An Experiment in LCD TV Repair

Recently, my wife’s grandmother’s completely awesome Phillip’s 47” LCD television decided to go all wonky.  Shipping it for repairs would have cost well over $100 with no guarantee of success, so she just went ahead and bought a brand new 50” LG TV with 3D support and all that good stuff.  She asked if I would like to have the old broken one to see if I could work on it and I said sure.

I got it back to the house a couple weekends ago and learned that the only real problem with it is that the backlighting on the left side of the screen was malfunctioning. With the help of a techy friend I took the back panel off of it, which is something I’d never done before.  I’ve fixed what seems like hundreds of computers, and even some other small electronics and video game consoles, but never a television.  Here’s what we saw when we got in there:

 

After analyzing everything for a bit, we deduced a few things.  The green board center-right is the main logic board and receptacle for all video input.  The tan board to its left is the power supply, much like a power supply you’d find in a PC except as a flat board rather than a box.  The large capacitors were a bit intimidating, so we were careful to stay clear of them.  The TV had been left unplugged for 24 hours prior to our opening it, but we still felt like it would be smart to not reach out and grab a giant capacitor.

We also determined that the two green boards on either side, partially obscured by metal covers, are the power inverters for the LCD backlight.  Some Googling told us that the most common problem with LCD screens’ backlighting is actually the power inverter boards, not the bulbs themselves.

I unscrewed the metal covering over the inverter on the right side (which lines up with the left backlight lamps on the front) and saw that it was marked “slave.”

 

The gray-brown cables on the bottom left seemed to carry power from the power supply board.  The black cable with the white plug on the right side carry power to the lights themselves.  And the white cable with the blue connector on the upper left runs directly to the other power inverter, which we confirmed was the “master” in the relationship. 

We further deduced that if the master were defective, all of the lights would likely be out, which wasn’t the case.  If the slave were defective, then only some of the lights would be out, specifically the ones powered by the slave, which was exactly what we experienced when turning the TV on.

I did some shopping around online and was able to find that part on sale for $35 plus $7 shipping.  It arrived after 4 days and my friend and I met back up, with yet another techy friend, and made the repair/replacement.  My dog even helped with the old board:

After the three of us (and the doggy) got everything back together, we plugged it in and hit power and BAM it works like brand new!  We got it moved to my game room and put to some good use:

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

I’ve now got the PS3, Xbox 360, original Xbox, Dreamcast, and SNES hooked up to it, with plenty more inputs just waiting for more consoles.  I’ve put in a couple hours of Deus Ex Human Revolution and love it on the new screen.  Can’t wait to play some more on it!

Now then, I need to do something super nice for my wife’s grandmother!

Windows 8 Developer Preview – It’s Kinda Annoying

Earlier this week Microsoft released a preview ISO of Windows 8 with some dev tools for developers to play around with.  This let’s them start building some hype while garnering feedback from the opinionated masses, like myself.  On the whole, I think I’ll like Windows 8 just fine.  The things I take issue with, which I’ll happily enumerate in a moment with illustration, are things that I can likely overlook or just get used to.  I don’t see anything though that makes me think I should jump from Win 7 to Win 8 with the eager anticipation that I had when leaping from Vista (which I consider far worse than WindowsME) to Win 7.

My biggest issue with Windows 8 is that I can’t escape the feeling that it was developed with these people in mind:

As a nerdy developer I feel annoyed by things that “dumb down” the experience for the masses.  It’s just patronizing.  What I want is an OS that feels like it was developed for this guy:

Because that’s pretty much how I see myself.  And I’m sure a lot of people will quickly argue that such an OS already exists, and that all I have to do is download [insert completely obscure Linux distro name here] and then set that up on a separate partition and then once I get the Bluetooth drivers compiled and working from this website [insert the scariest URL you’ve ever seen here], and run these 18 thousand scripts I’ll be in nerd nirvana.  Great. 

