Thanks, Tina! My first pair of toasty slippers in a few years. These badboys are model RN 88276 and have an upper lining and sock lining consisting of 100% wool. So far I can say they are very warm and seem size 12’s seem to run a bit small on my feet (I wear size 12’s in street shoes and size 11.5 in soccer shoes). Curious to see how they compress and fit over time.
My 2001 Volkswagen New Beetle GLS had recurring OBD2 trouble codes, P0171 and P1582, coming up over the summer. Reading other threads, I popped the hood and found a short piece (~1 foot) of disintegrated hose on the left hand side of the engine block (American passenger side). I pulled off the hose clamps and what little cloth like tubing remained and replaced the tubing with black silicone tubing purchased from an eBay auction with these specifications:
The new tubing fits like a glove and the listing is still available: https://www.ebay.com/itm/161551221275.
I’ve had this hose installed for almost 4 months with exposure to hot (90 degrees Fahrenheit) and cool conditions (10 degrees Fahrenheit) and my 2001 New Beetle GLS is purring like a pussy cat again. Even better, the trouble codes have stopped.
I love my Lumma light grips. Each light/laser packs a 750 mAh battery, which work wonderfully all winter. I’ve had my Big Dummy fall sideways and smash the the Lumma light grip into concrete and except for a few scratches, they seem unfazed.
The buttons have been a little finicky, but they work. Also, the USB port cover has broken off a couple of my grips. This isn’t so bad, but it allows rain to go right inside the grips and soak the PCB. Sadly, I let this happen to a couple of my grips. After this happens, I attempted to turn the lights on and they don’t seem to want to illuminate, or they might after the first soaking and from that point forward, they only sporadically light up.
This weekend, I pulled out my two bad light grips that are exhibiting the behavior described above. Accessing the PCB is really easy, two Phillips machine screws come out and the grip housing separates. After you unplug the battery from the PCB, the board slides right out – be careful to not let the laser lens and LED gaskets to get away.
Using my 50X magnifier (thanks Frank!), I looked at the pin connections for the button and where they attach to the board. Sadly, I don’t have pictures showing a closeup of the damage, but I found that solder points between the pads and the S2 button had cracked and separated. No problem, just a little heat from my solder gun and silver solder and I’m back in business! I fixed two light grips and a third is exhibiting different behavior that I haven’t figured out how to fix yet (the third one stays illuminated and only extinguishes the red LED when either of the buttons is pressed – yeah, pretty messed up). Still, I’m tickled silly to have two other grips back in service!
Comcast emailed me about changing settings – they are no longer allowing outbound email and port 25.
My aging Loftek Nexus 543 security camera has been jamming outbound messages on port 25 for years. There are no updates for its firmware, so I logged on thinking it might be in trouble of not supporting the present. Lo and behold, its sending test messages with Comcast while configured with these settings:
We have Comcast for internet-only service. Earlier this year, we successfully removed all TV plans and charges by exchanging messages with a Comcast representative in the support area of their website:
https://forums.xfinity.com/t5/Stream-TV-App/STREAM-BETA-APP-ON-SAMSUNG-75-INCH-TV-IS-NOT-IN-FULL-SCREEN/m-p/3205833/highlight/true#M21342
– strike up a conversation with a Comcast Employee by sending a private message as described in the link above and state that you’d like to drop tv service and go with internet-only
– the Comcast Employee you connect with will walk you through options you request and help activate your new plan
Or, you may be able to do the same by logging into your account through Comcast’s website to directly manage your plan – you can opt out of television and phone plans and choose an internet-only plan:
https://www.xfinity.com/learn/offers?lob=internet
– sign in to your account
– click above link again if you weren’t already signed in
– click “View all offers”
– click “Filter”, uncheck “tv”, and check “internet”, click “Done”
– choose the internet bandwidth best for you
If you add a term to your agreement, you generally get better rates for the term duration, after which rates go back up and you may need to repeat the instructions above to improve your rates again. Good luck to you.
** December 7, 2023 **
Went through this again today and, as described above, clicking offers through your account is the most painless way to do this. Note, the rates they show you include taxes and fees, despite what it says, at least this is what I found.
