Manhattan Digital Power Supply Tester Model 101530

Given that many of us have more than one PC in our homes or businesses, and the fact that given enough time all electronic items will fail and die, the quick and easy digital power supply tester is the one tool that everyone should have.

After looking at all the pros and cons and reading the Amazon online reviews of the various digital power supply testers, I decided on the Manhatton Digital Power Supply Tester for ATX, 20- or 24-pin connectors.

Here is what can be done with it:

• Quickly diagnose power supply units, saving time, avoiding system damage, and data loss.
• Accepts 20- or 24-pin ATX, 4-, 6-, and 8-pin CPU, 4-pin FDD, 4-pin Molex (HDD) and SATA power connectors.
• Voltage indicator safely and accurately detects voltage presence.
• Easy to read, backlit LDC display with audible alarms and LED indicators.
• Sturdy, lightweight, and compact aluminum case; ideal for carrying in a toolkit or having it on the technician’s bench.
• Lifetime Warranty.

The instructions are included with the device, though you have to look inside the sandwiched cardboard display sleeve to find them.

The directions are easy and is actually very simple to use.

• Make sure the power supply and all the connections are removed from the computer.
• Plug in the main 20- or 24-pin ATX connector from a power supply that you want to check.
• Two beeps indicate that the liquid-crystal display (LCD) has updated each voltage and power-good (PG) value based on what is currently being tested.
• The 12 V, 3.3 V, and 5 V LEDs will light if their corresponding power outputs are good, and reamian off if the power outputs fail. (The voltage sources are to be tested one by one.)
• Test any of the component voltage cables one at a time by attaching a 4-, 6-, or 8-pin CPU connector, 4-pin FDD or Molex (HDD) connector (+12 V1 / +5 V), or SATA (+12 V1 / +5 V / +3.3 V) connector to the tester, checking the appropriate LEDs for output indications.
• Remove each non-ATX connector after each test. Caution: Besides the 20 or 24-pin ATX connector, do not plug more than one additional power connector at a time into the tester.

* +/-5% for +5 V, +3.3 V, +5 VSB; +/-10% for +12 V1, +12 V2, -12 V.

Voltage Table and Readings

• Abnormal voltage will not display on the LCD.
• “LL” displays when no voltage or voltage lower than a minimum acceptable value is detected.
• “HH” displays when voltage is higher than a maximum acceptable value is detected.
• If the detected voltage is lower than table value (A) or higher than table value (B), an alarm beeps.
• If the detected PG value is lower than 100 ms or higher than 900 ms, an alarm beeps and the reading blinks on the LCD screen.

The tester works as advertised. Quite a handy device.

Check it out: Manhattan Digital Power Supply Tester

Jim

The Macintosh Plus computer was the third model in the Macintosh line, introduced on January 16, 1986, two years after the original Macintosh and a little more than a year after the Macintosh 512K, with a price tag of US $2599.

Let me tell you a short story. Many years ago, I purchased an Apple Macintosh SE and then later purchased a PowerPC 6100 series computer. Both of these computers made life working with a PC fun. Of course, I am using the term “PC” in a generic form here. The 6100 brought color (actual color monitor) into my computer life, and it even trail blazed the path to the Internet when most people didn’t have a clue what the “Internet” was about, nor had they even hear the “Web” term, or being “online” with a computer.

I was an early alpha and beta tester for the Mosaic browser which was the precursor for Netscape Navigator, which ultimately morphed into Mozilla Firefox. Mosaic’s direct descendant on the coder line, via Marc Andreessen, was Netscape Navigator. Netscape Navigator’s code descendant is Mozilla Firefox. It was around this time I started doing some basic website customization and web design for fun.

I knew the early Apples inside and out. However, the business world was using mostly all DOS PCs with software from Microsoft and IBM. So, when Microsoft introduced Windows 95 and then Windows 98 and ME became available, and PC makers were starting to build computers for the masses, my wife and I purchased a Tiny Computer, which was not so tiny after all, but was a brand name manufacturer of computers.

Tiny Computers, was Britain’s third largest computer manufacturer at the time, based in Redhill Business Park in Salfords, Redhill in Surrey, England. The Tiny brand of computers were sold in the United States at retail outlets at extremely competitive pricing. Tiny used the advertising slogan ‘Think big about your PC – think Tiny.” During the late 1990s they were a highly successful firm having units throughout the major retail stores of the UK, but their profits eventually began to fall due to competition from other major computer brands and they were bought out of Administration by their rival TIME. However if you look around now, there seems to be a lot of new tiny computers, i.e. mini laptops such as Acer, ASUS , HP Mini, Dell Mini, other Netbooks, Apple MacBook Air, Apple iPad, and a host of other manufacturers’ netbooks and minis are now on the landscape.

As the electronics in these computer devices have shrunk, the power within the boxes have expanded exponentially. Battery technology has greatly improved along the way, making the devices quite portable in their usage for long periods of time. However, that does not really paint the whole picture of what is going on today. We tend to think of the computer as a device we store things in, and a device we use for emailing, writing, and even research through the Internet. We store documents, pictures, songs, programs, books, track our finances, and do social networking with our friends and relatives all over the world using the PC, and now even using our smart phones like the iPhone and Androids to quickly post a picture, send a message, or check our emails.

What many of us fail to realize is the impact that the cloud is making on our lives, and how the PC might simply be a thing of the past in our thinking. In fact, it is quite likely that the near future, the PC will simply be a device that is so cheap, and common place that it will be like having a watch on your wrist. Just about everyone has a watch, and very few get excited about having one. Yes, you might want a Rolex, but seeing the time on a Timex will do just fine.

First off, what is the cloud? Or, what is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).

Believe it or not, most of us use cloud computing every day. In fact, I am using cloud computing just writing this document. As I type this document on my MacBook Pro, the computer is simply being used as a terminal that is tied into my web host server, where my website is located, where I have WordPress blogging software and content management software installed, and where the physical files are stored.

Another form of cloud computing is Google’s Gmail application, where all the emails are stored online, and access is provided through all types of devices, i.e. PCs, Apple laptops, iPads, netbooks, iPhones, Android smart phones, and even our new smart TVs have Internet access capabilities.  Even the Amazon Kindle, Kindle Touch, and Kindle Fire, Full Color 7″ Multi-touch Display, has Internet Wi-Fi access available for it. The days of using one PC device for everything is long gone. In fact, that is one of the reasons the cloud is here to stay. People want instantaneous access to their information through all the different electronic devices available to them. They want to be able to check their email from the cell phone, or check their friends Facebook pages from their iPad, or conference on their laptop when on the road, or even download a new book to read when ever they want.

No doubt about it, this generation is living in the cloud whether they realize it or not. Now, even businesses are moving to the cloud too. The same things that have occurred in the consumer world is also happening in the business world. Companies are looking for ways of reducing their costs, and one area of expense that are being looked at with a critical eye is the IT department. IT departments have traditionally had their plates full. They have had to juggle all types of activities; server integration, software, backups, computer laptops and desktops, email configuration, email maintenance, email backups, and one of the most important items, security. All of this adds up to big money. The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind, it is in the cloud.

Google Apps for business is one of the cost saving enterprise solutions available for small, medium, or any large business today. With the adaptation of Google Apps integration for a business, a company can realize enormous savings, reduced headaches, elimination of concern over hardware server problems, backups, power outages, and of having to deal with other interface items related to PC hardware, software, email integration, and more.

Need help with your business? Contact Jim at Professional Web Services today.

BlogoLife 1.8 by wplook

BlogoLife is a simple and perfect HTML5 & CSS3 theme for personal blogging that supports post formats, and several customization options. The custom background, custom header, and multiple color schemes gives you the possibility to adapt your blog as you wish.
Options: Widgets | Menus | Wplook Panel | Background | Header

With the BlogoLife template, I customized it to the size width that I wanted. Though, I had to do some figuring out the widths in order to create some new graphics for the wider width that I was changing it to. I ended up increasing both the left column (main text area) slightly, and increased the width of the right column significantly to allow for the usage of wider graphics.

Prior to using the new template, I decided to upgrade WordPress to the latest and greatest. That was quite a story in itself and required troubleshooting an upgrade that went awry. If using WordPress for your website, I suggest reading about how to recover from a failed WordPress update here.

