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moronic capitalist forces
Saturday, July 14 2007
This morning I tried to repair my Vaio PCG-Z505JE with the rework station described in yesterday's entry, but I found that the dead eight pin surface-mount F731 was held by a weird high-temperature solder, so I was forced to use the heat gun. This allowed me to successfully remove it and install a replacement delivered from Jameco Electronics. Unforunately, though, there was more wrong with the Vaio's motherboard than I'd suspected, and in the course of trying to find out what the other problems might be, I accidentally shorted something with a multimeter probe and incinerated a surface mount resistor of unknown value. That pretty much marked the end of my investigation. That particular model of Vaio had been of a very convenient size and shape, with a twelve inch screen and an ultra-slim body, one lacking any removable media drives. I don't need a big-ass 14 inch screen to show me 1024 by 768 pixels, and I don't need a fabulously fast processor. All I need is lots of memory and a big hard drive, and I want it to collapse away to nothing. The only computers in the same league with that Vaio are some of the leaner ThinkPads. Generally, though, there doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for (and thus supply of) small laptops here in the land of the McMansion and the home of the Hummer. People want to make absurdly grand displays with their laptops, even if it means pulling a muscle (possibly one they don't even have!) carrying them around. I fucking hate the moronic capitalist forces at work in this country; I much prefer the ones that operate in Japan and Europe.
I took some time today applying metallized tape to some of the exposed rubber and foam insulation associated with the hydronic solar panels up on the roof, since I know from experience that oil-based materials break down in ultraviolet light. The foam had already acquired a strange surface texture from the exposure to date. The panels have been very effective at collecting solar radiation for the past two weeks, ever since I fixed a valve-opening anomaly that had resulted from a wire that had broken loose in the relay-based "solar controller." This anomaly had caused the panel to try to heat the boiler (which is off for the season), and since the boiler, as a large cast-iron mass, is a very effective heat sink (one that can, through convection, offload surplus heat to its own chimney), the panels had been perplexingly weak in heating household water.
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