So I guess what I want is something that has the kickassery of Linux but the ease of use of Windows… WAIT! DON’T YOU DARE SAY IT!  I sensed you about to write comments regarding the MacOS and I want to stop you right there.  For the cost of a MacBookPro, I could buy two of my current Sony VAIO systems AND a cheeseburger.  If the MacOS would run on this hardware I’d have given it a shot by now.  But it can’t.  Because it’s so freaking limited.  Making it the most expensive consumer OS on the market.  Moving on.

Let’s get back to the point: Windows 8 is weird.  It rides the thin fence between mobile and desktop OS so tightly that I keep wishing it would make up its mind and fall off that fence, on one side or the other, and just be really good at being that one thing and leave it to another version of the OS to be good at the other… just like Win 7 and Win Phone 7.

Here are some of my more specific issues…

The lock screen that exists prior to your login is interesting.  It’s just like the mobile side of things and feels unnecessary on a desktop/laptop, but at least the lock screen is useful for something now I suppose.  However, it is limited in its use:

Choose up to six apps?  Six??  I want something like WidgetLocker on my Android phone, where I can just keep adding shortcuts and widgets and go crazy with it.  I have what is likely the ugliest lockscreen you’ve ever seen on my phone, and I don’t give a damn because it is functional as all hell!  Six apps?  Please.  With the screen real estate of dual monitors and multicore CPU I think I’d like more than six, dangit.

So no more Start Menu.  Instead I have this:

Great, now my desktop is exactly Win Phone 7.  It’s okay I guess- could definitely be worse- but feels weird to use with a mouse.  It scrolls horizontally, which isn’t the direction I scroll my mouse wheel to make it move.  Odd.  I do like though that all I have to do to get to the run/search functionality here is to just start typing.  That’s cool and a decent design decision.  Except that I use Launchy instead of search, which encompasses everything search can do and much, much more.  And I can’t use Launcy from this screen since this is all Metro and Launchy isn’t.  Dangit, again.

When I click on the IE 10 icon there on the upper left, I get a brief full-screen splash screen:

I would say, “DON’T EVER FREAKING SHOW ME THIS SCREEN AGAIN,” but I don’t have to worry about that because the likelihood of my giving IE 10 a second run is slim.  Chrome exists… so why does IE?  Also, this Metro version CAN’T RUN ANY PLUGINS.  Seriously, if Microsoft tried any harder to push me to use Chrome, they would have to fly Bill Gates to Memphis, have him install Chrome on every computer I touch, while personally telling me how good I look today.  That’s how much I feel like they want me to NOT EVER use IE 10.

Now if I right-click on one of those tiles on the Metro menu, I get a context menu at the bottom of the screen with its own sub-context menu:

Why can’t that white sub-context menu just popup on the tile where I clicked on it, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN WINDOWS HAS ALWAYS DONE?  Dangit.

I noticed that whatever app I’m in, even the desktop, moving my mouse to the left side of the screen shows me a thumbnail of whatever other process is running and acts as a shortcut to that app:

WHY?!?  What the crap is that about?  Maybe this one makes more sense with a touch-screen, but I doubt it.  Weird.

Now this one is kinda cool- in the new Control Panel there is a whole section for Send:

This lets you control what all apps get displayed as options for when you click a file and tell it to “Send To” a location.  I like that.  Reminds me of the “Share” options in Android, which I’ve always really dug.  Not bad.

Finally, since I have the “Developer” preview, This thing is loaded up with tech previews of Blend 5 and Visual Studio 11, along with this handy Windows App Certification Validator:

So this is what I run on my software to get it certified to add to the Windows Store.  I think I like this but I don’t have any code to test out on it yet.  I tried running my LaunchLater software on Win8 but it failed miserably.  I think I know what the issue is so I might code a fix for it and try again soon.  If I can get it to work, I’ll try it out with the certification kit.  Who knows- maybe I can get LaunchLater into the Windows App Store at some point.  Cool.

That’s about it for my first impressions.  It’s been fun to play with even if it has been somewhat annoying.  The issues I didn’t mention here I have attributed to being side-effects of running it inside of VirtualBox, rather than on real hardware.

So that’s it.  What do you think about it?

How I Upgraded to HDMI

Last week I upgraded my overly-complicated mixed cable setup in my living room to run almost exclusively off of HDMI cables, and now my wife and I are happier people.