Once I was upgraded with WP and all the Plugins, I tackled the template area. As with any website, there are tons of things behind the scenes, which are not seen by most folks visiting a website. However, if you are a website developer, you know what I am talking about. Spacing, alignment, color, graphics, text size, and even the header and footer spacing is a puzzle with having to make sure all the pieces fit together properly. Everything is looked at with a critical eye (mine), and still there are always things that you want to improve. Then on top of all of that, making sure that Web functionality is still intact, navigation, analytics, and other smaller items of importance such as how the admin area for comments, access, and page and post edits work in conjunction with the template are all inner-linked and functioning well together.

So, I hope you like the new design to the website. In this template, you might see some different colors every once in awhile, along with different header images too. Let me know what you think.

Regards,

Jim

Cisco Linksys E2000 Wireless Router

I remember the days when routers were not even allowed on Comcast. At least that was the official line. Then like everyone else, Comcast realized that was a silly terms of service requirement. Today just about everyone has more than one computer and many folks are running a combination wired and wireless home network to hook up their PC and Apple desktops, laptops, Nintendo Wii, iPads, iPhones, Android phones, and even new high definition flat screen televisions are configured for wireless access for Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming video services. Making the best choice for a wireless router is most important when it comes to making sure all those devices work well for Internet connectivity.

Like many of you, I did tons of research on the pros and cons of all the available routers for sale. Trying to decide what is important is difficult when there are so many choices. However, the important stuff to me came down to reliability, cost, signal strength, and ease of use.

Reliability:

Like one of the Amazon reviewers stated in the feedback area online, since it is a refurbished unit, they felt that Cisco would have gone completely through it to test everything out. That gave me the confidence on the reliability aspect. Plus, having the backing of the good customer service through Amazon was icing on the cake for peace of mind.

Cost:

Wow, what can you say here! Such a great deal! Why would I want to spend more for a router?

Signal Strength:

Signal strength was part of my criteria for judging the various routers on the market. However, there are many issues which can affect signal performance. Location, location, location is everything. If you place a router behind some shielded wall, signal strength will surfer. Also, depending on the band usage, i.e. 2.4 GHz vs 5 GHz, 2.4 GHz goes further no matter what router you get. Remember, the lower the frequency, the greater the distance given the same power output. I operate exclusively on the 2.4 GHz band. Note that only one band is selectable at a time (which is no big deal in my mind). While the signal strength on the 2.4 GHz might (and I say might) be a little bit less than my old Linksys SRX200, there simply is no comparison as far as the performance is concerned. The Linksys SRX200 was constantly dropping signal. The Cisco Linksys E2000 has never dropped signal on me at all.

Ease of Use:

Let’s face it here. Once you set up the router, how likely are you going to have to keep changing things in the future? However, with that being said, the Linksys SRX200 was a piece of cake to set up. I use the router login through any web browser to set up all routers anyways. No, I did not even insert the setup CD in the computer. So, I can’t tell you how that goes, but from my standpoint, it is simple to login [ http://192.168.1.1 ] to the router IP address through the browser and set up what you want. Refer to getting a new IP address from Comcast for more information on various router brands and accessibility through a browser.

The Cisco E2000 has extended coverage with an additional internal antenna designed for larger homes.

Features Include:

• Wireless-N Selectable Dual-Band (2.4 or 5 GHz)
• Gigabit Ethernet 4-port switch
• Additional antenna for extended coverage

Bottom line, it has been working great for a couple of months so far. I am extremely pleased with the performance at this time.

Regards,

Jim

That is exactly what happened to me yesterday when I went to update the WordPress software to the latest version. I saw that I had plugins to update; which I completed with no problems. However, when I tried to do a automatic update to WordPress, it got the proverbial message, “Update Failed.” That wouldn’t be so bad, except for one thing, I couldn’t log back in to my admin area. The blog was still active, but when trying to login to the admin area, I had the white screen of death, a blank page.

So, as luck would have it, or should I say Murphy’s law would have it, I did not have a recent backup of the blog. So, on to Google Search to find a WordPress update solution. I went looking to WordPress for an answer. I read on the forums of various instances of failed WordPress updates and the things to try. Many of the processes involved recovering from the update using the backup files. No, that was not going to work. Then I thought, maybe the manual WordPress installation procedure would work. I found this link for updating WordPress and thought maybe I could find how to do the process there.

Before doing anything, I decided to make sure I did a complete backup of everything that I could at that moment. I felt that the WP database was still intact on the website server. So, logging in to the CPanel of the website, I downloaded the various backups, including the databases that I had on the server. I also downloaded the WP directory from the server onto my local hard drive. I like using the FireFTP addon for Firefox. It is quick, easy to use, and convenient to provide FTP access for any website that you maintain.

After doing those things, I wanted some additional confirmation on the manual WP update procedure. I found this article on How to Recover from Failed WordPress Upgrade. The procedure was inline with the WP instructions, however, there were a few more details that made it easier to understand. Below is the procedure from WP. I am also adding my comments to it.

The following instructions assumes that you have your WordPress files installed in a separate directory on your web hosting account. Example would be: www.jimwarholic.com/blog or you might have the directory named wordpress or other instead of blog.

Step 1: Replace WordPress files

1. Get the latest WordPress zip (or tar.gz) file. (I used the zip file and saved it on my computer hard drive).
2. Unpack (unzip) the zip file that you downloaded.
3. Delete the following two directories (inside your WP directory) on the web host using FTP or shell access (I used FireFTP):
1. wp-includes
2. wp-admin
4. Upload the new wp-includes and wp-admin directories (directories are “folders” from the computer hard drive) to your web host in the WP directory. Because the old directories have been deleted from the web server, the new ones will take their place.
5. Read this next step twice and follow it carefully. Upload the individual files from the new wp-content folder (located on your local computer hard drive) to your existing wp-content folder (on the web hosting server in the WP directory), overwriting existing files. Do NOT delete your existing wp-content folder. Do NOT delete any files or folders in your existing wp-content directory (except for the one being overwritten by new files). This will replace only the files that need to be replaced, but maintain the other files within the wp-content directory.
6. Upload all new loose files from the root directory of the new version (located on your local computer hard drive) to your existing wordpress root directory on the web host.

NOTE – you should replace all the old WordPress files with the new ones in the wp-includes and wp-admin directories and sub-directories, and in the root directory (such as index.php, wp-login.php and so on). Don’t worry – your wp-config.php will be safe.

Be careful when you come to copying the wp-content directory. You should make sure that you only copy the files from inside this directory, rather than replacing your entire wp-content directory. This is where your themes and plugins live, so you will want to keep them. If you have customized the default or classic themes without renaming them, make sure not to overwrite those files, otherwise you will lose your changes. (Though you might want to compare them for new features or fixes..)

Lastly you should take a look at the wp-config-sample.php file, to see if any new settings have been introduced that you might want to add to your own wp-config.php.
Step 1.5: Remove .maintenance file

If you’re upgrading manually after a failed auto-upgrade, delete the file .maintenance from your WordPress directory using FTP. This will remove the “failed update” nag message.
Step 2: Update your installation

Visit your main WordPress admin page at /wp-admin. You may be asked to login again. If a database upgrade is necessary at this point, WordPress will detect it and give you a link to a URL like http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow that link and follow the instructions. This will update your database to be compatible with the latest code. You should do this as soon as possible after step 1.

In my case, when I logged back in (and I was able to log back in now), I was indeed prompted to update the database before continuing. All I had to do was click the link button and follow simple instructions to update the database.

Low and behold, success. Everything was back to normal, and actually seemed to be functioning better. I did have some further updates to do for the pluggins, but those went smoothly using the automatic update links for the plugins themselves.

Words With Friends is a Scrabble game for the iPad, iPhone, and Android phones.

Dare I give you my screen name? Okay, my screen name is:

applepc1

If you want to play a game with me, search for my name once you add the Words With Friends app to your portable device.

I have to say, it is a very addictive game.

Here is an article link with some very good hints and tips to consider:

5 Tips for Embarrassing your Friends in Scrabble

So, if you want to play an ongoing Scrabble game, send me an invite today. I might be sorry I said that. I may end up with too many requests for a game. I’ll see.

Regards,

applepc1

When I got to the Pittsburgh airport for check-in, the lady behind the counter insisted that I could check in myself with the kiosk. I told her that I was told that someone would have to help me. She continued to insist that I do it myself. However, there was another agent that assisted me, and entered my code number into the machine, but there was a problem. He said, someone will have to help me. I thought to myself, no kidding!

