BillGrady.com

Sharp VL-Z3 Dew Repair

Posted by Bill under How-Tos, News

Back in 2004 I posted about how hard it was to find the manual for my Sharp VL-Z3 MiniDV camera on the Sharp website, and how much better the Canadian branch of the Sharp corporate machine was at providing that kind of information. It’s now time to add a little bit more to the Sharp info pile: here’s a confirmed fix for the deadly “Sharp VL-Z DEW Message” problem.

On just about any video camera out there, you will occasionally see a “DEW” warning in the viewfinder when the sensors think there’s too much humidity present for normal operations. The Sharp VL-Z series cameras can take this to an illogical extreme: the dew sensor goes nuts and it always thinks there’s too much humidity for normal operations. Thankfully, there’s a solution to this issue and it does not involve boxing up your camera and sending it in for repair… If you’ve got a soldering iron and the realization that you’ve nothing to lose, you can repair your camera in about two minutes. It worked for me!

 UPDATE - An unseen side-effect of my “fix”… my standby function no longer works! I left my camera in the on position after playing a video, and when I came back 5 hours later my camera was hot to the touch and wouldn’t even load a tape. Buyer beware!

UPDATE - Bollocks! My dew warning has come back, and I’m shopping for a new camera. (January 14 2008)

D-Link DWL-121 Is Mac Compatible

Posted by Bill under How-Tos, News

If you’ve never had the pleasure, let me introduce you to Woot.com. In their own words, “Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap“. My kinda store!

Last week they featured a two-pack of the D-Link DWL-121 802.11b USB wireless adaptors for $9.99 + $5 shipping. The catch is that the DWL-121 isn’t an officially supported product for OSX, Linux, or Windows… it’s a special one-off adaptor D-Link made for a home entertainment system. It just so happens that you can hack the Windows driver for the DWL-122 to make the DWL-121 work with XP.

On a whim, I decided to install the OSX DWL-122 driver on my iMac at work (running 10.3.9 server). Lo and behold, the thing works like a charm! Sooo… don’t let anybody tell you the DWL-121 is WinXP only, because they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Your 1991 Honda Accord Transmission And YOU

Posted by Bill under How-Tos, News

To be certain, when I’m a crusty old man and I’m reminiscing about the days of old before there were flying cars and transporter beams, my 1991 Accord will definitely NOT come up in conversation. It is not sexy, nor fast, nor is it cool in a geek kinda way… it’s just a car that gets from here to there. A few weeks ago it actually stopped on its way from here to there, and I’m gonna post this so that all you other Accord owners can benefit from my mistakes.

When the “S” light on your dashboard stays on and your transmission won’t shift, don’t believe that greasy gear monkey behind the counter at the repair shop when he tells you your Accord needs a $2200 transmission rebuild… you probably just have a faulty Transmission Control Unit. And then, if that same grease monkey tells you a new TCU is $500 from Honda, drive that car back to your house in low gear and replace it yourself. Admittedly, I had to mail order my part from a junkyard in New York, but the price was right ($50 + shipping) and it took ten minutes to put the thing in. Now my Accord is as good as it ever and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I (kinda, sorta?) STUCK IT TO THE MAN!

Mandrake Linux, LG Cd-Roms, & You

Posted by Bill under How-Tos, News

Even though I don’t drool at the mouth about it, I am a Linux user. I’ve installed (or attempted to install) Redhat, Fedora, SUSE, Slackware, TurboLinux, and a few different iterations of Mandrake. Mandrake has been the most annoying, due to the well-publicized issues with the kernel destroying LG CD-Rom drives. What is not so well-publicized is the way to fix one of those drives that has gone bad. The LG site has a diagram and plenty of broken Engrish text files that are supposed to guide you through the process, but I had to search for two days until I finally found what I needed on mandrakeusers.org:

It sounds dangerous, but it worked for me. All I can say is thank you open-source community and thank you Google!

HP ScanJet 5370cse Driver Install Tips

Posted by Bill under How-Tos

I purchased a HP5370 scanner at OfficeMax recently for only $29! It’s a few years old and HP will probably never update the driver again, but it works just fine with my current configuration and that’s what is important right now.

So, here’s the tip: When trying to install the drivers for Windows XP, you gotta boot your machine into SAFE MODE first. Then you can run the installer and everything will operate properly!

Update (June 1 2005): The last time I reinstalled XP, I left the scanner plugged into the box during the install. It was correctly identified and the drivers installed perfectly without any intervention from me at all.