Darkoshi

My oven's touchpad isn't working right. The Temperature Up button makes the temperature go down. The Down button brings up Auto Clean. So I am stuck at a maximum temperature of 350, unless I want to Broil something.

It had a similar problem in 2015. Back then on the original Whirlpool unit, the Temperature Down button failed first. I was able to purchase and install a 3rd-party replacement touchpad to fix it, for $200. Now, it looks like a replacement may no longer be available. I've emailed the company I bought it from last time to find out for sure.

Looking up the problem, there are many videos indicating that oven touchpad buttons failing is a common problem with all brands. In most examples, the buttons don't work at all rather than doing the wrong thing. The videos show how to clean the ribbon cable contacts to fix the problem. One guy said that fixes the problem 70% of the time. I didn't try that back in 2015, but did yesterday. Today I tried it again, just to make sure I got those contacts very clean. It didn't fix my problem.

Maybe one of the resistors in the touchpad is shorted. I was looking at the photo I'd made of its wiring prior to installing it. Groups of buttons are wired together along the same metal connector thingy, with what looks like a flat resistor between each one. The control unit probably determines which button was pressed based on the voltage between the various connectors. If the resistor right after the Auto Clean button is shorted, that could result in my problem. Unfortunately the Temp Up button is the last in the path, so there's no other button I can press to make the temperature go up. It's strange that basically the same buttons failed both times, on different brands of touchpads.

Oh well. Being able to bake only at 350 degrees is better than not baking at all. I want to still bake something tonight.

If these touchpads failing is such a common problem, they ought to make more ovens with manual knob controls like in the old days.

Earlier this year, my microwave oven's touchpad was also acting up. Some of the buttons didn't respond, or only when pressed in a specific way. I tried one suggested fix (blow dryer) which didn't help. Later on, the problem went away on its own. Probably seasonal/humidity related.

DirecTV's DVRs (perhaps only some of them) have a bug such that sometimes when you delete a recording, instead of deleting only the one you had selected, it deletes ALL of the episodes you had recorded of that TV show.

See: DVR deleting entire show list instead of one episode

That thread is 3 years old and you'd think it would be fixed by now. But Qiao's DVR has had the problem as far back as November 2020, and it still happens, even though its firmware appears to be up to date. The problem seems to happens when we delete two or more recordings in a row. To avoid the problem, we have to either not delete any episodes until we've caught up and watched all of them (the safest method), or only delete one, then back out of the menu and come back in if we want to delete another.

When I'm not at Qiao's house, he records the daily Jeopardy episodes so we can watch them together when I come by. So there is usually a backlog of many episodes for us to watch. But when there are re-runs, we want to delete those from the list. Because of the DVR bug, it has now happened 3 times that the DVR has deleted our whole backlog of unwatched Jeopardy episodes when we only selected to delete a few re-runs!

It's a (big yet muted) disappointment each time it happens. (On one hand, they are only TV episodes, and not even part of story arc. But I looked forward to watching them, and then they're abruptly taken away. The lost ones included some of the last season which Trebek hosted before his passing.)
As far as I have found, past Jeopardy episodes aren't officially available anywhere to watch at will. That makes no sense to me. Why would such a popular show have no way for people to watch missed episodes? Even when an episode is pre-empted for whatever reason, there's no way to go back and watch it. From what I've read, that's even more disappointing for the contestants who played on those days, as their friends and neighbors end up not being able to see their performance.

One can find recent episodes various people have posted to YouTube, if they haven't gotten taken down yet, but it's a matter of luck.

Anyway.

We could talk to DirecTV tech support about the DVR problem, but I haven't felt up to it. I suspect they'd want to replace the DVR. I'm not convinced that would fix the problem, and it would probably mean losing the other recordings on the DVR that we haven't yet watched. I don't have time to catch up with watching everything at once, as there are always more shows being recorded in the meantime. It's a Catch-22.

So. I had the idea to get an over-the-air (OTA) DVR, for recording shows like Jeopardy that don't require cable to watch. We could have it as backup.