So, the main lady from behind the counter comes back over to me, and says, “this is the morning from hell!” I didn’t find out till a bit later, that United was having major computer problems. She started keying in my flights and after a few minutes I sensed there was something wrong. I asked her what the problem was. She informed me, the first flight was delayed an hour due to the flight crew having to wait their appointed resting time. This however would mean that I would most likely miss my connecting flight in Chicago. So, she actually double booked me (with an upgrade to first class) on a second flight out of Chicago to SFO, which was scheduled to leave an hour later.

Okay, now I am leaving an hour later from Pittsburgh, and of course, I arrive in Chicago an hour later too. However, they end up delaying the other flight leaving Chicago by almost an hour to accommodate the late arriving flights. Since both flights I was booked on were now set to leave nearly at the same time out of Chicago, I figured it sure would be nicer to fly first class on the second flight, instead of a center seat assignment on coach for the other flight. Now I am talking with another agent at the gate flight check-in counter. I tell her my story, show her my paperwork, and ask if I could just go on the other flight since I already was booked there too. She thought that would be fine, and proceeded to cancel my one flight and confirm me on the other. This is where another round of problems started. Once she unbooked me from the one flight, she could not confirm me on the other flight, even though I had paperwork to show that I was booked on it. She actually couldn’t understand how I got to Chicago, due to the paperwork not showing up properly. I told her, the whole story again and said, I simply checked in at the counter. So, she pulls another agent over, and they talk about the issue. She decides to give me a first class boarding pass for the other flight and just signed it herself.

It wasn’t until I was on the other flight, seated in my first class seat, that I felt comfortable that I was in fact heading to San Francisco.

I do have to mention, I could really get use to first class flying. I think I really like being pampered on the airlines. The service, the wine, and the meal were terrific. And, my knees did not hit the back of the seat in front of me. Much more comfortable!

iPad 2 Review

Well, I’ve had my iPad for about two weeks now and I thought I would see what happens to my voice dictation when I’m recording using an application called “Dragon Dictation” to automatically go from voice to text. That first sentence was entered into this blog posting using the dictation mode and then editing a few of the words as I went forward. I would start by hitting the recording button and then I would stop that after one or two sentences and go to keyboard mode and place periods and punctuation marks as required. It actually worked pretty good except I know that I would pause (with rather long pauses) and try to gather my thoughts together. I think part of the problem with dictation, it’s hard to keep your thoughts running along in a progressive manner which makes what you want to say sound logical. Keep in mind you can not dictate directly into WordPress. You must first use the app to do your dictation note, then copy from the app to WordPress.

I started off this sentence by saying, “new paragraph” to see what would happen. I also added the word “period.” Believe it or not it got the word period correct to add a period (.).

From here forward I started typing on the iPad keyboard. In any case this was a test of the free “Dragon Dictation” iPad app, blogging in WordPress (WordPress also has a free iPad app), using the keyboard, using the free iPad app “Terra” browser, copy, paste, fine keyboard edits, and scrolling in the WordPress edit window (tip: use two fingers, close together, to scroll in a division or text box inside a web page).

One of the nice features with Terra browser (unlike Safari), is you can have multiple tabs open at the same time. This makes it quite convenient to go from one tab to the other. Right now, I probably have a dozen or so tabs open.

I did notice that WordPress doesn’t seem to display properly in the “Visual” mode, but it does seem to display semi-properly in the HTML edit mode. What happens as this article got longer, WP edit window would run down longer and longer, to the point you would have to scroll up the entire page to see the editing tools at the top of the WP edit window. Maybe this has to do with the default number of lines in the editor.

The issue with the visual edit mode is that the editor goes wider than it naturally should. It goes behind the right column items. I suspect that is because this version of WP wasn’t exactly designed around the iPad. However, I certainly could see the iPad used to quickly gather your thoughts in more ways than one. The free WordPress app doesn’t have those same issues with the display mode. I’ve tested the WP app a little, but until I use the WordPress app to write a compete blog posting, I won’t be able to give you the details of how well that app works.

It seems that the more you type on the iPad, the more proficient you become at using the virtual keyboard. Note that there are portable Bluetooth keyboard options available through third party manufacturers that could make things go a lot faster. That would probably be a good idea if you were to use the iPad as your main input device. With the long battery life, and the portability of the iPad, I think it is a really cool device for doing some amazing things.

I have downloaded a ton of free apps already. Some of my free apps are: Compass HD, Planets, Google Earth, Pandora radio, Craigslist app, ABC player, HBO GO, Netflix, XFINITY TV, Google Books, Kindle, Free WiFi, KNBR, WordPress, a bunch of free games apps, several free browsers (I really like the Terra browser app), Dragon Dictation, NASA, Weather apps, Calculator Pro, Logos, and others.

The iPad that I have is the 64 GB, Verizon 3G version. I have used it both in WiFi and 3G modes. I have to say I really like having access to the web with Verizon, no matter where I am located at the time. The iPad is great for business and personal use.

Well, that is just a short overview about using the Apple iPad to write a blog posting in WordPress.

Jim

PS. I did not cheat when I wrote this blog post. Everything in this posting was done from start to finish with the iPad. I even used the add link hyperlink to my signature “Jim” with the WordPress editor and also copied the video link and YouTube embed code for posting the video at the top of this article. Though, I have to admit that it took me some time to figure out where the YouTube code was hidden.

Note the YouTube site knows you are using an iPad browser, so it brings a slightly different user experience. I had to change the settings in the Terra browser to make YouTube think I was using Firefox so I could get to the embed code. Google’s engineers need to think through that YouTube embed video code into a blog posting process a little more.

The hard drive I purchased is the Hitachi Deskstar 3.5 Inch 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA II 32 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02860

Using my SATA and PATA to USB internal hard drive desktop adapter, I was able to do a complete clone of my old 400 GB internal HD with the new drive hooked up to the adapter and a USB port. Prior to cloning the HD using the backup software Acronis, I first formatted the new drive using the administrative tools, in the control panel, and navigated to the computer management, disk management area to format the hard drive. Note that the hard drive is a virgin drive and will not be seen properly by the operating system until it is mounted and formatted.

Once the hard drive is completely formatted (which I think took more than an hour and a half),I  then used Acronis backup and cloning software to make a complete image backup. When doing a clone of a HD, everything is exactly the same as the original, expect for an increase in the storage capacity from the old to the new.

The version of the cloning and backup software I am using is: True Image Home 2011 Plus

Acronis Product Features Include:

• PC Backup and Recovery of Systems, Applications, and Files – Have you ever accidentally deleted a file, had a virus corrupt your files, or had a disk fail?
• Fast and Easy Backup and Recovery – Acronis True Image Home 2011 provides complete system image backup and recovery of your home PC’s operating system, applications, settings, and personal files.
• New Windows 7 Integration – True Image Home 2011 scales to the needs of novices and advanced users alike
• New Graphical User Interface – We have redesigned our recognized user-friendly interface with new features like Drag and Drop for faster navigation.
• Continuous Data Protection – Acronis Nonstop Backup automatically creates incremental backups every five minutes allowing users to roll back their systems, files, and folders to any point in time in the past.

After the cloning process was finished, I then shut down the computer, pulled the old drive out and installed the new, turned the computer back on, and voila, the computer had 1 TB of HD storage space instead of the 400 GB and all my programs were as they should be.

It is interesting to note that the old hard drive was a IDE cable parallel ATA “PATA” type, and the new HD is a serial ATA “SATA” type. Since my motherboard on the computer had the capabilities of running either the old PATA or SATA HD, this was the first time since I had last built the computer that I was installing a larger hard drive. The old drive was actually out of my old last generation computer. Once the new hard drive was installed, I definitely noticed speed improvements to the system. I plan on using the 400 GB PATA drive in the old external HD case which has a USB port on it.

Speaking of computers, it is somewhat difficult to tell what generation of computer I am using at any given time. Here I am typing away using Windows Live Writer (which only runs on Windows operating system software), on my MacBook Pro, running VMware Fusion, running Windows 7 Ultimate, on the MAC OS X Snow Leopard operating system software, with 8 GB of RAM (which I just upgraded from 4GB to 8GB).

