Category: Stuff

Angle grinder

Post mortem for la máquina

I rarely throw away anything that can be taken apart, without taking it apart. La máquina actually had a few challenging bits, and I had to cut apart a bit of a plastic fan to remove screws, so it remains a mystery to me as to how that part of the thing was assembled.

The gear assembly with bevel gears that change the rotation 90 degrees. Quite remarkable to imagine designing or manufacturing things like this.

And this clever spline. The rounded bit goes into the rounded indentation on the shaft, protruding a bit, and the gear slides over it, so that it has to spin when the shaft spins.

Once assembled, it’s held in place by the gear it mates to. OK, enough of this. I must have something more important to do….

Angle grinder, burned out

Cutting a plastic barrel in half to make planters, I noticed the angle grinder (almoradora here, called la máquina by Mexicans) was slowing down. I also noticed pain in a fingertip that I couldn’t quite place.

Turns out it was heat, and moments later I saw a bright flash and smoke.

After 12 years, la maquina is dead. Long live la maquina!

A first – changing a light bulb

I have lived in ten houses in the last 35 years, four rented and six owned. Today was the first time in 67 years on this planet that I have had to change a refrigerator light bulb. I had never even considered the idea before. I thought, Isn’t that strange? until I realized that, at 11-½ years, this is the longest I’ve lived in one house continuously since age 15. And in the last 35 years, of course, with an average of 3.5 years, by far.

We had less memory then

Though we’ve had Mac Minis for almost ten years, I only today discovered they have a slot for an SDXC memory card. I have some of those somewhere, I thought.

Yikes! 16 megabytes? That must be from our first digital camera 20 years ago. Each would hold exactly three photos now at 10 megapixels.

I was reminded of the 128 megabyte flash drive I ran across recently.

Not really sure why I hang on to these things.

Tech, yuck

I decided it would be a good idea to switch computers with my wife. Long story.

When she couldn’t log onto her Facebook account on the cloned machine, I decided to clone it to my old Mac Mini, which required Setup Assistant, which required a series of terminal commands, to see if that would help.

It might have. Depends on Facebook doing something, not that I’m holding my breath.

I don’t think I want to go through this again any time soon. Any of it.

128MB???

Seriously?

I bought a refurbished Mac Mini 2014 without realizing it is utterly dysfunctional with the latest Mac OS – 4 MB of RAM, not upgradeable, slow hard drive. I’m moving back to Linux, so need to burn a USB stick to install. My wife has several in a drawer so I just grabbed all of them.

128 megabytes – seriously? This must be 20 years old.

Lost and found

AHA! After inexplicably losing the gas cap for our lawnmower in the space of 15 meters from the garage to the lawn (the driveway was torn up, but we scoured everything), I was dismayed to find that an essential part of the weedeater had also gone missing. Again, I looked everywhere.

Though I couldn’t imagine any reason it might have ended up apart from the machine in the shed of our little country property, today I felt compelled to check there, even being quite wet after a dog walk in the rain. I almost didn’t find it, for some reason several feet beyond my little work table in the unlit shed, lying on the dirt floor.

But … AHA!

Deadphones

I don’t use them often, and it’s been a while, but when I tried to listen to music with these noise-cancelling JVC headphones, there was sound only on the left. I tried three different devices, sent an email, received a reply with a toll-free number, called it and described the problem.

Sold in 2005, they are now a “legacy” product, and JVC doesn’t repair headphones anyway, they replace them if necessary. So there.

They won’t be replacing these. I bought them in April 2019 at the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Alabama.

For $3. They were great.

Until they weren’t.