WHY THE UPGRADE?

In a few months I’m going to be moving to a new house and my LCD living room television will be wall mounted.  All of my consoles will be located in either a media box in the wall under the mounted TV, or further below that in a cabinet.  To accommodate that arrangement, I need longer cabling, and preferably fewer cables in general.

Since HDMI is capable of HD video AND audio over a single wire, moving everything to HDMI seemed like the right path to follow.

WHAT’S GETTING UPGRADED?

I previously had a cable box (component based), an Xbox 360 (component based), a Wii (component based), and a PS3 (HDMI + optical audio based) hooked up.  The three component cable based devices were connected to a component switch box that was switched manually.

I plan on demoting my Wii to the game room in the next house, so the only things I want to connect to the TV are the PS3, Xbox 360, and the cable box.  All of them are HDMI ready. 

WHAT DO I NEED TO BUY?

Since I already owned one HDMI cable, I only needed to purchase the HDMI switch with three additional cables.  This gives us a short cable per device, and a fourth longer cable to lead from the switch to the TV.  The switch I bought can be found here.  It provides you with 5 HDMI inputs and auto switching between them.  It will even automatically switch back to a previous input if it detects a feed coming from it after you turn off your current input device, such as switching back to the cable box after the PS3 is turned off.  The switch also comes with an option AC adapter that let’s you control it via remote.

HOW’D IT GO?

It went great!  Should have done this a long time ago!  I’ve been using this setup for over a week now and not once have I needed the switch remote, or even pressed the Select button on the switch.  I was able to get rid of a ton of unnecessary wiring and replace it with much simpler, cleaner HDMI cabling and a switch.

AND FINALLY, HOW MUCH DID IT COST?

The total cost of the switch as well as two 3’ HDMI cables and one 15’ HDMI cable was just over $21 on Amazon.  Not bad, huh?

– The pile of cabling and component switch box no longer needed. What a mess!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

– The nice shiny new switch with its swank HDMI cables!

Holy Crap, People are Using LaunchLater

In its first three months of living on Codeplex, LaunchLater saw just over 70 downloads.  Then early last week, on the same day that I released version 1.4, a blogger made mention of it in an article about various apps that achieve the goal of deferred startup application launching.  Soon after a post on a Brazilian site also mentioned LaunchLater and even tweeted a link to the post.

In the week that has passed since then, I’ve seen over 100 new downloads occur.  It really makes me wish Codeplex updated its analytics more frequently so that I could see where some of these clicks are coming from.

To respond to this influx of users, I spent some time over the weekend working on several features that will add polish to the product.  I’ve tweaked the UI in several places and I’m adding functionality for the app to passively alert the user when a new version has been made available online.

This new version should be online later this week, assuming I get the free time to wrap its feature set up.  Seeing the number of downloads jump so high so quickly is quite motivating.  I’m finding it very rewarding to see that my efforts spent on this pet project might actually be helping many people to organize and streamline their experience with their PC’s.

Going Open Source at the Memphis .Net User Group

Last week I enjoyed the honor of speaking at the monthly Memphis .Net User Group meeting.  I talked primarily on the considerations involved in managing and coding an open source software project.

A portion of my talk was a brief presentation of my LaunchLater application and the use I made of the MVVM pattern in its user interface.

It was great fun getting to present to the group and I hope that I get to do it again some day!

If you’re interested, the PowerPoint slides from the talk are attached here.

The FCC vs. Comcast, and the Digital Economy Bill

Two very bad things have happened to the Internet in the last few days.  Instead of going into detail on either of them, I’ll simply use this post to bookmark places where others have gone into detail.  Let it be stated though that the Liberated Software blog is officially unhappy with both of these news stories.