I am very impressed with VMware Fusion 3 for being able to run all the PC based programs that you can imagine. It is actually cool to be able to run both the Apple OS side and the Microsoft Windows side at the same time. I tend to run these programs in different spaces (Apple OS feature that lets you have multiple desktops in four different quadrants, with different programs and files open in each space). It can get a bit confusing when trying to remember which system I am using at any given moment. Windows updates just like on a PC, and Apple updates on the other side too. In fact, Windows 7 just came out with a major update in the form of “Service Pack 1.” This took a bit of time to download and install. It required turning off the virtual computer and then virtually rebooting. I did not have to reboot the whole MacBook Pro.

Once I had performed the updates on my MacBook Pro on the Windows side of the coin, I felt it was important to do a Time Machine backup on the Apple side of the coin. Any case, it is like having the best of both worlds on this computer.

OK, that is the computer story of the day. Now is the time to get your website found online. Professional Web Services provides Internet marketing services and SEO services for all types of B2B and B2C businesses on the web. Visit us today for your business solution.

Jim Warholic

I went to do a backup today of my PC computer onto my external hard drive, and low and behold, the backup hard drive would not work. I only use the external hard drive to do complete backups, and hardly ever turn it on. However, when I turned it on this time, I heard a very strange loud motor noise. I turned the hard drive off, and noticed when I turned it side to side, there was a clunking sound coming from inside the drive itself. This obviously was not a very good sign. The external hard drive is basically an internal drive with an external case around it. The HD was a Seagate Barracuda, 500GB PATA IDE drive, inside a SimpleTech case.

When I pulled the hard drive out of the case, and then disassembled the HD itself, I found that the motor shaft had sheared off the platters section, and all the four platters were still locked together, but the spindle section itself was separated from the motor, and was loose.

Keep in mind, failures eventually will happen on any device, and the SimpleTech Seagate drive has been very dependable for three years or more. This can happen to any drive and I do have experience with other internal drives dying on me too.

So, I did not feel comfortable without having a backup of this computer, and ran over to Costco to get another HD drive. I got a pretty good deal on a 500GB Ultra Portable Hard Drive for $60.00 plus tax. Yes, I could have gotten a much bigger drive, but I wanted to do more research in this area of large hard drives before spending more money, and this drive provided a backup bridge so to speak.

The new external hard drive is actually pretty cool in that the drive comes with a desktop USB dock and a separate USB cable, along with a small protective soft case for storage. It also comes with backup software and other software that is both Apple Mac OS X operating system 10.4.11 or higher; 10.5.8; or 10.6.2 and PC Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 operating systems. The portability of the drive is nice in that it does not require a power cable. The drive gets all its power directly through the USB 2.0 plug.

I already had Acronis backup software [ Acronis Backup Software ] installed on my PC, and even as I write this from that PC, I am doing a complete backup to the new external hard drive. I will be feeling much better once that gets done.

I have come to the conclusion, you can never have too many backups. In fact, it is good to have a backup of the backup, and then if you want to go further, store it in a firesafe, or better yet, store one of those backups off site. I am still a bit reluctant to use online backup file storage at this time, though there are merits to doing that too.

01/20/2011 Update:

I am very happy to report that the computer is backed up. Now I am thinking I should upgrade the internal hard drive to a SATA 1 TB and remove the two old PATA drives (C and D drive), using one of them in the old SimpleTech enclosure, since that enclosure is set up for PATA IDE drives. Note, my computer MOB is new enough that it has the PATA connectors built into it. Maybe I might even consider changing from Windows XP and loading in Windows 7. Or, maybe I should get a 2TB drive and make it dual boot, or maybe a tri boot with Linux, or maybe even consider making it a quad boot to Google Chrome operating system. Oh my, the possibilities are endless!

01/21/2011 Update:

After I completed the backup, I started thinking about my wife’s computer, and the backup that was on the backup drive, which was no longer viable. I had some extra PATA drives, and decided to try installing one of the extra drives in the chassis of the SimpleTech box, even though I have a SATA and PATA to USB internal hard drive desktop adapter. I am happy to report, it worked. So, with that in mind, I now did a fresh backup of my wife’s computer. I would really be in trouble if something happened to hers. As I always say, you can never have too many backups.

Also, I took the plunge, and ordered a 1TB SATA internal drive from Amazon for my PC computer. I think I got a great deal on this Hitachi Deskstar SATA 2 HD. What do you think? Hitachi Deskstar 3.5 Inch 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA II 32 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02860

Jim

I purchased my Gateway 24 inch monitor several years ago and have found it to be one of the most helpful computer accessories of all time. You never know how much you miss something until it starts having problems. About six months ago, the monitor would not wake up after going to sleep. So, instead of taking it apart at that time, I simply stopped it from going to sleep. However, that solution for a monitor problem only lasted a few months until the monitor finally went dark completely. I had read online about bad capacitor problems for the Gateway, and having documented the repairs for the iMac G5, I was set to tackle the Gateway.

I figured there would be some documentation online about how to disassemble the case, and I was hoping to find some pictures of how to do it, but searching proved futile. I did read on the various forums, that folks found bad capacitors onboard the PSU and one of the other boards. However, very little information was provided about getting the plastic case apart, other than a few folks saying that you have to pull the case apart. I thought Gateway would have a service guide for disassembly, but no such luck. Come on Gateway, provide some more detailed documentation other than just the outside hardware for service!

So, here is my take on the Gateway 24 inch matter.

1. Turn over the monitor, face down on a soft protected surface.
2. Remove three screws along the bottom edge.
3. Remove the four screws on metal mounting bracket plate located in the middle on the back.
4. This is the most difficult step. Carefully pry the case apart, starting with the bottom section and moving along the seam edge using two flat tipped screwdrivers and carefully pry it apart. Be careful not to break the speaker brackets. In essence, don’t pry the nylon tabs apart, but only the case itself. The case is held together along the left and the right side with internal plastic tabs that run the whole length of both the right and left side of the case. So, when you are prying it apart, it feels as though you are breaking the case.
5. Also note that the power on and control strip located on the right side has a very small cable with a ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) connector for connecting the very small ribbon cable to the board. The ZIF wire-to-board connector has a little tab that can be lifted up slightly to remove the ribbon cable from the connector itself. There was a little piece of black tape covering the connector that I removed prior to lifting the tab.
6. Once the case top and bottom are separated, then the internal guts of the monitor can be removed and set on a protected surface, face down.
7. To get inside the electronics, the shielding must be removed.
8. Remove the shielding on the left and the right side shields by carefully releasing the lock down tabs, and then sliding the shields away from the hold down clips. The larger of the two side shields has metallic grounding tape to join the side shield to the middle main shield. Lift one side of the tape off the center shield so that the side shield can be removed completely.
9. This next step must be done prior to removing the main shielding covering all the power supply electronics. Remove the small USB board by removing the two mounting screws, and carefully unplug the small power connector to the board. Place this board off to the side.
10. Remove all screws that hold the center shielding cover in place. Once the screws are removed, the shield can then be slid away from the hold down clips. Once that is done, the center shield can be lifted off.
11. Access to the power supply capacitors and other electronics is now visible, and you can quickly check all the capacitors for any signs of bulging. I had four capacitors on mine that were bulging, and some of the electrolytic juice was coming out.
12. Remove the PSU board from the chassis by removing the mounting screws and disconnecting the cable from the inverter card. Also, the screws for the power plug connector plate must also be removed before the board can be pulled off.
13. Replace the capacitors on the bench.
14. Remove the inverter card by first carefully removing each of the connectors, by slightly lifting up the connector clips and sliding off the cable connectors from the circuit board.
15. Remove the inverter mounting screws and lift off the board.
16. Replace the two capacitors on board.
17. Reinstall everything in reverse order.
18. Make sure the small ribbon cable connector is fully inserted into the ZIF wire-to-board connector and also that the traces of the ribbon cable itself is fully lined up with the connector edge. My cable had the traces slightly loose from the cable itself and needed to be straightened out parallel to each other.
19. Put the whole thing back together by snapping it along the edges. Note to be careful of the power on/off control ribbon cable. You do not want to rip it on the edge of the case, or squeeze it between the two sections.
20. If you did everything properly, you should be able to plug it in and turn it on.

The important thing is to take your time and do it right. When I went to turn mine on after reassembly, I found out that it would not turn on. I pulled it apart again, and found one of the cables from the PSU board to another logic card was disconnected. Once I hooked that up, and put it back together a second time, the monitor worked!

