I’ve rocked Samsung Galaxy phones since they made their appearance in the marketplace, and I’ve always protected them with those awesome Otterbox Defender cases. I tend to keep phones a long time and this one’s no exception. My S-8’s over 4 years old, my first with a “non-removeable” battery. I figured the battery would be its weakness but still charges easily and coolly and runs through my longest days with plenty of charge left over so never gave it much thought.
This particular model of Defender case has a weak point. The plastic catch that attaches the case to its holster tends to break. There are two of those attachment points so when one breaks, I tend to call it in for warranty. I use the unbroken side until they send me a new unit, usually just a few days.
The stage set, the pictures show what I found as I un-cased to collect the Defender’s serial number.
The S8 battery had swollen enough that it forced the back of the phone right off! You can see it’s even broken the retainers that hold the Defender’s inner clamshell together.
In case you didn’t know, damaged Li-Ion batteries can be dangerous! They’re inherently unstable to the point that it takes active circuitry – built into the pack – that manages them. Thermal runaways happen. A cute way of saying that they can catch fire or even explode.
I wasted no time in replacing the handset.
What’s next? Part of me just wants it outa here. It’s got no cash value, too old. Throw it into recycling? But it’s a good computer! I may try replacing the battery myself. They’re available. It’s already 90% open – the hardest part, according to the Internet. If that goes well it’ll become a dedicated screen for the drone controller.
While I ponder it’s in a thick-walled ceramic box outside the house, nothing nearby but concrete.
If you haven’t already, meet Imperialstar Wiley Raz-Ma-Taz.
Good ol’ Wiley’s been around since April 21, 2007, making him 5,032 days, or 13 years, 9 months, 9 days old today. Not too shabby!
Wiley on June 1, 2007 – 42 days old
Wiley on December 20, 2020 – 4,993 days old
Every day’s an adventure, eh Wiley?
Longtime readers may recall that Wiley’s been on Prozac for about four and a half years. There’s more about that here and here. He’s still doing quite well with his meds, thanks for askin’.
Today I’m introducing something a little different – at least for me. ‘Slices’ are another way of highlighting subject areas in a way I think will be better than Categories or Tags can do.
The first slice? The good ol’ Eudora email client.
This slice is off to a pretty good start with plenty more to come on that topic. Other slices – interests, I suppose – are in the works. Let’s see where it takes us.
The other day I was invited to participate in a related class-action suit involving Google+. This is excerpted from the Summary of Litigation section of the email:
Google operated the Google+ social media platform for consumers from June 2011 to April 2019. In 2018, Google announced that the Google+ platform had experienced software bugs between 2015 and 2018, which allowed app developers to access certain Google+ profile field information in an unintended manner.
Read more at the website that’s been set up for the lawsuit. I might stand to win as much as twelve dollars. That’s a little bit less than the lawyers are guaranteed to win. I haven’t decided but it’s likely I won’t bother.
WordPress 5.5 released the other day. It’s always a mad scramble to make sure that all the customer sites are operating as they should. They are. For some reason I found myself I turning my attention to my own little bit of space out here…
And here we are. So I was messing around with a back-burnered mini-project I had in mind – adding a collection of Eudora-related stuff… and for just a few minutes a bit of content went ‘live’ quite unintentionally.
Tip o’ the lid to Peggy for being the first in my inbox!
So I guess I’m committed now. I need to flesh this thing out a little bit more but it’s on the way now, promise. I’ll try to make the first Slice worthwhile.
It all started with this picture. It had come around with some bit of advertising or another and reminded me – a lot – of a 1950 Chevy my dad drove when I was a little kid. I took the picture to social media to see if anyone could provide a proper year for the picture. The consensus was 1942, before production stopped for the war.
Chevrolet estimated to be 1942. Maybe you’ve got a better idea?
The 40s estimates make perfect sense. The starter is on the floorboard, for one. Dad’s had a chrome button on the dash. Before relays got cheap enough the floor switch was a necessity. Of course, the floor switch was actually a lever arrangement that actuated a ‘Frankenstein’ switch behind the firewall that could handle the amperage needed to run the starter.
So one day dad and I were headed out somewhere. The car was backed into the driveway, facing the street. WTF – or the 3-4 year old me’s equivalent of WTF – I thought, and asked if I could drive. I guess I figured it’d be easy, facing the street and all. Way easier than backing out. To my surprise he said ‘sure’ and dropped the keys in my little hand.
