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Grex > Agora56 > #63: the near future of networked homes? | |
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| Author |
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| 25 new of 290 responses total. |
tod
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response 105 of 290:
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Jan 27 19:13 UTC 2006 |
re #102
The free section of craigslist tends to do the same thing..give away TV's and
monitors
The reasoning behind it is that usually these are broken items which cost you
money to properly dispose of.
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keesan
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response 106 of 290:
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Jan 27 20:02 UTC 2006 |
Kiwanis does not give away free TVs, we do. We find them at the curb. This
one only needed the power cord replaced. Jim spliced on a plug end instead.
One time he found a TV/DVD player at the curb, with a little note from the
garbage collectors saying they could not take it for free. So he took it home
to fix and was really disappointed that it already worked. I use it to watch
library DVDs.
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nharmon
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response 107 of 290:
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Jan 27 21:42 UTC 2006 |
This response has been erased.
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nharmon
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response 108 of 290:
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Jan 27 21:42 UTC 2006 |
What do you do with TVs you find on the curb that are too broke to fix?
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tod
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response 109 of 290:
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Jan 27 21:56 UTC 2006 |
Hook them into Jones the dolphin.
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keesan
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response 110 of 290:
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Jan 28 00:31 UTC 2006 |
We don't take home TVs from the curb normally, just if a friend wants one,
which only happened once and that one was fixable. The cut cord was a
giveaway.
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gull
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response 111 of 290:
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Jan 30 04:42 UTC 2006 |
Re resp:98: I once replaced a 1990 RCA TV that had already died with a
1980s Sylvania one that still worked. (This was in about 1996.) I
find that newer TVs give a better picture but the build quality is
lousy. RCA, in particular, has apparently forgotten how to solder
properly.
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keesan
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response 112 of 290:
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Jan 30 14:04 UTC 2006 |
Lots of the TVs donated to Kiwanis get fixed there by soldering some bad
joint.
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nharmon
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response 113 of 290:
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Jan 30 14:25 UTC 2006 |
What happens to the ones that can't be repaired?
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keesan
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response 114 of 290:
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Jan 30 16:04 UTC 2006 |
They get put behind the dump truck. I don't know where they go next. The
unsellable or unusable computer monitors and computers get sold at 5 cents/lb
to someone who reuses or recycles them. THe printers go in the dump truck
along with books and floppy disks and cables. (We recycle our own cables as
copper, and books as paper, and printers we spend 30 min taking apart into
unrecyclable plastic, and recyclable steel, copper and aluminum).
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marcvh
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response 115 of 290:
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Jan 30 19:15 UTC 2006 |
Those prices would make me very concerned about whether the un-sellable
monitors are being properly disposed of. Normally it costs more money to
properly deal with the hazardous materials in an old monitor than you can
get out of recycling and/or salvage.
On my own front, I had to have a Comcast service call over the weekend
for a signal outage issue. Over the course of analysis I discovered
that the ground loop isolator I put on my cable TV line is responsible
for introducing ghosting and other signal degredation, and the amplifer
I put on the line (to try to reduce the degredation) seemed to be
over-driving my cable modem. The service tech wanted to remove them
both, but unfortunately that re-introduces a ground loop and the famous
60 Hz hum.
This is on a setup where everything is relatively new and is done
"right"; the electricity and cable TV both enter the home at the same
point, and both are properly grounded to the same point. Unfortunately
something still causes a loop; I guess it's a mismatch in impedance
and/or resistance, I'm not an EE so I was never totally clear on the
point.
It appears that the only cost-effective solution is to lift the ground
on my amplifiers, which solves the problem perfectly but is a bad idea.
About the only other thing I can think of is trying to add some
shielding around the isolator in the hope that it will lessen the degree
to which it's allowing OTA to leak into my CATV signal.
Anyway, the lesson of all this is that the future of home networking is
lots of annoying conflicts. I consider myself somewhat above-average in
terms of the amount of time, money and knowledge I'm willing to bring to
the table and yet I still feel stymied. So, in the future, everything
will work together, except that it will have little niggling problems
that make it all come crashing down.