I receive allot of spam recently using the from: Linkedin Communication and to: info@a-company-name.com or some other junk in front of @ a-company-name.com

Do you think it comes from Linkedin link on home page or is it something else?

Answer:

The info @ a-company-name.com email addresses are spam magnets.

Even if you don’t post that email address, the spammers use it to send every url an email because they know there are a lot of people that have an info @ company email address. They also use a means of targeting a URL with a dictionary attack. So, if people leave a default (catch all) email address, and the spammers use any type of attack, they can find unlimited email address openings to send spam. This is why it is never a good idea to use a “catch all” email address. Not only will it be a bad experience for the user having to go searching through the tons of spam, but it will simply be an undo strain on the hosting server. This is why, many servers and hosting companies are limiting this type of setup. Additionally, if you choose to run this way, you run the risk of alienating yourself with the hosting company. In essence, they won’t like you very much and run the risk of having your website be transferred over to a much poorer server environment, one that has other less than desired operators and webmasters.

Once an email address is in the spammers database, it is impossible to get it cleaned, because other spammers get it from others online.

I strongly urge you to guard your email addresses carefully online. Use of Javascript, a picture image of the @ email address, or formmails are some of the things you can use to be proactive to protect your emails from the spam bots (email scavenging programs that automatically harvest email addresses online). However, even having guarded your email address, I strongly suggest using spam detection, or filtering it through Google Apps for email, or running it directly through Gmail (by adding an account in the Gmail settings), or other options like that for the long haul.

Do the right thing, and don’t use a catch all email address. If you have a number of email addresses that you want to use as throw away emails for signing up for things online, do a forward of those select throw away emails to your main email address instead. Then you can create email filters to place them in folders or assign labels. You can also add address aliases for your main email address. Read about on how to use an email address alias name.

For online marketing solutions for your business visit your B2B and B2C solution provider. Need a good webmaster? Contact us today.

The following ripple voltage chart is provided for reference material.

Capacitor Discharge Results in Ripple Current

Understanding the Ripple Voltage Drawing Above

The faster the capacitor discharges, the more ripple will be present. If the capacitor in the circuit is underrated or completely bad, it will not properly hold a charge, and thus the electronics circuit will have maximum ripple present. When a capacitance filtering circuit is faulty, picture the valleys on the voltage being very deep relative to the peaks, and the ripple current will shoot up proportionally in the circuit, with the result of a major increase in heat being generated in all the circuits supplied by the power supply voltage that should be a regulated level DC, which would now effectively be an AC ripple voltage. This will quickly result in thermal breakdowns in various components on the circuit boards, causing a cascading component(s) failure(s) affect.

Picture Courtesy of HyperPhysics Department of Georgia State University – Development of Ripple Expressions

I thought it would be interesting and educational to hear from an expert in the engineering and circuit design field. The following is the email dialog conversation I had with Dean Palmer, engineer/owner of MicroDyne Engineering, LLC, an electronics research, design, and development services company, located in Queen Creek, Arizona, USA.

Dear Jim,

I stumbled upon your very informative “Capacitors” web page today and enjoyed your article on DIY lead free soldering and circuit repairs. I too encourage people to try to service their own stuff where possible. And this leads me to the following question:

I have a Panasonic DVD player/recorder (Model DMR-ES15) that has a recurrent “U61″ error that, in the owner’s literature, is stated more or less to be a power related problem. So I open up the unit and discover a single (but large) aluminum electrolytic cap on the main power converter sourced directly from the DC rectified AC mains. A check around the Web and I see that many owners of this product have been experiencing similar “U61″ problems with their units; some failing after only a few months of operation; most just after their 1 year warranty expires. So I get my trusty Tek 2467 scope on the circuit and I see a HUGE amount of ripple at the pins of the capacitor, yet the capacitor tests good! I replace it anyway with a good quality low ESR hi-temp Nichicon and still there is terrible ripple on that node. The power supply seems to have a load related voltage regulation problem and there is a lot of ripple and harmonic noise on the output. Doubling up on the capacitor even though there was no room on the board (had to dead-bug it) was the only way I could quiet down the circuit.

After visiting your page, I too thought that this part (or others) had possibly been damaged by the lead-free thing and the higher heat production methods used to build this unit – there is lead-free solder everywhere, even though the date of manufacture was 2006. But now I’m convinced that the part was actually under-designed for the requirements of the circuit. And, I’ve seen high ripple on computer mother board caps from time to time that caused all sorts of malfunctions and random errors/reboots, and also in a couple of LCD displays I worked on. In addition, there is an under-designed heat sink on the video processor chip in this DVD player – it gets seriously frying hot when playing back or recording a DVD – which cannot be good for the chip or it’s tiny ball grid array solder connections.

So my question to you is, why are manufacturers under-designing the circuitry in these products? Are these companies so desperate to maximize profits that they apply MTBF and service data back into the manufacturing process to find ways to cut back on design quality and circuit components to just get them through the warranty period? I’ve heard they can actually tweak this down to a granularity of weeks. Or, are we just seeing rampant designer incompetence all across the board – engineers who do not know how to do simple calculations for ripple current and thermal dissipation? Could these guys even balance their check books? What are they teaching in the EE programs these days???

I would be very interested in your thoughts on this! At any rate, Ha, it keeps me in business.

Thanks very much!

–
Dean Palmer
Engineer, NPD

MicroDyne Engineering, LLC

Queen Creek, Arizona
USA
480.888.0600
www.microdyneeng.com

—

Jim W. wrote back:

Hello Dean,

Wow, you got my mind filled with all types of thoughts. First off, my experience in the electronics field goes back more years than I care to imagine: http://jimwarholic.com/about.

I constantly see problems related to component failures more and more frequently. I honestly believe that everything is designed with a time value. Capacitors have a certain time value to heat rating. If you operate a capacitor near its maximum rating, the capacitor will last X amount of time. If you operate a capacitor at 1/2 the maximum rating, you will likely get 2X life or more out of the capacitor. So, it comes down to the engineers specifying the ratings on the capacitors without fully understanding the time value. The differences in costs are very very minuscule if anything at all. But, when they call for a value of 2200 uF cap at 10 volts because the maximum voltage might be only 10 volts, but the circuit is actually operating at 10 volts, then in essence the capacitor is operating at 100% of its maximum voltage. They could just as easily installed a 16 volt capacitor, that might be slightly larger, (though they would have had to design for this larger size) but would have lasted probably more than twice as long, because it would have only been operating at 63% of its maximum operating voltage, and more than likely would have operated at a cooler temperature too. So, the engineers need to take into account the time value, which is probably not being stressed at all.

These power circuits generate tons of heat on their own, and that also is not being taken into account. This causes a cascade effect, which causes more heat, and more breakdown, and more heat, etc.

Here are a couple of pointers to consider when troubleshooting power supply circuits. Most power supply circuits start with full wave rectification. If only one half of the rectification process is working, the capacitors will not be able to filter the voltage properly. Also, there are many times the regulator circuits are failing. So, the voltage drops under load, the regulator can not keep up and therefore the caps try to maintain the voltage, but heat builds up due to excessive current draw.

With the push towards smaller, more compact designs, this causes the engineers to simply go with the smallest of the specs that they can get away with. So, when the final design comes out, and it goes out for build, the builder (assembly house) simply follows the component specs and then gets its supply of components sent from the manufacturer. Once again, at each leg of the manufacturing process, the specs are used as the guide. If the specs are just of a minimal value, and the manufacturer supplies the component with that value, the question comes down to, who’s fault is it?

Did the engineer look at a data sheet of components and see that the standard is a 2000 hr. rated capacitor at TEMP, OP. MAX:105(DEGREE C) and in essence say that will be good enough? Probably. Did the manufacturer of the component, simply target the minimum standard? Probably.

Have computer companies looked at the life cycle of computers being somewhere between three and five years, and say, that if it lasts for four or five years it’s probably good enough? My guess is yes.

However, computers have gotten to the point where even if you go twice as fast for most activities, it really doesn’t matter much. So, more and more of us are keeping our computers for a longer period of time.

Does the manufacturer hold some degree of responsibility for a design that should last longer than the warranty period? And if so, how long? The short answer, is yes. However, the long answer is much more complex than meets the eye. There is always a trade off between price, design, and life expectancy.

