This is how the patio turned out. Not too big or fancy, but not too small or plain.
We bought those resin chairs for our first house, so they must be at least thirty years old. A resin table we had was damaged in the move, making the metal table less than 25 years old. The umbrella was purchased the day the picture was taken.
To hide the view from under the deck and porch I ordered some curtains that are intended for outdoor installation.
Looking for a way to keep the curtains from sliding back and forth in the wind, I came across these table cloth clamps.
Hidden behind the folds of the curtains, they’re perfect for positioning the panels and holding them in place.
Plan B for having access to my cable TV DVR from the porch was a total flop. This was Plan B.
I had my doubts about wireless HDMI when first considering it seven years ago, before choosing to buy the OTA TiVo instead, and those doubts have been confirmed. Based on hours of experimentation, in my opinion wireless HDMI is suitable only for a line-of-sight connectivity in the same room.
Communicating through a wall or floor doesn’t work, even when the total distance is only ten feet. Worse, the 5 GHz range of frequencies that wireless HDMI uses for peer-to-peer communication, without benefit of a hot spot or router, can interfere with a 5 GHz Wi-Fi network. Yesterday, while the transmitter and receiver kept trying to establish a connection, devices would disconnect from my Wi-Fi extender. Once I realized that was happening I gave up, disconnected the wireless HDMI transmitter and receiver, and put everything back in the box.
Having been a few years since I returned something to Amazon, today was my first time using the self-service return process at an Amazon-owned Whole Foods. First I initiated the return online and downloaded a QR code JPG to my phone. At the store kiosk I scanned the code, then put the box in a bag and slapped on a label the machine printed before dropping it into the kiosk.
This evening I received a text message confirming the return has been processed, with the refund coming within 7 days. By coincidence, this week’s New Yorker has an article about the business of returned purchases.
That evening I heard my Frigidaire dehumidifier making a terrible sound. Running downstairs to check it, the fan wasn’t running and the thing was extremely hot. The power button didn’t work, so I pulled out the power cord. After letting it sit overnight, yesterday morning I plugged it back in but didn’t hit the power button, and it did this.
The buzz wasn’t as loud as the noise that caught my attention, but it wasn’t a good sound. After pressing the power button the display flashed “88” and the fan spun up, but the compressor was dead and the buzzing persisted. Purchased nine years ago, I’m just glad it didn’t catch fire. Obviously, it should be one of the recalled units.
But is that particular make and model and serial number on any recall notice, past or present, I could find? Nope, of course not. So I put it in the trunk of my car and paid $40 to drop it off at the local trash and recycling center.
A replacement I ordered from Lowe’s should be here on Monday.
Elsewhere downstairs, a Goldstar (pre-LG brand) dehumidifier I bought in 1989 for our first house continues to work. It clanks when turning on and off, but when running it does what it’s supposed to do.
My entitled retired Boomer white guy problem of the moment is that I have recorded a lot of Turner Classic Movies since it went HD on FiOS TV last September, and not all of them deserve firing up the video projector. Wanting to save hours on the very expensive projector lamp, that lasts “up to” 2000 hours, for movies that are worthy of the “cinema experience,” I’ve been looking for a way to watch the DVR on the porch TV.
Motorola QIP7232 DVR
One option would be to go back to what I originally had on the porch, a FiOS set top box with a tuner that can control the DVR over the MoCA coax network. When TCM was in SD, the monthly fees for multi-room media and STB rental weren’t worth the extra cost.
Seven years ago I replaced the STB with a 4-tuner TiVO Roamio OTA DVR with a directional outdoor antenna. That setup continues to work well, with occasional picture breakup, especially on UHF signals, depending on the wind and weather. Once the Watch TCM app became a reliable platform for streaming I was happy, but now that old cable DVR is filling up.
Quite a few of the now-discontinued FiOS STB units are available on eBay for next to nothing. I bought one for $35, delivered, and hooked it up. Following that was a very interesting conversation with a woman in customer support at Verizon.
Motorola QIP7100 Receiver/Controller
She saw the box immediately, and her screen showed the serial number had been registered to someone in Baltimore, but it had never been activated, and the customer had never returned it. I asked about assigning the box to my account for activation, and the answer to that question was, “it’s complicated.”
I was told that Verizon has absolutely no interest in the box as an asset. If it had been returned they would have either reassigned it to another customer, or thrown it away, depending on whether or not the model was discontinued by then. “They don’t even bother with remotes,” she said. The upshot was, my box was considered to be stolen property, because it hadn’t been returned to Verizon.
The “stolen property” issue was only one of the problems, with the other being the box is a discontinued product. If I want a STB for multi-room media, the only way to get one would be to scrap my existing setup. What Verizon’s business office wants the customer support reps to do is get customers like me to agree to a new plan, swapping out not only the TV hardware for the current models, but the Internet router as well.
The new plan that would cost at least $50/month more, and in the process I would lose all of the movies on the DVR, and I may as well say bye-bye to my pesky old landline. As a bonus, the WiFi extender, that is working so well, definitely won’t be compatible. They have a new one I can buy. I’ll have gigabit/second Internet speed, but that isn’t a big selling point for me, because 100 Mbps is plenty. I told her I’m not gonna change, not for a while anyway, and for emphasis I pulled out the old, “I’m a retired person” sob story.
So what about my original idea of activating the illegal, discontinued box under my existing plan? I know it’s compatible with the DVR. “I see you have been a customer since 2006,” and there was a sincere effort at rewarding my loyalty. She was nice to attempt registration, but she was locked out of the option, and her supervisor tried an override without success.
A last-ditch suggestion was that technical support has the ability to register and activate discontinued products as part of a troubleshooting process. They aren’t supposed to do that to reassign stolen gear, but maybe if I contact them directly, I might reach someone willing to do it. If successful, I would be charged the monthly multi-room media fee, along with the hardware rental.
Not wanting to bother pushing on this string any more, I am looking into trying another option. This post is getting long, so I’ll explain it in the next one.
