greystar.org

http://www.nutsvolts.com/index.php?/blog/post/segways_puma_personal_urban_mobility_accessibility

http://www.segway.com/puma/

So I snagged a copy of the service manual for my Samsung HL-P4663W and followed the diagnostic steps liste din it and it led me right to the DMD board.  *sigh*  I should have just bought the service manual right off the bat.

So I dig around looking for a DMD board and find one for $368 with a $150 of that being a returnable core charge, so I’ about ready to order it and decide to poker around on avsforum.com’s forums a bit for some info and find a thread talking about the fact that you can get the entire light engine for around the same price as the DMD board.  I looked and guess what?  The light engine with a color wheel is $279, without the color wheel is $239.  The light engine includes the DMD board, optics and sometimes the color wheel (if you decide to order it with one).  It’s also a heck of a lot easier to install the entire thing as a single unit than deal with messing around with the DMD board and possibly messing up the alignment.

Anyways, I ended up buying the light engine with the colour wheel, because I can turn around and sell it to make a little money back.

Hopefully this will fix the damned TV and be the end of my troubles with it.

Well the ballast showed up today, no dice.

I finally did what I should have done in the beginning and got ahold of a service manual.  Going through the troubleshooting steps in it leads me right to the DMD board. The DMD board also happens to be the most expensive thing it could have been :/

I’m debating whether or not to bother with it.  It will probably be a few weeks before I buy one (if I do).  I’ve got to get the whole job thing sorted first.  Oh well.

A month or so ago I decided to build a HTPC (Home Theater PC) out of some of the spare computer parts I have lying around the house.  I’ve got the machine together and right now I’m running the Windows 7 RC on it using its version of Media Center, which is actually pretty nice.

One of my old machines came with an IR receiver and a remote, so I got the control set after mucking about with some software for a few days. I was able to get my Harmony 628 programmed using the remote that came with the IR receiver, so I can stick with one remote.

If you have multiple IR remotes right now and can afford it, it’s totally worth buying a Logitech Harmony to get rid of all the extra remotes.  You can program it to turn everything that you need for a given activity (DVD, TV, Music, etc) with the push of a single button. You can program it all from your PC (or Mac) with their software. It’s pretty slick.  I’ve had my 628 for about 4 or 5 years now and it’s still working great.

Now if I can get my DLP working again, I’ll have a nice large TV to watch all the movies that I’m currently ripping from my DVD’s onto the HTPC.  Hopefully that will work out, if not I’ll be stuck with my trusty old 27″ Panasonic Tau CRT that’s about 10 years old now, survived two cross-country moves, but it’s still alive and kicking.  Which is more than can be said for my less than 5 year old Samsung DLP.

Machine specs:

• Intel Pentium 4 3.2ghz Socket 478
• Some random Asus motherboard
• 2 gigs of ram
• An undecided amount of HD space, probably around 750gigs.
• ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (old school!).

So over a year ago my Samsung HLP-4663W (46″ DLP) went on the fritz and I just didn’t have the time, nor patience, to bother trying to fix it.  The set had the dreaded (and surprisingly common) “3 blinking lights” which could mean one of a few parts is bad. Recently I’ve decided that I wanted to try and fix it, so I dug around the net a bit and narrowed the problem down to four possible parts.

The first and most obvious was the lamp, I went ahead and ordered a new replacement lamp and afte rI ordered it I discovered the the lamp was lighting up, but only for about 5 seconds when you first power up the set.  Scratch that and it was too late to cancel the order *sigh*.

Next up was the color wheel.  I ordered one and replaced it too.  No go.

Today I found a decent priced used ballast for the lamp and ordered it.  It should show up sometime next week and hopefully that will be the solution to the problem.  If it’s not that means it’s the DMD board which runs about $350 (with a $150 core charge :/ ).  If the ballast doesn’t fix it then I’m just going to part the thing out and recoup some money off the parts that are good.

This is a place I’m using as a repository for my terrible writing.  You’ll find fiction and non-fiction stuff here (eventually).  Enjoy!

I’m just going to say how much my dog rules.

Dirk == teh cute!

That is all for now.