It turns out there are some fancy OTA DVRs that even let you stream recordings to your mobile devices, and even when you're not at home. But they have limitations such as only working with some kinds of TVs, requiring a monthly fee or being very expensive, etc.

So then I looked for and found more basic DVRs, like VHS recorders used to be. With these DVRs, instead of having to supply VHS tapes, you have to supply your own external hard drive. But the user reviews I've read have given me concerns. One review said a DVR ruined their TV's HDMI port. I'd hate that to happen. Other reviews mention other problems. I'll just have to choose one that sounds the best. Or forget about it and live without it.

I've set up one of my Wyze cams outside on the porch. Its power cable connects to the porch's lamp fixture. The lamp fixture has 2 candelabra-sized bulb sockets. I screwed a candelabra-to-regular-size socket adapter in one of the sockets, and into that a socket-to-outlet adapter. Into that, I plugged the Wyze cam's power adapter, which converts the 110V AC power to the 5V USB used by the camera.

With this setup, the lamp's power has to be kept turned on so that the camera can work 24/7. I'd like to have a bulb in the lamp's 2nd socket, but don't want the bulb on during the daytime.

I could use a daylight-sensor adapter along with a regular bulb. If the light were to be on all night, it should be a yellow bug-light to reduce the number of flying insects attracted to the porch area.

There are bug lights with candelabra bases. But when one adds a light sensor adapter to it, which also requires a socket adapter, they might not all fit into the lamp fixture. And daylight sensors haven't worked well for me in the past, especially under a porch roof which limits the amount of light that gets to the sensor.

I don't really want to keep the porch light on all night anyway. There's enough light from the nearby street lamp for most purposes.

So I instead tried out a remote-controlled color-changing light bulb. I can set it to an orange-yellow color, and can turn it on and off with the included remote. But I found that the remote control has to be fairly close to the bulb to work, and it doesn't work through the house wall.

If there's someone on the porch whose face you want to see more clearly before opening the door, having to step outside with the remote to turn on the light isn't practical.

Then I started thinking about smart bulbs controlled by wi-fi. Wyze now has smart bulbs, so I bought one of them to try out. These bulbs can be adjusted between warm & daylight whites but not to other colors. Therefore I wouldn't put it on the porch and leave it turned on all night, as that would attract insects. But it should suffice for intermittent on/off porch use.

To control the bulb, one can use the Wyze app on one's smartphone. That should work through the house wall just like the Wyze cam does. But I'd prefer a simpler and quicker way to turn the bulb on & off.

Qiao had bought an Echo Dot a long time ago, but for whatever reason never set it up. Lately, I've been curious to try it out. If I were to keep the echo dot near my front door, I should be able to turn the bulb on and off with voice commands without needing to touch my phone or have the phone nearby.

Setting up the Echo Dot requires using the Alexa app. I'm not sure I want to install Alexa on my phone, because of all the permissions it requires. Maybe I could disable some of the permissions that bother me, before it gets a chance to download all my contact info and texts to the Amazon servers somewhere, but I'm not sure.

I wouldn't mind installing Alexa on the iPad as I don't have much personal info on it, but the iPad is v9, and Alexa requires v11.

So now I'm looking if there's a way to set it up without having Alexa on my phone... Per this page, it may be possible: Can I set up and use an Echo without having a Smart phone?

I got to wondering if this approach would still work when the internet is down but my wi-fi is still up. My voice would activate the Echo Dot... would the Echo send a command message directly to the bulb? Or would it send a message over the internet to the Wyze servers or to some IFTTT server, which would then control the bulb? I'm not sure yet. (For that matter, does the Echo need to send my voice command to a server somewhere, to decode it and determine what command I am giving? I think it does. Otherwise Amazon's servers wouldn't have recordings of your voice commands, but from what I've read, they do. That would explain this report where all of a home's smart devices stopped working during an internet outage.)