The FCC lost a battle to Comcast; however, there is a good chance that by winning this battle, Comcast has lost the war.  Confusing, but possible.

http://broadbandbreakfast.com/2010/04/the-bottom-line-court-decision-on-comcast-vs-fcc/

And, while the country was sleeping, or possibly watching Dr. Who reruns, the UK government allowed this travesty to pass:

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/04/08/doublethink-the-digital-economy-bill-against-the-digital-economy/

Moving From Windows to Ubuntu

Ah, the Great Experiment begins!  I’ve decided to see just how feasible it is for me to switch from being a hardcore Windows with some Linux on the side, to being a hardcore Linux user with some Windows on the side.

What prompted this decision you ask?  A number of things.  First, I’m learning the lessons of day-to-day use of a new operating system.  This makes me think about the ways that I use my computers from a different perspective.  I will probably begin appreciating certain little things that I always took for granted even more. 

Another reason is that, as with most people these days, I’m not convinced Vista is the worthy successor to the great name of Windows XP.  I don’t care who you’re loyal to in the computing world, its hard to argue against XP being one of the most reliable and usable operating systems ever, and definitely Microsoft’s finest work.  Vista, even after receiving the service pack treatment, is still a memory hog that is only usable once User Account Control (UAC) is disabled.  Ubuntu offers a similar security measure as UAC, but is far less obtusive.

A third reason is that I like going against the grain.  Whenever I’m around network administrators, I feel like a developer.  Whenever I’m around solely developers, I feel like the network administrator who just happened to learn coding.  Now I work for a company that is a Microsoft certified partner, and I feel that I should learn Linux.  Apparently it is just in my nature to be contrary to my surroundings.  The grain here has gone Microsoft, so now I must go open source!

For anyone interested in doing the same, or offering me any much appreciated advice, I’ll list out what I used in Windows and the counterpart application that I’m using in Ubuntu.  This is definitely subject to change.

Microsoft Office -> OpenOffice

Microsoft Outlook -> Thunderbird (this might change to Evolution depending on how much I really like Thunderbird)

Visual Sudio 2008 -> MonoDevelop (for .Net dev) and Netbeans (for Ruby on Rails)

IE/Firefox -> Firefox, of course

Media Player -> Totem

Photoshop -> GIMP

MSN Messenger -> Pidgin

Now most of those were probably obvious.  I didn’t list out the rest of the apps I use regularly because most of them are cross-platform.  Azureus, for instance, is my choice BitTorrent client regardless of OS.

I should also note that I’m running Wine, the not-quite Windows emulator, to run a few other small windows apps such as WinAmp and WinRAR.  So far so good, although things that require the .Net Framework won’t run inside Wine.  MindManager being the one I miss most.

I’ll keep posting on this topic as my exerience increases and I hope that someone out there is interested enough to offer suggestions for further downloads!

My Trip to Microsoft: Day 4

Last night we left the lab earlier than ever:  8:45!  We had dinner at Red Robin (again) and consumed sufficient quantities of beer.  Good times were had by all, and many jokes were considered far funnier than they actually were.

This morning we met with Sunil Agrawal, one of the geniuses behind the storage engine in SQL Server.  He is hands down one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with.  His knowledge and passion for what he does is quite inspirational.  He talked to us about the complex issues of Read-Committed Snapshot Isolation in SQL Server and made it sound so simple and obvious.  If you’re interested in this subject, or any other SQL Server related info, his blog is located here.

My boss gave a 40ish minute talk on our company, what we do, how we use technology, etc.  It was well done and reflected great on the company.  Go David!

This afternoon we got beer in the lab.  Lots of it.  Unfortunately, I just took a large dose of Sudafed to fend off my sinus infection.  Blast it all. 

 Now we are off to eat dinner somewhere fancy that I’m not currently sure the name of.  Details to come tomorrow!

 

Back From Microsoft 2008 Launch Event in Memphis

Just got back from the Visual Studio 2008 Launch Event hosted by the Memphis .Net User Group.  Despite not winning a free copy of VS 2008, I was able to come away from the event with more than just a free t-shirt. 

Demos of WPF, LINQ to SQL, Framework targetting, Office Add-Ins, JavaScript debugging, AJAX enabling, and many other fun new technologies were conducted. 

There are many more launch events happening around the country through the rest of the summer so do register to attend if at all possible!  This experience was a first for me and definitely will not be a last!