He got out, walked around, got in the passenger side while I scooched over behind the wheel. I could barely reach the pedals, perched on the edge of the seat.
I put the key in the ignition, like I’d seen him do a brazillion times. One hand on the wheel, the other stretched toward the magic starter button on the dash… and pressed.
And nothing happened.
I pressed again and again, but nothing happened. Major disappointment.
He probably said something to the effect that maybe I wasn’t ready quite yet. We switched seats again.
He gave the key a twist, hit the starter button, and the engine fired.
And there I learned that you had to twist the damned key, not just stick it in the slot.
Dad wasn’t worried, and rightly so. There were no safety interlocks or anything of the kind in that car. Anyone competent with a manual transmission knows you always leave it in gear when parked. Had I worked the key properly and hit the button there would have been a jolt of movement that likely would have brought my finger off the button. Even if not, there’s no way the starter motor would’ve been able to fire the engine under load. I didn’t know what a clutch was, I couldn’t hardly reach the pedal, let alone press it to the floor.
I never did get to drive that car. Like I said earlier, I was only around 5 or so when dad got rid of it.
First thing you notice – it costs to park. “Welcome to America, land of the free. That’ll be five bucks to park.”
Kidding aside, those rectangles in the crown are windows and if you climb up there you’ll pass right by ’em. They’re really tiny, about a foot by a foot and a half. And they open!
Anyway, the climb from the pedestal to the crown is made via a double-spiral staircase, one up and one down. The steps are about a foot and a half wide and a railing that just about meets your right hand with your arm hanging straight at your side. On the steep nose-to-ass climb you can see how the statue is constructed, the iron armature, the attachment points to the copper skin. It’s awesome. It’s a quick walk across the crown and then you’re on your way down.
Incidentally, they stopped allowing public access to the torch long, LONG before my time. Probably a good thing. That trip from the shoulder up the arm isn’t much more than a ladder and the walk around the torch is only about 7 feet or so in diameter. The railing around the torch is much shorter than comfortable, too. (I didn’t climb it, of course, but the original torch was on display in the pedestal for a long time. I’ve touched it. Today it’s in a museum somewhere, I think.)
The descending climb is where gets interesting. It’s as steep as the ascent. Remember where that railing is? Roughly mid-thigh? Without an ass in your face you clearly see all the way down to the pedestal floor with nothing but a railing not much more than knee-high to stop you. Each steep step requires strength – and some faith.
I took Pam up there once, “It’s something you just gotta see!”
Ya gotta understand, Pam doesn’t do heights. Uh uh. Not at all. The ascent wasn’t too bad but the descent had her seriously tensed. She made it through the day but the next day she couldn’t stand up. And stairs – which we had in the house – were damned near impossible without literally crawling.
It was several days before Pam’s legs were sort of returning to normal but one knee hasn’t been the same since. We call it her Liberty Knee, pronounced li-ber-tee-nee with the emphasis on the third syllable. Ask her about it sometime.
So it used to be you could just show up, park, take a ferry to Liberty Island and go on up. Today you need to book a reservation. There’s probably a hidden screening process involved, thanks to 9/11.
Absolutely worth it, though, to visit this iconic symbol of freedom.
(Written as a Facebook comment August 16, 2019, in response to someone’s post.)
Flip-flops are pretty much de rigueur footwear for Florida. There are exceptions, of course: work boots for lawn work, riding boots for motorcycling, sneaks for walking/running  are good examples that come to mind. But I take my flip flops kinda seriously.
Back in July of 2014 I wrote about the de-lamination failure of a pair of favorite flip-flops. The gist of the article lamented how the Florida environment seems to destroy just about everything. The failed footwear had lasted about eight years before succumbing, and Pam ordered replacements which arrived that day. I expected ’em to last a similar amount of time.
Flipflop failure. Inset shows failure point, earlier duct tape hack for comfort.
They didn’t.
July 27 they fully died. I say fully because the between-the-toes part of the right foot stretched had some and became uncomfortable sometime last winter. Pam addressed that emergency with a commodity plastic pair – I think she spent a dollar. (Still, I wrapped the stretched between-the-toes part with a bit of duct tape, which helped the comfort just a little bit. Â Then I dedicated them to poolside use – they were too new to throw away.)