All this because of that cam on the porch, and I'm not even sure I like it out there. It's too easy for someone to steal or vandalize. Pointing down from the soffit, it's field of view isn't even very good. I'd really like to install a few more cameras outside in other locations, but those aren't as well protected and don't have as easy access to a power supply, so would require more work.

But still, it is some fun trying these things out.

Wyze keeps coming out with neat new things. They're working on an outdoor camera that will be battery-powered. That will make things like this a lot easier, maybe.

..

Update, 2019/12/09:
Yesterday I also mounted a Wyze motion sensor above the front door. That lets me get a notification on my phone (if desired), or a video clip to be saved to the cloud when motion is detected in that area. The cams themselves have motion detection based on analyzing the video stream, but that gets triggered too often to be very useful (from branches moving in the wind, cars driving by, etc.). The motion sensor is triggered by body heat, so should be more discerning.

I had already mounted a contact sensor on the front door a week or so ago, which also lets you trigger events.

So last night I realized I could set up an IFTTT (if-this-then-that) trigger so that when motion is detected, to turn on the light bulb for a few minutes. I could also include conditions to only do it when it is after sunset, or only when the door is currently closed.

Then I realized I could mount another contact sensor on the inside wall by the door, with another trigger set up for it, and thereby have the sensor be a pseudo-light-switch (to be able to turn the light on without first opening the door), controlled by me manually moving one half of the sensor away from the other half.

But only as long as the internet and wi-fi are up and working.

Update, 2019/12/12:
I have discovered that the Wyze app lets you set up simple rules/triggers, so having an ifttt.com account isn't even necessary. The rules can be like "when motion is detected and it is between 8pm and 6am, turn on the light" or "if the light has been on for 5 minutes, turn it off", and so on.

First big set of coincidences:

Yesterday afternoon I searched for "Who is Nurse Ratchett". Qiao calls me that jokingly sometimes, when I'm helping him with medical stuff such as after his surgeries.

It turns out that "Nurse Ratched" is a character in the movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". So I started reading about that movie and the book it was based on. I watched some video clips. I've probably seen the movie before, but I didn't remember it well.

I started watching this video about the book and movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BHR6xTmwC8
At 2:20, the video mentions that Ken Kesey, the book's author, took part in an experiment at his university. It was a covert experiment being done by the CIA, testing LSD on people; part of what was called "Project MK-ULTRA". The video says "And if you think it's shocking that the United States government would use its citizens as guinea pigs, look it up. It was part of a project, project MK ULTRA. Google it."

So I duck-duck-go'd it and started reading about Project MKUltra. Depressing stuff. The world sucks and has always sucked, don't you forget it.

(I didn't even think of it til just now, but Qiao rewatched Bourne:Ultimatum yesterday evening. That's a coincidence too, considering how it deals with covert CIA "behavior modification training -- which involved torture tactics and psychological manipulation to muddy agents' moral compasses.")

Anyway. Today at work I was listening to music on my phone, in random order like always.

This song came on: "Psience", by Psychophysicist, from the Album "Deepnet" (disk 2).
It's a long eerie song, with a small amount of speech; a man's voice recounting something:
"We had been really chasing a phantom, if you will, an illusion that the human mind was more capable of manipulation from the outside, by outside factors, than it is. We found out that the human being is an extremely complex thing. There were no simple solutions. We got trapped a lot of times with complexities and illusions that didn't exist. But you've just got to bear in mind that these were very strange times."

It sounded oddly like what I'd been reading about yesterday.

Sure enough. I've looked it up now, and the quote is attributed to Dr. John Gittinger - CIA Chief Psychologist 1950-74: The Rise of the 20th Century Mind Control Agenda

This is a clip of that part of the song, if you're interested:

Video title: VA - Deepnet
Posted by: Psychedelic Superbeast
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAxcOFOiSmI
Date posted: Sep 4, 2019

(That's the only clip of the song I found on YouTube. The original CD is from 1996. Someone posted it 5 days ago. What's the odds of that?!! This keeps getting weirder!)