January 2018, I was corresponding with LIVALL over my failed LIVALL BH81H bicycle helmet. I really liked the helmet while it worked, but first its heart rate sensor failed and then the entire helmet stopped working. Remembering the BH81H’s good days, I quickly accepted LIVALL Support’s offer to purchase a new BH61S for $35, including shipping. The BH61S is essentially a BH81H, without the heart rate sensor and a bit of a different profile, but nearly identical in operation, even down to the front-mounted buttons.
I received the BH61S in February 2018 and it came with another BlingJet 100 that I left in the box, because I found little use for the first BlingJet 100 I received with my BH81H. After opening the package, I noticed the helmet was even lighter than the BH81H, so I weighed it in at 308 grams, nice! The BH61S had nearly identical construction to the BH81H , down to the straps and padding. Also identical to BH81H is the comfort, these helmets are barely noticeable compared to the comfort of a non-smart helmet.
The pairing setup for the BH61S is identical to the BH81H, just power on the helmet with the center round button and hold it down until a female voice announces over the helmet speakers “Pairing”. The pairing was quick and painless with my iPhone 6s+. I used the helmet for the ride to work the next day, which was near 0 and found that the helmet held its charge until I got to work, about a 1.5 hour ride due to the snowy conditions. The helmet continued to charge and operate like a champ until the spring, when it got pretty wet riding home one day. I tried to towel it off as soon as I got home, but it was a soaker of a rain and the helmet didn’t respond to button presses. I let it sit by the dehumidifier for a day and the helmet started working again – woohoo! Over the 1.5 years since I started using this helmet, I found that it is very sensitive to rain – don’t get it wet.
The helmet continued to work fine through the winter of 2019, which included a snowfall in the Twin Cities that bested the previous record by nearly 50% – yikes! All through this time weather, the BH61S worked, with wetter days requiring use of the dehumidifier mentioned above. In the spring of 2019, two issues developed with the helmet. The left speaker started to cut out. In September 2019, the left speaker stopped working and the center button has also started to fail, button presses only sporadically turn the helmet on or off.
Other notes: the audio quality from the speakers lacks bass and the microphone leaves plenty to be desired. While riding and making phone calls technically works, the quality of the BH61S’ microphone may drive your telephone call recipients crazy. I have to pretty much ride at less than 5 miles per hour for people to hear me on the helmet microphone.
Since buying into LIVALL helmets, Sena (motorcycle helmet company) has developed their X1 and R1 helmets, the latter includes a model with a front-facing camera, and other companies are offering smart helmets too, including Coros and Cosmo Connected. Still, the BH61S has been enough of a winner that I’m willing to triple down with LIVALL and pursue their latest helmets, the BH51M or BH51M Neo Range, whichever I can get my hands on for less. More on this in a future review, which will most likely note how much more the BH51M-series weigh and what that means to comfort over an hour plus commute.
** Update 11-7-2019 ** The helmet has officially died again. I heard rattling inside the plastic enclosure on the front of the helmet. Taking apart showed that R22 and R23 were literally blown off the board that is now a bit black in that area. If you have info on what the resistance should be for each of these resistors, please let me know! I haven’t found the board design files anywhere on the internet (yet).
This has come up for me a couple times and I can never seem to find a good source on the web.
For my Surly Big Dummy equipped with Surly Open Bar handlebars and Rohloff Speedhub, the shift cable housing length from the Rohloff grip shifters is 87 inches. This is for the largest Dummy frame, 22 inches, built in 2008.
This has come up, because I love my Yokozuna brake cable housing, so I decided to go with their shift cables this time around. To order long enough cables and housing, consider SKU 63640, Yokozuna’s Rohloff Cable kit, which includes the following:
Will report back on how it goes.
** UPDATE 11-9-2024 **
These shift cables have yet to be changed and I can say I’ve never experienced a better cable on my Rohloff-equipped Surly Big Dummy, it simply shifts like butter.
Two weeks ago I went over the handlebars on my Pugsley while riding Monarch in Carver Park Reserve. I twisted the handlebars pretty good and screwed up the Rohloff brand shift cables and housing, which has been too stiff since I started riding the Pugsley. I plan to dial up Merry Sales and order another set or two of Yokozuna’s Rohloff shift cables, could the Pugsley’s Rohloff start to shift better than it ever has? Also, I’m going to have to figure out something to do with the cable trays on the down tube, they’re too close to the front of the bike and force the cable housing into an odd position that I believe caused the stiff shifting the current housings and cables exhibit.