So, let’s see… Retail cost was $59, on sale for $29.99. Sales tax, Land’s End has nexus in Florida, $2.28. Shipping was $8. Total cost was $40.27. They arrived July 16, 2014 and, setting aside my duck tape crutch, they totally failed July 27, 2017 – that’s 3 years and 11 days. That brings the cost-of-ownership for those suckers to a whopping twenty-five and a half cents per week!
Contrast that to the earlier pair, which were $30.95 (with tax and shipping) and lasted 7 years, 11 months and 10 days. Only 7 and a half cents per week.
Lets put that into perspective, you bought a new Harley for thirty large in 2006. Eight years later you bought the same bike and the cost had jumped to a hundred. And the motor blew up three years later.
Planned obsolescence? Degradation of quality of manufactured goods over time? Product abuse? Or just Florida killing stuff?
This is a story about Hydra. Hydra’s a box, a computer, that up and died the death that old machines sometimes do.
Hydra, dead, stripped of all innards save the CPU and motherboard, awaiting transport to the parts shelf. Click for full-size image in a new tab.
I’m not 100% certain why Hydra’s dead, but pulling everything except the CPU still won’t elicit so much as a measly POST beep from the aged motherboard. I meter-tested the power supply. (I had another box on the bench for a PSU replacement, so I briefly stuffed the new PSU into Hydra just to make sure.) There’s nothing left to die except the mobo or CPU!
“So what,” I hear you thinkin’, “who TF cares about yer old box?”
Well, I do.
See, Hydra’s served the house in various capacities for a long, long time before retiring to the un-insulated sun room by the pool deck – most definitely an unfriendly environment for computers. The moisture, for one: Florida’s humid. The there are the temperature swings; in winter it can drop to near freezing and closed up in the summer it might reach 115F – or more. Environmental extremes have been the story of Hydra’s life. Finally, Hydra’s kinda remarkable in that it’s one of the oldest processors that Windows 10 will run on: the AMD Athlon 64 3200+.
So yeah, it’s worth taking a few minutes to write about little Hydra’s uncomfortable life.
Dex (left) & Reptar, circa 2002, about four years before Hydra.
For that we have to go back to Monday, October 16, 2006. That’s the day I walked into a local Comp-USA (remember that name?) with the idea of upgrading the house servers. At that time there were two. A more-than-10-year-old Pentium Pro box named Dex running Win2K Server, and a slightly newer Pentium II box named Reptar doing file server duty. Dex and Reptar were simply running out of gas.
I wanted a 64-bit CPU, a couple of GB of RAM with room for some future expansion. Remember, memory was considerably more expensive than it is today. I wanted the ability to use my existing IDE drives plus some SATA ports for later. I wanted a PCI bus. Overall, just something a bit more modern, something that would run VMware so I could segment the family’s workload.
Plus assorted support stuff like a cheap case, power supply, optical drive, and so on. Came to about six hundred bucks. Sure, I could have done better online but WTF, that’s what retail’s all about; getting it now. I assembled and IPLed the box that very afternoon and Hydra took up residence in the dusty, dark basement. Right next to the furnace. So Hydra’s twenty-four seven life began.
Hydra survived much abuse. The second phase of the basement refinishing project comes to mind. The drywall work deposited a coating of dust on Hydra’s innards that called for a weekly blowout to keep it from burning up. The un-insulated NJ basement was a harsh home.
Over the years came more memory, a couple of hardware RAID cards, more drives, and still more drives. That little case became dense and heavy. And ugly, as I cut more holes for fans. Yeah, it got loud, too, but in the basement it didn’t matter.
Win2K Server gave way to a bare-metal hypervisor for a while. Fast like shit through a goose, but tricky to administer. Bare-metal gave way to Linux. Hardware RAID gave way to software. The years passed.
In December 2012 we moved to Florida. We unceremoniously tossed Hydra into a U-Haul trailer with the rest of the stuff we didn’t trust the movers to handle and pulled to its new home.
Environmentally the new network closet was an absolute step up. But Hydra screamed like a jet on full afterburner with all those drives and fans. In the old basement it didn’t matter but the closet’s just off the office, quite distracting…
By the end of the first quarter of 2013 Hydra entered a much-needed semi-retirement. The replacement, named dbox, was a quad-core box from the parts shelf, with way more memory and fewer, but higher capacity drives. By then all the server roles were running as virtual machine guests. The migration was super-fast and super-easy.
