin

Note: This article applies to the Surface Pro 3.

Tablet computers don’t come with the same kind of massive hard drives as desktop computers. My Surface RT only has 17 GB free. The obvious way to expand your memory is with a micro SD card, with 64 GB media readily available and relatively cheap. Doing it safely takes some preparation.

Windows RT encrypts the system drive, but it doesn’t necessarily encrypt SD cards. To gain space on the system drive, you might well assign your File History folder to the SD card. Bad move. Doing this creates an unencrypted copy of all your documents for the taking, no password required.

Here are the steps that will get you up and running with a secure SD card storing your File History and OneDrive. To start, you will need a computer running a version of Windows that has a full version of BitLocker on it (specifically Windows Vista/ 7 Enterprise or Ultimate editions, or the Pro or Enterprise versions of Windows 8). BitLocker is the encryption system in Windows RT, but RT doesn’t support all the features of the full version, specifically creating a new encrypted drive. So with your other computer, follow these steps:

In Windows, right click on the drive icon and select Format, specifying NTFS.

image

Step 2: Encrypt the drive. This may take a while (hours) depending on the size of the SD card and its speed. Right click the SD card drive icon and select “Turn on BitLocker….”  Pick a really crazy long password and write it down. Once you put the drive in your Surface RT, it can be told to store the password, so you don’t need to pick something you can remember. There are web sites that will generate a random password for you.

Once you have the SD card prepared, mount it in your Surface RT. When you insert the SD card you’ll be prompted for the password. Click the “More options” link first to expose a checkbox to automatically mount the card, then enter the password and click OK. (Note: this same procedure can be used to create an encrypted USB flash drive.)

To move the File History folder to the SD card, select Charms | Settings | Change PC Settings | Update and Recovery | File History. Click “Select a different drive” to specify the SD Card.

Untitled pictureCaution: If you put your OneDrive folder on the encrypted SD card, changes made to documents made on the Surface WILL NOT UPLOAD. So only do this if read-only access to your Cloud files is OK.

To move your OneDrive sync folder, open File Explorer on the desktop, then right-click or click-hold the OneDrive icon, and select Properties from the pop-up menu. Select the Location tab on the Dialog, then click “Move.” The Move dialog will let you select a new folder for your OneDrive on your encrypted SD card. After navigating to the folder where you want your OneDrive files to reside, click “Select Folder” and then OK to return to the Location dialog. When you do that, you will be prompted whether or not to move your files from your old OneDrive folder to the new one.

And with that, you’re done.

There is one other setting you might want to make. Start the OneDrive app and navigate Charms | Settings | Options and toggle to Access all files offline. Since you have all that free space, you might as well have copies of all your files available for use when there’s no Internet connection.

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