Our coffee grinder had stopped working. Now that for me is a near-emergency situation demanding repair. This is the grinder, brand “Hamilton Beach”
the dead grinder
September 13, 2015
Fixing a Hamilton-Beach Coffee Grinder
January 13, 2013
How to Replace the Serpentine Belt in a 1996 Dodge Caravan / Plymouth Voyager 3.8L V6
Recently I had to replace the serpentine belt in my 1996 Plymouth Grand Voyager LE. These belts used to be called “fan belts” in olden times when they used to mainly drive the fan, and sometimes are also called “accessory belts”. This same van. Pretty much the same vehicle as a Chrysler Town and Country or Dodge Grand Caravan of the same era. Mine has the 3.8L V6 engine. Belt replacement procedure is apparently similar to what is needed for the 3.0L but the 2.4L version will be different due to a different belt tensioner and different accessory pulley layout. “Serpentine” is a good adjective for the belt in the 3.8L since it takes a tortuous path around no less than 7 pulleys. And yes, the first three people aware of this repair all immediately thought of this great flick, re Serpentine! Serpentine!. (more…)
September 17, 2012
Harvesting and Re-using Lithium Cells from Laptop Batteries
For more than a decade, I’ve been using a series of HP and Compaq laptops and as a result, I had accumulated a pile of expired, apparently dead batteries composed of lithium-based cells. I decided to resuscitate a couple of the old laptops for a project in Campbell River, and needed a couple of working batteries. Rather than buy new ones, I decided to crack open a few of the old ones to see if they still had any working cells that I could re-use. (more…)
December 27, 2011
Avoiding WordPress login hackers
Lately in my server logs I’ve been seeing a lot of attempts to hack into WordPress. The hackers appear to have automated means of working well-known exploits such as to timThumb.php and phpMyadmin, but also I’ve seen persistent efforts to do brute force login attacks using a big password set. A lot has been written about the exploits and patches exist for them that you can find elsewhere, but the simple way I avoid the most common brute force login hackers out of the gate is to not even have the well-known wordpress login script wp-login.php visible. (more…)
I have a vp215 that isn’t completely getting all the air out of the bag now. I spoke to AVY…