In the garage, Hydra rested on the parts shelf before being called upon to support a Facebook project Pam had launched. I don’t really remember exactly when that began. Hydra was much quieter, stripped to a single drive running Windows 7. We shoved the headless case under the healing bench near the door and Pam ran her project from her Windows desktop, logged in using the Remote Desktop Connection tool. It wasn’t the highest performance configuration in the world but it got the job done.
Without the benefit of a proper UPS poor Hydra suffered a new peril: power glitches. We got used to looking for the power light under the workbench as we passed. If it was dark anyone could thumb the power button and go about their business.
That arrangement lasted about a year. Pam’s project wound down and Hydra went back into retirement.
Meanwhile, in the real world Windows 10 was getting legs. I’d come to like the Tune In Radio app. One can only take so much country and classic rock from the local stations and I’d had my fill. I wondered… could a Windows 10 box and Tune In Radio bring superior tunes to the pool deck? Was there any spare hardware around that could run Win10? Microsoft took great pains to exclude older hardware, even while offering free upgrades. Would Win10 run on Hydra’s CPU, now approaching twelve years since its introduction?
It turns out the answer was yes! Well, there were issues to overcome along the way, but yes.
A Win10 license costs more than the budget for this venture, which was exactly zero. Microsoft was still offering free upgrades from Win7 so the plan was to follow that path. Hydra had a Win7 Pro 64-bit OS from Pam’s project so we got that upgrade started. The several-gigabyte download took forever over the crappy ADSL connection. Then the upgrade failed.
That’s how I learned that Hydra’s Athlon 64 CPU doesn’t support the CMPXCHG16B instruction. This instruction, commonly called CompareExchange128, performs an atomic compare-and-exchange between 16-byte values. And 64-bit Win10 (and 64-bit Windows 8.1) requires this instruction.
CMPXCHG16B isn’t required by a 32-bit Win10. The path became clear. Install a 32-bit Windows 7. This meant giving up any installed memory over the 3.5 GB mark. Fine. Get Windows 7 activated. Install all the service packs and patches. Finally, upgrade it to Win10. Remember that crappy little error-prone ADSL connection? That, along with the lengthy downloads and general slowness of the ancient hardware… there went a couple of days. Thankfully it didn’t need much attention.
But it worked!
And that’s where Hydra lived out its days. Providing great radio out on the pool deck. Enduring temperatures from near-freezing to well over a hundred degrees.
The evening of May 15, 2017, I attempted to kick Hydra to life to collect the latest Win10 updates. I thumbed the power button, and heard it starting up as I walked away. Later I noticed it had gone down. Hydra never booted again.
A few interesting observations…
Hydra began and ended life on a Monday. (Watch out for Mondays.)
Hydra ran ten years and seven months. 10-7. If you remember the old 10-codes the cops and CBers used to use, 10-7 means “out of service”.
Hydra ran 24/7 for most of its life. If we assume about 9 years of total running life, that works out to about three-quarters of a cent per hour against its original installed cost. Absolutely worth every nickel.
Hydra died on its side, on the floor, in an overheated room, alone, behind the bar. A noble death.
And that’s where today’s story ends.
Maybe you’ve got an old AMD Athlon 64 3200+ floating around in your parts bin? Maybe you’d like to give it a new home? If it resurrects Hydra then it’s mine and I’ll give you a nice, fat mention in this story AND a link in the sidebar. If not, I’ll send the chip back to you with my thanks for a noble effort.
But wait! What about the tunes out on the deck? It just might be resolved. Well, at least some preliminary testing seems to show that it can be resolved with a little bit of creativity.
So that part of the story needs to wait. But I can promise you that if this scheme works it’ll be even weirder.
It’s been more than three-quarters of a year since I wrote about medicating one of our resident felines. Yes, Wiley’s done well and continues act like his old self – thanks for asking! His weight’s dropped about a quarter pound from a year ago. Our vet raised an eyebrow at that change, “cats his age usually gain and gain,” but I think it’s because he’s much more relaxed. That, and the two-year-old almost-kitten gives him a run for his money. Wiley recently turned ten.