Later, while driving home, I turned on the radio to NPR. This segment was playing:
The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'. It's about the person who ran MK-ULTRA!!!

..

2nd smaller set of coincidences (things breaking / not working):

1. At work, I accidentally dropped my phone from the desk to the carpet. The phone seems ok, but the audio cord for my headphones was plugged into the phone at the time, and its plug got bent. I bent it back, but a wire must have broken, as sound doesn't come out of the right channel anymore.

2. When I got home, that NPR episode was still playing, so I hurried inside and tried to tune the station on one of our radios. I couldn't get the station to tune in! I tried another radio and couldn't get it to tune in there either! I went back to the car... no problem tuning in there, but the segment just ended. Oh well. But why can't the inside radios pick up that station anymore? It used to be one of the strong stations!

I tried tuning the station on the FM Radio app on my phone. That works, but only when I'm holding the phone in a certain position.

3. I wondered if I could tune into FM radio stations on the TV. I think I've come across that option before, haven't I? I checked the channel list and TV menus and didn't find FM radio there. So I duck-duck-go'd how to get FM Radio on TV, and the search results mentioned apps.

Ah! I switched the TV to the Amazon FireTV input, which has apps on it. We don't use that input very often. But the FireTV box wasn't responding to the remote. Sigh. This always happens when we want to use it. I unplugged the box and plugged it back in. The remote still didn't work. I checked its batteries. They are dead. That's odd. Then I notice that the battery contacts in the remote have white powdery stuff on them too. ARGH. I hope the remote isn't ruined. Now I need to open it up to clean it up as well as I can.

I've been feeling fairly chipper today, considering I got less than 4 hours sleep last night. I should have gotten 6, but had trouble falling asleep.

.

Remember that big tree at work by the pond, which a beaver started chewing on over a year ago? The trunk finally was chewed all the way through. At first, the tree fell over onto a nearby tree and leaned that way for a while. Then it finally fell down into the pond. Within a few days of that, the grounds-people had taken it away. So much for all that work you did, beaver. I have photos; may post them one of these days.

The beaver (or beavers) have been gnawing on a bunch of other smaller trees too, and the small trunks get chewed through a lot quicker. One of the felled trees had nice bright green leaves, some kind of evergreen; I felt sad for the pretty tree. The grounds-people had removed it by the next day too.

.

I bought two Wyze cams to try out. They are inexpensive, and let you record 12 second motion-activated clips and store them online for 2 weeks, for free. You can view the clips from your phone, and you can configure it to notify you when motion is detected. The cameras can also store video to a micro SD card, and you can view the camera live streams on your phone when you are away from home. So far, the cams seem really neat. One drawback is that after each 12 second clip that is stored online, it doesn't save more until after 5 minutes have passed. But if you have the SD card installed and keep your home's wi-fi running all the time, after getting a notification, you can make a note of the time, and then go and view the continuous video recording from the SD card, all remotely from your phone.

I have had a few problems so far. A 32 GB microSD card works fine, but an old 4GB card doesn't seem to work. And when I turned off my wi-fi overnight, for some reason the camera stopped recording an hour later until I turned wi-fi on again in the morning. Supposedly from what I read, it is supposed to keep recording to the card even when the wi-fi goes out. I'll have to try that again.

[ Update: It happened again; this time it stopped recording half an hour after turning off the router and wi-fi. So maybe that's not supported after all, but I will check. ]

I'm not sure how good these would be for security purposes (if a burglar can get to them, they can steal the camera along with the SD card, and then the recording on the SD card won't do you much good.) But for remotely monitoring things, they seem quite neat. This is the kind of security camera I've been looking for, where you don't have to pay an ongoing fee yet still can access the video streams remotely, and get notifications and all.

Admittedly, I have been viewing the video streams and clips only when connected to wi-fi (both at my house and remotely), as I don't want to use up my phone plan's data. Between yesterday and today, just from my playing around with it, the app on the phone has used half a Gig of wi-fi data. If I were using the phone's data, I'm not sure how long it would take for the video and clips to load.

