Feeling a bit disappointed as the travel router I ordered seems to be dead on arrival. It has been on the charger for around 48 hours now. The charging light is still blinking and the power button does nothing even when pressed and held for far longer than the manual indicates. It got quite warm when I first plugged it into the charger (an Anker multi-port charger that I use for most things that need USB power) but by 24 hours in it was at a reasonable temperature.

I’ve tried pushing the factory reset button and that does nothing. I’ve unplugged and replugged several times (and tried the power button when unplugged). When I plug it back in, the charging LED turns red and blinks quickly for a few seconds and then we’re back to slow blinking green.

I’m almost certainly going to send this back to Amazon at this point. I’m inclined to try an exchange as the feature set on the device really does meet my needs. I had been hoping to try this out with the setup I intend to bring along next vacation…and perhaps I will be able to with its replacement…

I’ll post when the new one comes in and talk about whether it works and how it performs…

Sometime since last winter, something heavy smashed the 240V breaker on the side of my portable generator. I’ve just spent some quality time trying to find a replacement. Home depot has nothing of the sort (no huge surprise). The generac website was a little helpful, but offered no clear way to order the breaker. I’ve sent a message to them using their ‘contact us’ link and I’m hoping they’ll be willing to help.

The worrisome bit is that their parts section lists the entire electrical

box as a single part number. I’m expecting that all of the wiring, outlets and breakers in there are going to cost much more than I’m willing to pay for just the breaker. If necessary, I’ll wind up in DigiKey or somewhere similar finding a breaker whose ratings are close enough and whose physical mounting options can be made to work. I’d much rather buy the right breaker from Generac if possible.

Continue reading Fixing my portable generator →

As of this weekend we’ve got the lights up on the house and yard. The Christmas tree is in the corner of the living-room. Lorna has decorated the house with all the various bits of Christmas cheer.

I still have a few lights to finish up on the lower front of the house. One string failed to light this year (led lights too) and we came up short on the far end of the house last year but just let it go. This year we picked up a couple more reels of lights to fix that.

Spent a chunk of the weekend replacing the in-law apartment water heater. It has been leaking quite a bit for a couple of weeks now. Not a huge problem as it is in the furnace room in the garage and the water runs into the garage floor drain but it clearly couldn’t go on that way forever.

Found that quite a few gallons of water had leaked out into the space between the tank and the insulation in the old heater. I wound up cutting a hole in the side with the angle grinder to let that water out before lifting it over the gas line to get it out. Glad to have that done now but it put off those last strings of lights a little.

Looking forward to having Alyssa back home for Christmas time. Lorna went out to Great Lakes fo a visit but I haven’t had a chance. Lys has grown so much since she joined the navy…I’m very proud of my girl.

I just voted and my polling place was hopping with a line around the building.

It was wonderful to see so many citizens out at 7:00 in the morning to cast their ballots. Hoping that we’ll pick someone who will be good for the country and emphasize the best aspects of the America I believe I live in.

Another weekend passed…more work on the house done. Office floor almost done…then on to the next item 🙂

SFB:

My Star Fleet Battles set is nearing complete update. I’ve got the core ships I should have and all of the important rules updates. I still have a few batches of peripheral stuff to pick up (Jindarians and such, unusual ships, omega). I’ll probably finish this up as I am interested in the new and unusual stuff. No idea when I’ll have time to go looking for opponents. Probably need to run through a few battles solo just to get my head back into the rules.

VR:

Lots of reading C# stuff over the weekend. Work related but likely to spill over into sandbox projects as Unity is C# based and seems to promise the smoothest path to simple VR coding (whenever I can find time to play with this). Got to dig into more JavaScript and Node.js stuff as well along the way. Interesting options for IoT type projects and such in there.

Basement power and networking needs to be dealt with after the upstairs floors are done. Once I’ve got power where I need it I can move the VR computer (and ideallly one other) down there where they’ll be more useful. I may wind up picking up new monitors for that area as the ones currently in play are old and dying. I don’t want to raid the back basement work bench if I can avoid it.

RPG:

Nothing much going on here. The one possibility that I talked to has gone dead. I’m assuming that game never made it to critical mass. I can’t see myself having time in the near future to run a game and I’m probably lucky that the game I might have joined as a player fell through…looking like I’ll be booked up for some months to come on various things.

Photography:

Also on indefinite hold. After the remaining house stuff gets done I’ve got a long list of other projects that need attention and haven’t gotten any in months. I may spend a little time working on England cruise pictures at some point, but I don’t really expect those to get post-processed until spring at the earliest. I’d love to seriously consider a 100-400mm L lens but if I’m not going to find time to use it, it really doesn’t make any sense.

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