We have a couple high capacity drives attached to a Mac mini running macOS Server on High Sierra. Family Macs use Time Machine to back up to these drives. At some point, my wife’s password on her Mac (running Mojave) changed from what was on the mini and Time Machine began to error out. Some foreshadowing: she uses the same username on the mini and her Mac.
After her password on the mini changed, her Time Machine backups displayed the following error messages:
“There was a problem connecting to the server”
“Time Machine can’t connect to the backup disk”
“OSstatus error 65”
Basic troubleshooting called on me to make a manual connection using Finder (command K) from her Mac to the mini – mounting the drive was successful, so I went back to Time Machine and tried from there, but the same errors above barfed out. Frustrating.
From Terminal on my wife’s Mac, I pasted in the following line:
log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info | grep 'upd: (' | cut -c 1-19,140-999
I pasted output from the command into Google and came across this post on Apple’s site:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7898878
Yes, Satrop’s issue and fix is it! The username on my wife’s Mac is identical to the username on the mini and somehow this disturbs things if the password changes. To get around this issue, I decided to use the following workaround, which is essentially changing the credentials on her Mac for how it mounts the mini. From her Mac I had to:
1. Disable Time Machine by System Preferences->Time Machine->Select Disk…->(click the disk you’re trying to mount)->Remove Disk.
2. In Keychain.app, remove all instances of the saved password to your NAS, in my case the mini. I searched for “mini” and “10.0.1.125” and deleted those instances.
3. From Finder, mount the mini’s disk (Command K) using my own credentials, which obviously differ from hers.
4. After the disk mounts, go back to System Preferences->Time Machine->Select Disk…->(select the mounted disk – I used AFP to mount the disk, so when I hovered over it I could see its address had the AFP protocol).
5. Success! When you quit Time Machine preferences, it should automatically start a new backup (or continue an existing one).
I have posted on installing and removing Homebridge platforms and accessories, which is even easier with a Homebridge web user interface called “homebridge-config-ui-x”. I installed it with Terminal.app and the following command:
sudo npm install -g –unsafe-perm homebridge-config-ui-x
By installing this package, you’ll be able to install and uninstall packages and accessories and update Homebridge’s config.json file with a graphical user interface. Be sure to open port 8080 or whatever port you prefer from the outside so you can gain remote access (or just access it from inside your network for better security). If you open it to the outside, be sure to change the default username and password 🙂
** UPDATE 12-24-2020 **
To incorporate the homebridge.log file into the config-ui-x interface, open the config.json file (mine is here):
sudo pico /Users/bradschwie/.homebridge/config.json
and insert the following code (please note, your port number and file path will likely differ, this is what I used on a macOS Server machine):
{
"platform": "config",
"name": "Config",
"port": 8581,
"auth": "form",
"theme": "dark-mode",
"tempUnits": "f",
"lang": "auto",
"log": {
"method": "file",
"path": "/Users/bradschwie/.homebridge/homebridge.log"
}
},
Last summer, the plastic micro-USB covers snapped off my lovely Romanian Lumma Systems Grip Lights. I had plenty of time to find new covers, but of course didn’t and could have at least covered the port with a large rubber band, but I digress.
This spring, I carelessly rode through a few spring showers that seemingly shorted out my lights. The lights will still somewhat work when pressing the button, but they randomly turn on and off and cycle through modes all by themselves. Fortunately the laser still works. I happened to be one of the lucky backers who received all three sets of lights that I ordered, which means I still have a couple working sets to roll with, but I really want to fix up my broken left Grip Light.
I pulled two phillips screws out of the grip light and disconnected its power cable. The board slides out of the housing by gently prying up on the rubber fittings around each LED. Using my digital multimeter, I delicately poked around the PCB, which isn’t all that complicated. I soon found resistors R7, R8, and R14 to have given up their ghosts. R7 is marked 470, R8 is covered in rust and unreadable, and R14 is marked 220. I’ll try to verify R8 on another board, but it will probably be covered in dried hot glue unless I tear some away to expose it.
I don’t have the proper board level soldering gun to attempt this repair, but I may give it a shot with my pencil soldering iron and try to replace the blown resistors. Will post an update later if I can size and source the resistors.