And then I almost went to work without my laptop. But luckily, I noticed before driving off.

.


Yesterday I wanted to play some internet radio through my stereo system's speakers, via the audio cable I usually use for that purpose. The cable connects the laptop to the equalizer. The equalizer connects to the receiver via another cable with phono connectors. The speakers are connected to the receiver's speaker outputs, which are the spring-loaded kind that you stick the bare speaker wires into.

I noticed how much white noise was coming from the speakers, before turning the music on. There was also an annoying intermittent rumbling sound. With the radio playing at a low volume, the noise is still audible.

So then instead of listening to music, I messed with my audio system for a few hours. In the process, I came across this term: audio nervosa, which seemed amusingly apt.

The problem seems to be the receiver's speaker connections, not the speakers themselves. I cleaned all the dust out of the receiver's case, but that didn't help. Now I'm using my older set of speakers, which have phono connectors, connected to the equalizer's main-out jacks. The receiver's tape-out jack is connected to the equalizer's audio-in jacks. The laptop audio cable is connected to the equalizer's tape-in jacks.

This way, the speakers are blissfully silent until I turn the music on. A down-side is that I can no longer turn the receiver's radio on with just my remote control; I have to walk over and turn on the equalizer too. Before, I wasn't using the equalizer for the radio.

Another problem is figuring out where to position these speakers. I had been using these to prop up the other speakers (which are smaller and don't have a flat top) up higher, rather than them being directly on the floor. As a temporary solution, I now have the left speaker balanced on an open drawer, to put it at the same height as the other speaker, which is on the same table as the receiver.

A more significant downside is that the receiver's volume control doesn't control the radio volume at all now, and it is fairly loud. How did I not notice this yesterday? Maybe I'll need to change things around again after all, or replace something, or get an extra volume control (amplifier?) box.

Or sheesh, just put it back the way it was to begin with. Maybe.



Update: I now had the idea to connect a cable from the receiver's headphone output to the equalizer's input, as that should be controllable by the volume dial. I'm pretty sure I had done it that way before. But today, I'm not getting any sound that way. Although the sound does work with actual headphones plugged into the jack, but only the left channel... because I'm using a mono 3.5 to large jack adapter instead of a stereo one.. where did I put the stereo one...

Update #2: All fixed now. Found the stereo adapter. Laptop connects to receiver's CD-In jacks. Receiver's headphones-Out jack is connected to the equalizer's Audio-In jacks. Equalizer's Main-Out jacks are connected to the speakers. The receiver's volume control (including the one on its remote) can control the volume for everything. I can even still switch between the laptop audio and the radio with the remote, like I was able to do before. The big speakers are now sitting on top of the smaller speakers which are on the ground; they do have a flat enough surface after all. And no static noise coming from the speakers, woo-yeah!

Pink azaleas:

My mom sent me a cassette in 1986, back when I was living in the U.S. with my dad, and she was in Germany. She spoke on it, and let several of my German relatives speak on it too during a family gathering over there, and then let it record in the background while relatives were chatting with each other. She and my aunt sent me a few such tapes during those years, and I likewise recorded and sent a few to them. When we ran out of things to speak about, we recorded music on the remainder of the tape.

I must not have listened to this tape in a long time. Six minutes into recording the first side onto my computer, the tape got stuck in the player. I managed to pull the tape back out without breaking it. I twisted the tape back into the shell. The reels weren't turning smoothly or easily, which is why it got stuck. The part of the tape which had been stuck was crinkled up, and I worried that it might get stuck again.

This page: FRUSTRATED by old cassette tapes binding my decks
suggests:

Try slapping the sides of the cassettes firmly against the palm of your hand (do it on both sides.)
This does help in many cases in freeing the layers of tape, and in my case I am talking tapes that go back to 1972.
If the rollers in the cassette are sticking, this could also help loosen them
Then after that, wind them through.

So I tried that. After slapping the cassette, the reels *did* seem to turn more easily. I then fast-forwarded and rewound the whole tape, and started the recording over again. This time it is playing fine.