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tod
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response 116 of 290:
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Jan 30 19:29 UTC 2006 |
Are you using your water lines for true ground? I'm assuming if you have a
newer home with proper fuse box wiring then you are but what about the loop?
Is it wired to an AC outlet ground or water pipe?
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rcurl
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response 117 of 290:
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Jan 30 19:59 UTC 2006 |
I also had a Comcast service outage over the weekend. I eventually had to
shut everything down and bring them back up in the order cable modem, WiFi
router, and WiFi adapter. I didn't contact Comcast, but this is what they
had suggested on previous outages. What causes Comcast outages?
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keesan
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response 118 of 290:
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Jan 30 20:03 UTC 2006 |
A friend of ours thinks he has to get a dsl line ($20/month plus $77 for the
DSL modem) so his wife can use the phone. What is the cheapest cell phone
service he could get instead, for light use?
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tod
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response 119 of 290:
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Jan 30 20:05 UTC 2006 |
7-11 Speak Out
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kingjon
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response 120 of 290:
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Jan 30 20:07 UTC 2006 |
Re #118: I have a Tracfone, which is something where you buy only the minutes
you need, though you have to keep it activated by periodically buying more. I'm
not sure how much the phones themselves cost, since I was given mine by a
coworker of my dad's. If your definition of "light use" is as low as mine
that's probably best -- I've probably been on the phone maybe forty minutes
since I got it in August.
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marcvh
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response 121 of 290:
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Jan 30 20:26 UTC 2006 |
Both electicity and cable are grounded at the entry point, not using any
water pipes. But I'm hardly surprised that there are other leaks to ground.
Re #117, if shutting down your modem and restarting it fixes the problem,
then I don't think Comcast would consider it an outage. An outage is
where you do that several times and it still won't work.
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keesan
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response 122 of 290:
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Jan 31 04:07 UTC 2006 |
What does the Tracfone cost?
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gull
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response 123 of 290:
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Jan 31 06:55 UTC 2006 |
I have a ground loop problem with my cable TV, too. I'm not sure what
to do about it. The problem comes of having a computer as part of my
home entertainment system, since the computer is grounded through its
power supply and the cable is grounded somewhere else.
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kingjon
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response 124 of 290:
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Jan 31 12:02 UTC 2006 |
Re #122: I don't trust my memory. Look at tracfone.com .
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slynne
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response 125 of 290:
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Feb 1 01:01 UTC 2006 |
I have a t-mobile cell phone plan that costs $20 a month for 60 anytime
minutes and 500 weekend minutes. It works for me but the pay as go plans
might be cheaper for someone who uses their phone even less.
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kingjon
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response 126 of 290:
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Feb 1 01:17 UTC 2006 |
If I recall, we paid something like $80 or $90 for a year's airtime when the
time came, which incidentally came with a hundred-some minutes (when I got it
it had three-hundred-some on it already, and I hadn't used more than twenty).
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keesan
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response 127 of 290:
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Feb 1 02:08 UTC 2006 |
Our friends don't need any weekend minutes because they have internet service
only 9-6 M-F, and they are usually home on weekends. $20 for 60 minutes is
too much. Is there some plan without weekend minutes, but more weekday?
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slynne
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response 128 of 290:
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Feb 1 02:36 UTC 2006 |
Unfortunately M-F before 6p is the most expensive time with almost all
cell phone plans. I guess that is when demand is the highest
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marcvh
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response 129 of 290:
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Feb 1 05:43 UTC 2006 |
In general cell phone plans tend to be priced around a "sweet spot" in the
neighborhood of $40-50/mo; there exist plans that go for less than that
but usually they have lousy value (e.g. for $20 you get 60 minutes, but
for $40 you get 1500.) Providers aren't particularly interested in
competing for the highly-frugal demographic; I think they either don't
care about it or figure that they should go prepaid.
I ended up removing the ground loop isolator from my cable; not only did it
allow analog leakage from OTA but it also did not cleanly pass some of the
digital channels recently introduced as part of digital simulcast. So, at
least for the moment, I lifted the ground on my amplifiers and found that
to be the only workable short-term solution until I can find a better one.
But at least now all of my channels are better quality than I could get
via DBS.
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