I was really ticked off, and still am ticked off to this day, when my Apple failed, two months out of warranty, and the Genius Bar folks said, “Why don’t you just buy a new iMac? The price of a new one is only several hundred dollars more than the parts for the old one.” It was at that point, I had to taken action in my own hands. http://jimwarholic.com/apple

Thank you for listening. Maybe I will post this online, without adding your name to the mix.

Regards,

Jim

Dean Palmer wrote:

Thanks Jim for answering my question! I appreciate your comments very much. And I am right with you on being very upset that your MAC dies right after the warranty period is up. I think that manufacturers should be held accountable for the quality of their products. I know that in reality, it’s “Buyer Beware!” – “If you don’t like my brand, buy someone else’s” … but really, is that the way you’d want YOUR company to do business? The whole attitude out there seems to be “make as much money as you can with as little cost as possible put into it…” – that seems to be capitalism at its worst where greed and lust for wealth and profit creates an environment where crap is king and corporations are driven to make things as cheap as they can get away with! But in the end, we are ALL consumers of products and services. Even the CEO Of SONY, or Toshiba, or in my case, Panasonic – all are consumers. When he goes to buy his Mercedes Benz, would HE be satisfied that it just (barely) meets the warranty period before some major failure occurs? No! He’ll be on the phone to Mercedes to raise hell about it!

So whatever happened to having pride in your product and its quality of workmanship? As you pointed out, for just a few cents more, a better suited capacitor could have been used in the circuit and this would have avoided thousands of upset consumers and calls to service centers. The way I see it, it’s a reputation thing as well as being an ethical matter. When I do a design for my Clients, I want my design to be the best it can be. I was raised by a very demanding and “military authoritative” father who insisted on perfection; to do the best job you can do – or don’t do the job at all. So it’s in my makeup to give my Clients 110 percent on every project that crosses my desk. I will cut corners in design or materials ONLY if they tell me to do so, but with great reservation and reluctance. And for the money I pay for a new TV set, I expect it to last for many years. My parents had an old Motorola Quasar “Works In The Drawer” TV that we had for probably 12 or more years. It was a hybrid design made with tubes and transistors, and a couple ICs. It lasted until the picture tube finally gave up. Wow! But these days, this kind of quality and reliability just isn’t seen anymore. It’s very sad really, especially in the light of technology being so advanced – you could build a DVD player that should last 20 years. And as consumers, have we, for the most part, become used to mediocrity in everything we buy?

No matter what brand I choose, it’s gonna have problems? There just has to be a balance between profits and getting your new gizmo to market before the competition, and building a product of decent quality and reliability. And it seems that the consumer public – you and me included – needs to drive this shift in corporate paradigm by DEMANDING high quality and exceptional reliability from manufacturers. And by the same token, we should also be willing to pay a little extra for it. If I want to buy some off-brand TV set for 79 bucks at Walmart, I can do that, and I’ll get what I get. But when I pay $895.00 for a bran new shiny SONY with all the bells and whistles that even pours me coffee, I EXPECT it to last and last and last. Maybe I’m too much the old school, I don’t know. But I would NEVER design in a 10 volt capacitor into a 10 volt circuit! I “might” design a 20 volt part in there if I’m in a good mood. But I’ll probably and most likely use a 50 volter! And really, what does that do to the end cost of the product? Not much.

There are so many other factors that go into the total cost to manufacture and sell an appliance. One of the biggies is that damn paranoia about lead in the environment (RoHS)! For God’s Sake, don’t people know that lead comes from the ground in the first place? How much of this is political and how much of it really makes sense in the name of public health and the environment? And a lot of the cost to make a product comes from efficiency and the internal structure of the company. Some companies are so wasteful and inefficient that they could build their products lined with gold if they’d just cut out the waste and inefficient practices, and perhaps limit those million dollar bonuses to CEOs. The list is endless, but taking such clean up measures would pay for a better capacitor, diode, or heat sink a thousand fold. And personally, I will pay more as long as I KNOW that I am buying quality. The tires on my car and the brakes I use are the best money can buy. There are some things you just don’t cheapen your way out of! I can buy a cheap DVD player if I want. But I probably won’t. I want good quality at a reasonable price. And I adhere to the Three-To-One policy: for a one year warranty, a product should last three years at the very minimum! Really, warranties are to protect the consumer from DOAs and accidental defects that can sometimes occur in manufacturing or materials. It should NOT be an indicator as to how long I can expect the product to work!

I’ve enjoyed our conversation Jim! Thank you for allowing me to rant. And you may use my name in connection with any of my comments you wish to publish. I hope if you do publish this dialog, it will get people visiting your site to thinking – and demanding – quality and reliability. Next to a fair price, what else matters?

-Dean Palmer

Dean Palmer
Engineer, NPD

MicroDyne Engineering, LLC

Queen Creek, Arizona
USA
480.888.0600
www.microdyneeng.com

“MicroDyne Engineering provides Electronics Design, Research and Development (R&D) and Prototype Design and Assembly services to customers and clients who wish to bring a new technology product idea from concept to actual hardware realization. Their goal is to provide clients and customers with product designs and solutions for markets and applications that would benefit from innovation and value-added product designs.

Reverse-Engineering services can also be provided for existing technology products and devices where the original documentation and component sources are non existent or no longer available.”

Thank you Dean for sharing your insight into the wonderful world of electronics research, design, and product development, with this first hand look into engineering and design of electronics’ products. The mind of an engineer is …

I would also like to extend a big thank you to Dean for granting permission to reprint this here.

Note, all copyrights are reserved.

Regards,

Jim Warholic

A while back, my wife and I went on a field trip for one of her extra, ongoing, lifetime, college courses to the Hiller Aviation Institute, Museum, Education and Research Center. The Hiller Air Museum is located at 601 Skyway Road, San Carlos, CA 94070. The hours of operation are from 10am to 5pm, 7days a week. Admission as of this writing is Adults – $11.00, Seniors (Age 65+) $7.00, Youths (5-17) $7.00, and Children (4 and under) free with paid adult.

This is a really fun place to take in the sights and sounds of aviation history. There are a large number of exhibits to take in. There is even a Boeing 747-136 forward section of the fuselage with the cockpit on full display that is available for viewing and even sit down in the pilot’s or copilot’s seat to move a knob or two on the avionics control panels.

There were some really cool old airplanes of yesteryear to view above your head. And there were indeed some wild looking contraptions that never got off the ground.

This is definitely a fun place to spend a half a day, or more, if you are really into the history of aviation.

Here are a few more pictures of things to view at the Hiller Air Museum.

The 1929 Stinson

Pictured above is the 1909 Wright Engine. “This is one of two airworthy copies of the 1909 Wright engine built by John Palmer. One will be used to power a replica of Robert Fowler’s 1911 Model ‘B’ airplane. The airplane will be displayed here with an original 1911 engine. This engine was built in 1998 at Campbell, CA, with the assistance of William Renaud. 30 horsepower, 170 lb. dry weight.

In addition to this being a place for adults to spend some leisurely activity, it is a great place for field trips for school students of all ages. The staff is quite knowledgeable and provides various types of guided tours and hands on activities. For more information, visit www.hiller.org for the details published online.

Have Fun!

This was an email from Marty S., who wrote, "Just wanted to let you know that there are bad caps on Apple G4 eMac logic boards. There were 5 different models, and I think there were only slight differences between the logic boards. The one in the photo is Apple part # 820-1591-A, from a 1.25 GHz system. Needs 5 units of 1000 uF 16v, and 8 units of 1800 uF 6.3v. One happy aspect that these are pre-RoHS machines, which means you can actually get the failed caps out without a struggle."

Thank you Marty for the information, and the insight about the standard solder. I have the high quality, low ESR cap kits available for sale at www.jwestsales.com.

Order your Apple eMac Capacitor Kit here.

Apple iMac G5 PSU With Ambient Light Sensor Shown

iMac G5 Power Supply Connector – P-1

On the 661-3350 power supply, jumper pins 15 (gray) and 16 (blk/gnd). This turns the supply on and you should see all the voltages listed above with a DC voltage meter. Between pins 22 and any GND, you will see approx. 24vdc, which is needed for the backlight. Note that the plug is numbered on the wired side of the connector plug. You will need some good lighting to see the numbers. A small flashlight comes in handy.

From what I have been able to tell, the other power supplies in both the 17 inch and 20 inch iMac G5 computers all used the same DC voltage pinout arrangements. I believe the voltage pinout arrangements are different on the Intel iMacs and some of the iSight models.