Anyway, I ran into a situation the other day that calls for some comment.
It was time to renew Wiley’s prescription. I buy a 30-tablet bottle – the quarter-tablet doses last 120 days. But when I cracked the seal something was different: these tablets were noticeably smaller and lacked the usual blue coating.
I first checked the veterinarian’s label. It was correct. I needed to see the manufacturer’s label beneath. Over-labels are notoriously difficult to remove, I suppose to prevent abuse, but with patience I was able to peel back label to see what I needed.
I learned that the origin of this latest bottle was India and not the usual Israel. (The cost was $2.10 less, too.)
The label told me that per-tablet dose hadn’t changed. But the tablet mass was clearly different. Now I needed to re-weigh and re-calculate my capsule fills. Here’s where it got weird.
I won’t bore you with the 30-tablet list, but the variance between tablets quickly became clear. The smallest and largest measurements were 0.099 g and 0.107 g! Tablets from Israel were way more consistent, tablet-to-tablet.
The average worked out to 0.1023 g, yielding a quarter-tablet dose of 0.0256 g. This would be near the lower end of the capabilities of my scale: 20 grams with milligram resolution.
I’m pleased to report that my first 12-day compounding run worked out perfectly. Finished capsules are less full than usual, naturally.
But I’ll still be bringing my feedback to the vet with my next refill.
Wiley’s only been using the new batch for a few days now so it’s too early to tell if this change will have any effect on him. It should not, but you never know.
Pam and I had gone to the local pizza place for some takeout. In typical “I’ll buy, you fly” mode, Pam drove the F-150 with me in the passenger seat. She parked head-on by the front door and waited while I ran in for the goods.
It was just past closing time. Staffers killed the lights and ran out the door behind me.
Pam selected reverse and backed out, then pulled the lever for drive, hit the gas – AND THE TRUCK SURGED BACKWARD!
There wasn’t much room in the lot so she maneuvered to the curb, occupying about three marked spaces, and killed the engine.
It’s dark, beginning to rain, maybe three or so miles from home, hot food in the back seat, and we’re hungry. I called the kid for a lift home. We’d eat and think, then come back. Maybe the rain would pass.
The console lever felt sloppy, disconnected, I suspected a mechanical issue like a linkage or cable had worked its way loose. The console lever has a history. I removed the plastic shroud and felt around as best I could in the darkened cab; nothing felt out-of-place and my earlier hack/repair felt intact.
The kid soon arrived. We locked up and left to eat.
Sure enough, a bit of Internet searching turned up lots of similar failures! The most common issue came down to the cable-end detaching from the transmission lever. We returned to the truck armed with a good flashlight and I crawled under for a look. Before you ask, yes, the rainwater had pooled underneath…
Now it was clear that the cable-end was no longer attached. By manipulating the console and transmission levers it was possible to reattach, but when the console lever moved the cable end fell right off. The press-fit retention was no longer retaining!
I figured we could get the truck home, though. That’d free up parking for the restaurant and make for more comfortable work. The safety interlock only allow the truck to start in park and I could manipulate the levers to do that from beneath. With the truck started I could move the transmission lever into drive while Pam applied the brake. Then I’d crawl out she could drive home.
Pam was less than thrilled with the idea. But she did it. She probably pressed that brake pedal almost through the floorboard while I was under the truck fiddling with the transmission lever, engine running!
Cable end at top, transmission lever at bottom. The white plastic bit captures that knob.
The Root Cause The cable end is a roundish half-bowl of plastic molded onto the semi-flexible metal rod that extends from its sleeve. In the picture you can see a white plastic insert fitting in the black bowl. The transmission lever has a protruding machined knob that’s captured by that bit of white plastic.
Failure occurs when the white plastic insert no longer captures the knob.
The cable assembly is not adjustable. The length is exactly what it is. That’s important because…
When the console lever’s placed in park – that’s how the truck spends much of its time since being manufactured – there’s much linear force being applied against the transmission lever. By that I mean if you select park and slip the cable end free of the transmission lever (easy to do, now that the part’s failed), the cable end springs out extend a good 3/8″ past the transmission lever. You cannot put it back in place without manipulating the console lever positions, the end-to-knob alignment is that far off. So of course that 29-cent bit of plastic will fail eventually! It’s designed to fail!
