Category: Tech

In the Pratt Cave

Now that I’m using the Hoopla library app in addition to Kindle, I wanted an e-reader downstairs in my mancave reading spot. What about carrying the Fire HD10 tablet downstairs then back up to the kitchen? Nah. Something bigger than my phone is needed, but not that big.

Wait. What about the Lenovo Yoga 8-inch tablet that saw me through many trips to Arizona?

Retirement Man on the Go

I put the tablet away almost five years ago, after system updates ended with Android 6, and it slowed down to the point of being useless. Does it have enough life left in it to run a couple of reading apps?

After all this time, when powering it up, the battery was at 63%! Unbelievable. Once connected to WiFi, it started taking a lot of Google updates, including a system update. Whatever it was, Android 6 remained.

Eventually, the updates were done, and I was able to install the two apps I cared about. Hoopla complains about its updates requiring Android 7 and higher, but downloading and reading books is working.

One more piece of otherwise electronic waste has been forced back into service! This is nice, but not enough for me to reconsider my boycott of future Lenovo purchases. I’ll only do that if there’s a way to wake up the touchpad on my Yoga i7 laptop PC.

Return to Downtown and Back to Mono

Andrew at Parlogram talks about one of the most significant Pop records of all time. Petula Clark’s “Downtown”.

It was a record that everyone of all ages loved hearing. This video of “Downtown” was made by somebody who knows his Sixties-era mono-mix 45 rpm singles. He played it with a mono Ortofon cartridge.

Andrew demonstrates the difference a quality, lateral-tracking mono cartridge can make for purists of original, mono-mix Sixties records.

As I Used to Say at Work…

… “let’s swap all the tires until we find the flat one.” With “tires” being an expression for whatever the not obvious cause was of a technical problem.

That’s the situation I’m in right now. The power company sent a notice yesterday, warning of possible outages, due to high wind. So, I wasn’t surprised this morning to see there had been two of them. But then I saw that the router was offline.

Power was off, not only in the office, but throughout the finished half of the basement. Checking the power panels in the unfinished half, it was easy to see that one of the circuit breakers had popped. Resetting it once, twice, three times, didn’t work. So, something must have shorted out due to a power surge.

The first thing to do was see if Internet service could be restored. With a very long extension cord, I connected the office gear to a test outlet next to the panel. Success! That put me back online. Would the circuit breaker still refuse to reset?

Yes, it did. So, where’s the problem? I disconnected everything else, and tested the breaker again. It held! Yay!

Now the question is, what shorted out? I’ll test each outlet and, assuming they’re all good, reconnect everything one by one, to see what pops the breaker. But not right now, because I have a dentist appointment to fix this damn broken tooth.