Please read the detailed information for repairing Apple iMac G5 power supplies.

Note: (see comment #13 below) PG acronym represents the Power Good signal and VSB represents Voltage Stand By.

If anyone has more information for any of the power supplies used on the various Mac products, including the various PPC models, Intel Models, and Power Macs, please send it to me.

Thank you.

Regards,

Jim

Welcome to my new According to Jim WordPress website look.

By now, most folks have probably heard about the end of life support for FTP publishing via the Blogger online system of being able to post directly to your own server using FTP publishing. Blogger has a FTP migration solution to transfer your FTP blog, and move it to a custom subdomain or even a blogspot.com address if you so desire. See: FTP Migration Tool Released for information and a video on how to do the Blogger FTP switch. I have used the tool on some FTP blogs, and it does work. However, I wanted to do something different here.

Welcome to my Blogger converted to WordPress blog with FTP migration changes.

This is a writeup about the procedure, tips, pitfalls, and what needs to be done for everything to work right when converting from Blogger FTP publishing to WordPress publishing.

Blogger to WordPress Conversion Criteria for Everything to Function Properly

• Switch to WordPress from Blogger FTP publishing.
• Make sure file names (including archives, labels, and posting pages) were the same from the old system to the new WP system.
• New blog must be SEO friendly and maintain Google PageRank.
• Set up .htaccess redirects for seamless intergration with new WordPress categories vs Blogger labels.
• Support for PHP “includes” for file pages.
• Allow for any type of file naming convention (i.e.: .htm, .html, or .php) at the old file names to the new file names and must be seamless from the old to the new.
• Blog posting must also include all original comments.
• Be able to merge two or more blogs together in one new WordPress blog.
• And, last but not least, as if I have to say this, the new WordPress blog must work.

Below is the process I used for converting to a WordPress blog.

Suffice it to say, there was a fair amount of work involved with the conversion.

I have to say at this point, the WordPress blogging platform is a very powerful tool. It also can be somewhat intimidating for someone to first install and use it.

Step One: Create a WordPress blog on your website.

There are a couple of things to consider when initially setting up a WordPress blog directly on your own server for the first time. If you already have an FTP blog using Blogger to a subdirectory (i.e. yoursite. com/blog) or are using the naked domain name (i.e. yoursite.com) as the FTP blog posting area for all your postings, or even multiple blogs on the same domain name with Blogger, then you will need to consider a few things before stepping forward.

In my particular case I had a number of subdirectories prior to installing a WordPress blog on my website. Since I did not have a subdirectory called “blog” I decided to install WordPress into that directory. There were two main benefits to installing it in a subdirectory. This provided a work in progress design area for creating and customizing the blog, without it affecting any of my other content on the website. This also turned into what was a major plus for the future, with an quick and easy option to make it the main website, without having to reinstall the WP blog at the root level. I’ll go into more detail with this later.

To create the blog, is very easy if you have a “cPanel” hosting provider. cPanel hosting is my favorite, because of the powerful tools available to users and webmasters. For example, most cPanel hosting providers have installed the Fantastico De Luxe software script that makes installing WordPress easy. Fantastico also makes it a breeze installing over 50 other programs such as, web content management systems, shopping carts, wikis, various blog open source software, photo sharing, surveys, and other cool software too. If you don’t have Fantastico from your hosting provider, and they do not automatically include WordPrss in the hosting package, then you will need to install WordPress manually. You can go to the WordPress website for more information and detailed direction on how to do that.

Step Two: Customization of the WordPress Blog

Once the WordPress blog is created on your sever, it is at a level that is a very basic installation but fully functional. There is a first posting created for you along with a generic template. You can use the template if you wish, but most folks will want a cool customized template, suited to their own tastes. There are thousands of WordPress templates available for free at the WordPress website or other websites online. You can even download a number of different templates and upload them to your server, and switch from one to the other with a template selection button. However, once you settle on a particular template, then you will probably want to stick with that one, because ultimately you will have more WP template customizations that you will do.

Step Three: Import Blogger Postings and Comments

First thing to do before messing with your Blogger blog is to export a backup XML file from the Blogger settings tab in the blog administrative panel. Do this first, because you will actually need this XML file later for the comments import.

The reason to import your old FTP Blogger postings is so you can eventually turn the original Blogger blog hosted on your own server, and redirect or make it so all the WordPress postings’ file names are the same as the orignal Blogger FTP postings. WordPress has an import tool that I thought was going to be the perfect tool to do the job of importing not only the postings from Blogger, but also the comments too. However, there was a problem with the importing of the comments. The WordPress import did not import all the comments. Before I go into the details on the issue with the comments, I need to point out what I did to even allow importing of the postings to the WordPress blog to begin with.

Blogger provides a FTP Blogger Migration Tool and FAQs for conversion of FTP blogs hosted on your own server, to Blogger hosted, either with a .blogspot.com subdomain name or a Custom Domain name (i.e. blog.yoursite .com). I would suggest reading that in detail to decide which way you wish to go and before clicking the FTP Migration tool in your Blogger Dashboard area.

As far as the WordPress importing postings, you need to know that you can not import directly from a FTP published blog using the WordPress import tool. It requires you to switch your blog to a blogspot.com subdomain name or yoursite custom domain name. Since I was not sure the WordPress solution was going to work for me, I still wanted the option of using the Blogger FTP Migration tool and migrating to a custom domain name permanently for writing my online articles in the future.

In my case, what I did was essentially make it so the Blogger FTP Migration would only go part way to fully completing the migration switch to my own custom domain at: abc.jimwarholic.com. I blocked Blogger from republishing the new updated meta redirected files and not letting the system automatically upload them to my server by changing the password at the Blogger administrative publishing settings tab to the wrong value. I think that is the first time I ever entered the wrong value for a password on purpose. This stopped the full migration process at the point of updating the old postings with meta redirects included in the postings. At that point in the migration process, I was provided a link to the ZIP file to download, with all of the updated files that I could manually upload to my server if I ever wanted to do that in the future. I also did not want a double content SEO penalty at abc.jimwarholic.com, so I included the following meta tag in the header section of the new blog only, to prevent the search engines from cataloging my content at the new abc.jimwarholic.com website. If you want to see how this code looks in the header section of my ABC website, click my ABC link and select view source code from your browser menu area. Also read about this at the Google Webmaster Help area online. Here is the code that I entered in the new blog:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

This provided me a safe place, and reachable online, to keep my old postings banked while I updated my main website at www.jimwarholic.com. Also note that the old original files were still sitting on www.jimwarholic.com during this whole WP conversion process and were still functional to the point that the information could be fully navigated to from the external and internal links, and the search engine results pages.

Once the old blog information was converted to the new Blogger Custom Domain name website, I was able to do a importing of the blog postings from the new website to my WordPress blog that resided at www.jimwarholic.com/blog. This however, is only half the battle. Blogger typically truncates the original blog posting file name (based on the title of the the original post) and leaves out smaller words at times in the file name. Before you do any importing of blog postings, you need to switch from the default WP file type Permalink Settings i.e. http://jimwarholic.com/?p=123 and need to turn on Custom Structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.php if you had PHP file names or /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html if you had HTML ending file names. The WP importing tool looks at the title of the article and creates a new file name with that title, but does not use the original blog file names. I then uploaded a PHP script to my blog directory that automatically converted it to the original file names. Take a look at these two articles for more details on the cool PHP script for easy file conversion from the old to the new and more details on the Blogger to WordPress migration process:

• Moving From Blogger To WordPress – Maintaining Permalinks, Traffic & SEO
• Migrating a blog from Blogger to WordPress

Now, I had my file names the same, but some of my comments were missing in some of the postings that were imported. There seems to be some sort of glitch that some folks are experiencing when importing the postings directly from the blog using the WordPress importing tool. WordPress does not provide the option of importing from the XML exported file from Blogger, but there is a workaround. Once I had the file names exactly the same way I wanted them from the past, I then used another tool at http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com to convert the saved exported Blogger XML file from the top of Step #3 into a WordPress WXR export file that can be understood by the WordPress blog import button.

You might ask, why didn’t I just use the Blogger 2 WordPress tool to begin with? Well, that is a good question, and there are a number of reasons why it was not the ideal importing solution to begin with. First off, the export/import using the Blogger 2 WordPress tool was only effective at getting all the comments and postings into the new WordPress blog. It however had difficulty with the conversion and importing of Flash files within postings, and it also did not import a custom meta tag for original file names. Since there was no reference for the original file names, there was no way to run a script automatically to quickly change the file names on these imported postings. So, what I did was go through and edit the file names manually on the ones that had the comments, and then deleted the other imported postings that were duplicates.