The Repair The cable assembly – part number 4L3Z-7E395-CA for my 2004 unit – is available on Amazon for about $48. I don’t have a shop manual – that’s another story for another time – but it looks like it could be replaced in a couple of hours. Beer optional.
Obviously, a dealership could handle the repair. I heard that runs around $300-$350, including parts.
Ascension Engineering’s current location, under construction when Google Earth grabbed this shot.
But let me introduce you to Ascension Engineering. They produce a line of replacements for those little white pieces of plastic – apparently it’s a common failure mode across a wide variety vehicles, not merely Fords. The parts sell through their website, BushingFix.com. And business is apparently pretty damned good – Ascension Engineering’s principal relocated to some considerably nicer digs between May 2015 and March of 2016…
Shipping origin. Click for detail.
Y’know, $25 is a lot of money for a bitty bit of plastic. (Update: I learned, when sending a link to this article to the manufacturer for review, that the price is now reduced. My luck, right?) Okay, there’s design, tooling costs, manufacturing, but any number of Chinese outfits will do all that. Probably including the engineering design, too. It seems likely that they already manufacture those little bushings for the auto manufacturers. That Mr. Smith, he’s one smart cookie!
Screw it. I ordered a kit. There was sales tax, we’re both in Florida. And shipping was, I thought, a little high at just under $6 for USPS. The total cost was $32.29. I showed up at my door in a few days, shipped from Charlotte, North Carolina.
The cage-hack. See text for features. Click to enlarge for detail.
But First, An Interim Hack A couple of weeks before the order and permanent repair, a simple hack was necessary to keep the truck on the road. A truck’s a useful tool here in rural Florida. There’s trash and recycling to haul, stuff like that.
I hacked up a little cage from (what else?) coat-hang wire – easy to work with, yet stiff enough to enclose the cable end.
It’s got some nifty features. First, it’s a cage. It’s solidly attached to the transmission’s shift lever and doesn’t contact the cable or its end except where it absolutely must, to prevent the thing from slipping off the knob. That contact is minimized by a custom thrust plate constructed of softer plastic. (Don’t be fooled, the thrust plate is from a plastic storage bin. We use the bins as high-walled litter boxes for our feline residents, and this is the material cut out to form a door.) Notice the bend in the thrust plate, and the cutouts so the cage retains it.
The hack would likely outlast the truck. But a replacement part was on the way.
The Replacement Bushing It arrived in about a week. Here’s what $32.29 bought me:
The package, as received, followed by the individual parts and instructions. It’s actually well-thought out and about as foolproof as it gets. Click for a larger image.
Three bits of plastic: the bushing itself plus two more that served as press-blocks. Click to enlarge the image and see the instructions. Leaning way towards foolproof, I’ve gotta say. It took me longer to remove my hack than it did to install the replacement.
Debris in my cable-end cup. The rear of the truck is the right side of the image. The cable presses rearward when the transmission is in park. Click to enlarge.
Part of the install involves digging out any old bushing parts from the cable end cup. I used a carbide-tipped scribe and it cleaned up in a few seconds. Here’s a shot of what was left in my cup before that step. Pretty disgusting. But what’s clear as an unmuddy lake is how the linear force of sitting in Park had basically ruined one side while the other remained basically unworn. Ford’s non-adjustable setup is designed to fail. It’s only a matter of time.
Bushing installed. Click to enlarge.
I assembled the sandwich of plastic bits and used a pair of Channellock pliers to give it a squeeze. I chose the Channellocks because of the adjustable jaws but I think a pair of ordinary pliers like those found in the average person’s tool bag would have done the job just as well. You’d need pliers, though, it’s a bit much for fingers alone.
Repair complete. Click to enlarge.
The rejuvenated cable end mated to the transmission lever with a satisfying click. Then I exercised the console lever. It felt great.
Notice in the completed repair image that there’s a slight gap between the cable-end cup and the transmission shift lever. This tells me that the replacement bushing is the proper size for the job. If the knob sat too deep then the two parts would rub, wearing the cable-end cup.
So How’s It Holding Up? It’s been a few months since all this went down and so far, so good.
No issues, no complaints, the repair feels as tight as ever. How long will it last? Hard to say. Ford’s designed-to-fail assembly of the subsystem remains unchanged. What’s a worse environment? New Jersey winters or the Florida heat? Time will tell.