There are voices on this tape from aunts and uncles who are no longer alive. I didn't even remember that they had spoken on the tape, and that I had any recording of them. What a precious treasure to find.

Update. Ok, while recording the 2nd side, towards the end, the tone started shifting between low and high. So I had to slap the cassette some more, but that fixed it.

Yesterday, I was inspired to continue the task of converting my audio cassettes to MP3 files. The longer I postpone it, the more the audio on the cassettes may degrade, and the more likely that the equipment I've been using to do the conversions, will break.

I had already converted all 26 of the cassettes that were official purchased albums. The remaining ones (45 to 50) have music that I recorded from the radio or which other people sent me. The former were simpler to do than the latter (which I'll call mix-tapes even though that term may not be accurate). With the albums, I simply recorded each side of the cassette onto the computer as a audio file, applied noise-reduction, then split the large file into a separate MP3 file for each song.

Right now I am recording the remaining cassettes to audio files, without yet doing any further processing on them. 15 cassettes are already done, leaving about 30 more. I could finish them in another week or two if I keep at it.

Then I'll eventually have to decide:
Should I keep each long 45 minute file, without splitting it by song? That is how I used to listen to them, and would keep the original experience. But some of the songs I really don't care to listen to anymore.

Splitting the files by song would require much extra effort. With the albums, there was silence between each song, and software was able to split them with minimal manual effort. My "mix-tapes" don't have the silences, and they have many more clips per side, all of which I'd have to manually split.

Once I split the songs, I'd be tempted to delete the ones I no longer care for, and to find better versions of the ones I still really enjoy. But the "lower" quality cassette versions of some songs still have a special nostalgic quality, which higher-quality versions simply can't replace. So I'll end up with multiple versions of those.

I think I'll do this:

Keep the full long versions of each cassette for archival/nostalgic purposes.
Also split them into individual files, and keep a full copy of those files just in case I ever want them.
For the remaining songs which I still enjoy listening to, put them in folders where my random-play MP3 player will be able to pick them up.
For the songs which I especially like and don't already have other versions of, see if I can find better versions online to purchase.

Sunday evening I pulled out my old Sanyo clock radio/cassette player (model M1950F - like the one in this video except for my AM/FM switch being on the side instead of on the back). The LCD clock display was blank. The button battery had gone bad, leaked, and corroded the battery terminal. I hope to clean it up and get it working again. It - how does one say? - holds memories.

Monday evening after getting home, I found that the cable modem was dead. A couple months ago, while researching my slow internet speed, I had disconnected the coax cable from the UPS and connected the modem directly to the wall-plug. That didn't make a difference, but the speed issues eventually went away, and I forgot about the cable. There was a storm Monday, and a lightning strike must have caused a surge through the coax. All the power cords were plugged into the UPS, and the UPS was even turned off, so the surge couldn't have come in that way.

Luckily, I had already bought a replacement modem when I was having the other issues. So I hooked it up, and called my ISP to activate it. But its internet connection didn't work. Later I found out there was an outage in the area, likely from the same lightning strike.

Tuesday evening, I tried the modem again. The outage had been fixed, and the modem worked, including the internet. But when I hooked it up to the router, the router's internet didn't work. The router must have been damaged too, even though it was still partially working.

Wednesday, Qiao bought a new router and hooked it up. Then we discovered that the printer wouldn't even turn on. It had been connected by an ethernet cable to the router.

So the surge must have come in through the coax into the modem, out through the ethernet cable from the modem to the router, out through the ethernet cable from the router to the printer, and damaged all 3 of them.

Moral of the story: Always keep *all* the cables protected, not only the power cords.

Also this week, my work laptop's battery, which had been "nearing the end of its usable life", finally reached the end.

I came across this cool video a few weeks ago, but couldn't find the source. So I wasn't sure if it was real or fake (as a few comments suggested).



It seems these flexible OLED screens have been around for quite a while, at least in research labs.

More coolness:







More info and news on OLED displays: oled-info.com.