Yes, this all took some time to do, and it requires a bit of critical thinking skills to keep track of what is what and where is it. It helps to use two windows and do side by side comparisons. Sometimes I had to copy the entire posting from one copy to the other that had all the comments, but might have been corrupted with the Flash internally in the post itself. Other times, I had to change the file name of the one I  did not want, to make the one I did want, the same as what was there to begin with. I know this sounds a bit confusing but the WordPress file system will not let you have two files with the same name.

Step Four: Creating Custom .HTACCESS Files and Redirects

I would like to give a special thank you to Alistair MacDonald and his article on Blogger to WordPress Migration. His insights were invaluable, along with his published .htaccess files were quite helpful in getting a handle on this part of the project.

Now that I had all the post files ending the same way and structured with a .php or .html file name for the postings, I needed to address the archives, labels (Blogger has labels) and categories (WordPress has categories, and also tags and pages). Also, keep in mind that at this step of the process, when you are about to begin switching things on and making them live, it is a good idea to have a complete backup of all of our public_html files from the website. You can use a standalone FTP program or even use a browser based cross-platform FTP like FireFTP for completely backing up your server files to your local disk.

This is where things start to get a bit more interesting. Remember that I mentioned in the beginning of this Blogger FTP to WordPress posting, that I created the WordPress blog in a subdirectory called “blog”? Well, I wanted to make the blog live at the root directory and for online readers to arrive at and navigate from the root. I did not want to have the subdirectory “blog” in my postings, labels/categories, archives, tags, and separate page file names.  A really cool feature of a WordPress installation is that it can be quickly changed to make it as though it is installed at the root of the website, without having to actually install it at the root level, while still keeping all WP files in the directory where it was originally installed. What I did, was basically follow the following WordPress article backwards for setting up a WordPress blog in its own directory. It required toggling how it was published from the WP settings area and uploading a change to the .htaccess file on the server.

The following directions are very important to follow when toggling where WordPress files are being published online, as in being displayed, and where all the WordPress files are located. This is taken from the WordPress information link above with a few clarifications:

• #7. Copy the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address). The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not using pretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file.
• #8. Open your root directory’s index.php file in a text editor
• #9. Change the following and save the file. Change the line that says:
  require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);
  to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files:
  require(‘./yourdirectory/wp-blog-header.php’);
• #10. Login to the new location. It might now be http://example.com/yourdirectory/wp-admin/
• #11. If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can’t write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)
• In my case, the “yourdirectory” is: “blog” i.e. www.jimwarholic.com/blog . This is where the WordPress files are located, but the files are actually displayed without the “blog” directory being displayed at the root of the website. The root of my website is where the index.php file is located.

This is what the index.php file looks like:

/**
* Front to the WordPress application. This file doesn't do anything, but loads
* wp-blog-header.php which does and tells WordPress to load the theme.
*
* @package WordPress
*/

/**
* Tells WordPress to load the WordPress theme and output it.
*
* @var bool
*/
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, true);

/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require(‘./blog/wp-blog-header.php’);
?>

Once I performed that process above, I then pasted the following into my .htaccess file at the root level of the website:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

These rewrite conditions above effectively rewrite all the blog files to the root level of the website.

To get the labels that are in Blogger to automatically redirect to the categories in WordPress required the implementation of a couple of special things. I suggest you read Alistair MacDonald’s article on Blogger to WordPress Migration. It wasn’t absolutely necessary that the old labels be exactly the same file names, but I wanted the old label files to be redirected or renamed to “category” names.

The archive files were similar to the label files, in that they also needed to be redirected to the proper areas regardless of the file names within links online or the search engines. While the posting file names were important to remain the same, due to the number of postings I had online, I did not think it was quite as important to have the archives and the categories match exactly to the old file names.

Using the procedure on the .htaccess files I learned from Alistair MacDonald, I did the following. I first created an empty labels and archives folder (directories) in the root level (public_html area) of my website because that is where the original ones were stored from Blogger FTP. Before I created those folders at the root level, I changed the original folder names that still had the original Blogger written files, to labels-o and archives-o. Now that I had my empty folders, I then created separate .htaccess files and placed them into the previously created labels and archives directories using my cPanel File Manager. Once those were created, I then placed the following modified code for my website that Alistair had first written.

Labels: Here is what I added to the labels .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.(.*)?$ category/$1/ [R=301,L]

What this does is basically changes any labels file that someone clicks on online, and converts it to a category file at my WordPress blog.

For example the following link: http://jimwarholic.com/labels/apple.php, becomes: http://jimwarholic.com/category/apple when clicked on.

Archives: Here is what I added to the archives .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)_(.*)$ /$1/$2/ [R=301,L]

What this .htaccess file does is take the year and month of the archives and rewrites them to the root level with the following format: http://jimwarholic.com/2007/06. Notice that the archives file does not have the ending .php file name as the Blogger FTP published files, because WordPress creates the archives files by default with no file type at the end.

I also redirected the old RSS and Atom subscript feeds to the new feed file format.

RewriteRule ^atom\.xml$ /feed [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^rss\.xml$ /feed [R=301,L]

At this point in time, I was ready to write this blog posting.

By the way, I also imported some blog postings from another blog I had hosted in another subdirectory on this domain name. It was a smaller blog, with less postings, but I also did some special .htaccess file creation over at that other directory to redirect those postings directly here.

Yes, there are a few more template customizations that I intend to do for this WordPress blog but for the most part, I think I got it the way I want. I have also loaded some cool WordPress plugins that are really helpful for doing some special functions. I’ll have to write another posting on those a bit later. Feel free to tell me what you think of my new blog layout and post your comments here. You may also post your how-to questions here or send me an email.

I hope this has been beneficial to anyone looking for the procedure on how to convert from a Blogger FTP published blog to a WordPress self hosted published blog. While this information is mainly to convert to WordPress from Blogger FTP, most of the information can also be utilized in the future for importing postings from other blogs to a WordPress blog. Besides that, I can refer to this information myself in the future. Reference notes are always nice to have. Online blogging after all, is much better than taking notes the old fashioned way, and helps everyone find the information out semantically too.

Find your company online today with Professional Web Services, Internet Marketing Services. Gain new customers now!

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Regards,

Jim

PS If you come upon any glitches in my site, please let me know. Thank you very much for your input.

For high quality, low ESR, computer and switching power supply grade, long life, high temperature rated, and high current rated capacitors, go to www.jwestsales.com, your source for the Apple in you.

Note that there are at least two different iSight G5 models with different logic cards. Take a look at this one to confirm which model iSight you have.

Click the following link to purchase the iSight Mother Board Capacitors Kit.

Here is a down-loadable procedure for G5 iSight dis-assembly which can take you all the way down to and including the iSight motherboard removal.

Regards,

Jim Warholic

These USB external hard drives can be used in both a PC world and the Mac world for key backups of your system. What would you do if your computer went down? What if your hard drive were to die on you, would you be lost? Would you lose it all?

If you haven’t done a backup of your system yet, I recommend it ASAP. Be prepared is the Boy Scout motto, and now is the time to do it before your system puts you in a bind.

This is your insurance policy to keeping your pictures, documents, files, applications, and complete software system backups up to date for your future computer health and welfare.

Get your company online welfare updated today. Learn more about Internet marketing and how you can receive additional customers online now. Get a free website evaluation.

For high quality, low ESR, computer and switching power supply grade, long life, high temperature rated, and high current rated capacitors, go to www.jwestsales.com, your source for the Apple in you.
Click the following link to purchase the iSight Logic Board Capacitors Kit.

Here is a down-loadable procedure for G5 iSight dis-assembly which can take you all the way down to and including the iSight motherboard removal.

Regards,
Jim Warholic

Jim Warholic is President of Professional Web Services, Inc., an Internet marketing services company dedicated to helping B2B and B2C companies gain a larger online footprint through Internet marketing, SEO, online advertising, web branding, and strategic marketing to help companies increase their sales and improve their bottom line results. Prior to starting Professional Web Services, Jim has had a lifetime of experience and engineering expertise in the electronics field in circuit board drilling, routing, and electronics equipment maintenance and field service engineer repair services.