A long time ago having one’s own photo gallery running on the web was a thing, it’s not so important today. Mine was on the old Gallery3 platform but that hasn’t been supported for several years now.
I finally got around to moving it to Coppermine, software that’s still supported.
On the way I purged a bunch of albums. [shrug] The remaining stuff is mostly nostalgia and inertia. You can have a look if you want.
I can only think of one good reason to maintain a personal gallery these days. It’s for those times when you need a permanent URL to an image for one reason or another, and want to manage those images efficiently. It seems likely that I’ll move most of mine somewhere else eventually. But you know how that word – “eventually” – tends to work.
I picked up this skull ring in a New Hope, PA shop in August 2005 and I’ve worn it daily ever since. It’s an attention-getter with mass and warmth that only solid chunk of silver can deliver.
Skull ring on my gnarly meathook. It stares at me. I’ve worn this for almost twelve years now, the little dings give it character. Click to enlarge in a new window or tab.
This sucker weighs a ton. I’ve got take care for my desktop is glass and yes, I’ve already chipped the glass.
The ring originated in Hamburg, Germany. I’m told that it’s identical to the ring Keith Richards has been famously wearing pretty much forever. Here are a couple of shots – decide for yourself.
Looks pretty darned close to me, but I’m not makin’ any claims!
I have another skull ring that’s been with me even longer. (If you know me at all then you know that if something works I tend to stick with it.) I can’t remember exactly how long I’ve had the ring. But I do clearly remember the motorcycle I was riding at the time and that dates it solidly from the summer of 1980.
My oldest skull ring, acquired in 1980. It was definitely not new when I found it at the famous Englishtown (NJ) flea market. I’ve never, ever seen another like it. Click to enlarge the image in a new window or tab.
The ring was already old when I bought it. Didn’t matter, it was solid silver and fit perfectly.
In the 37 years I’ve worn this one I’ve never seen another like it. The nearest I’ve come to any kind of story is through a nurse that worked at a gym I joined in 1986. She commented that the ring looked exactly like one worn by her father when she was a little girl in California.
Go ahead, click the image for a much-enlarged look. Have you seen another ring like it? If so, I’d love to hear from you.
Back in 2013 I wrote about how my 2004 F-150 stranded me with an R203 relay failure. Since then I haven’t gotten any closer to a cause or solution. I’ve periodically replaced the relay as needed. But I’ve got a few more observations to add.
The DTC codes reported by the in-dash diagnostics (Engineering Mode) have meaningless meanings. D900 is just a general communication fault, not helpful, like “syntax error”. D950 is apparently an instrument cluster issue. Both make sense. No power to the PCM will tend to inhibit communications. No PCM data means the instrument cluster will be data-starved despite being powered up. Duh.
When running, the R203 relay runs HOT. You can hardly keep a finger on it.
It’s not necessary to replace the R203 relay as soon as it balks. In the beginning, simply removing and replacing it will often get it working again. After a while, stronger ‘persuasion’ is needed. I’ve gotten good at pulling the relay, giving it a couple of raps on the pillar, and jamming it home – even in the dark. Eventually the relay requires replacement.
The part of the relay that fails is the energizing circuit. A completely failed relay seems physically distorted by the heat over time. I haven’t been able to correlate this to long trips – we don’t use the truck that much – but it wouldn’t surprise me. A cross-country trip involving all-day use might be troublesome. Conclusion: there’s a high current draw on that circuit somewhere. I doubt it’s the relay itself, too many parts have been in there. Maybe the fuse panel itself?
Ambient heat worsens the problem. In winter (like Florida has a ‘winter’, right?) the failure doesn’t happen as often. Leaving the kickpanel off helps extend life. Â I’ve considered sandwiching the relay with Peltier devices, maybe something like this. Yeah, that’s fixing the symptom and not the cause, but WTF.
That’s about all I’ve got.
Maybe someone out there has the Ford shop manual pages for the fuse/relay panel? And/or the wiring diagram page(s) for the PCM power relay circuit? (2004 Ford F-150, SuperCrew, 5.4L V8, automatic transmission.)
Whoa! Not sure how it happened, but a key file went missing – or, more precisely, became empty – the other day. The problem rendered all but the front page inoperable.
Gallery3 platform but that hasn’t been supported for several years now.
