Microwave magnetron replacement

Important note: microwave oven contains very high voltage and should be handled with extreme care.

Our GE Spacemaker microwave broke (again). This time it was the magnetron. One of the isolators on the filament connector burned out and the current started flowing between the connector and the magnetron body. This was accompanied with loud noise and sparks.

Turned out that the magnetron has very long warranty - 10 years. If your magnetron goes, contact your microwave manufacturer before buying a new part. Few days later I received a new magnetron.
The microwave repair FAQ states that the high voltage diode must be replaced together with the magnetron. I found this to be true because as soon as I turned on the oven after magnetron replacement the old diode went up in smoke.

Replacement diode from the manufacturer was priced astronomically high. In my opinion $50 for a $2 part is a bit overpriced. I started looking for suitable replacement. As it turned out most household microwaves use diodes with the current from 0.3A to 0.5A. Our GE Spacemaker had diode with the current of 0.35A and voltage of 12kV. Most of the places that sell microwave parts do not specify any parameters on the parts that they sell. On ebay however one can find diodes with the stated parameters but most of them ship out of China and have shipping time of several weeks. I was able to find one person selling NTE517 diode for a reasonable price. This diode should be able to replace HV diode in pretty much any household microwave. It has Vpk-15kV and Io-550mA. The person was selling two versions of the diode, one without mounted connectors and one with connectors. I found one without connectors first so I bought this one. If you have problem with soldering or just want to save some time the one with connectors is a good choice just for a few $$ more. I cut connectors off the old one and soldered them to the new one. Original connectors are crimped to the leads but soldering them is OK too. After that I used heat shrink tubing to isolate one connector. Original diode was isolated with medium thickness tubing which should be good up to 20kV. I could not find that type of tubing so I used just a regular tubing and that seems to work just as well. It probably will not hold if the diode is touched while under voltage, but I do not have suicidal tendencies and have no plans of touching it.

The lessons from owning and fixing the GE microwave are following:

* GE microwaves are poorly designed and poorly made. For the appliance that is built in to the cabinets they sure break a lot. Our microwave is cracked in several places, some that are not even touched.

* GE charges way too much for parts although they ship promptly.

* NTE517 is a good replacement diode for most of the household microwaves.

DELL D610 Power Button Fix

We own total of 3 Dell D610 laptops. These were very popular at some point and now they are cheap and plentiful. If the laptop works it is not a bad machine for email and web browsing. Although running most of the flash games it is out of the question. But this post is not about how good the laptop is but about one common problem. These laptops tend to stop reacting to the power button. User has to press power button harder and harder which in fact makes the problem worse.

The problem is that the power button is mounted on the panel and the panel is plugged in to the female connector on the main board. The female connector is soldered poorly on some models and gets loose from the motherboard. It is held just by solder and nothing else.

To fix the power button one must almost completely disassemble the laptop. I would not get in to the disassemble procedure as it is available online elsewhere. The goal is to expose this connector and effectively to take out the motherboard. The connector must be accessible with the soldering iron from all sides.

You will need two soldering irons, one about 40 to 60 watt with a large tip and one 25 watt with a small tip.

After disassembling the laptop, reheat large pads of the connector with the large iron and small pads with the small iron. Make sure the solder is melted well and connection is restored. The power button will work like new after that. Do not overheat motherboard and the connector otherwise you are risking lifting the cooper trace.

DELL Lattitude E6510

Recently I got a new Dell laptop at work. This new laptop replaced a 6 year old Lattitude D600, which was still working well but became too slow to run all the software, that IT installs on our work computers.
I love new computers. They are slicker, faster and better than the old ones. A lot of technology is packed in the new laptops. In any event this was my mood until I started to use this machine.
The one I got was nearly top of the line Lattitude E6510. It has Core i7 with 4 cores and 8 total threads, 4GB of ram and 250GB hard drive (our standard memory size to run a 32 bit OS), 1920x1080 led screen, decent video card and what ever else came in the bundle.
When I just started using it, I was pretty impressed how fast this machine was. I also liked the back-lit keyboard which allows you to work in the dark environments, like an airplane. The fingerprint reader is a nifty gadget, as well as built in camera and the microphone. I guess these things were around for a while, I just never had a laptop that had them all.
I was quickly disillusioned after using that machine for a few days, especially away from my desk. The keyboard on this laptop is terrible. The internal design has metal parts rubbing against each other during the key press, so all of the larger keys squeak in a very annoying way. I had to pop most of the keys and put a small dub of lithium grease one the metal parts. This becomes old very fast, especially when you are traveling and don't have the grease handy. Also powerful processor does come with the price - heat and short battery life. The machine is hot and noisy. The fan makes annoying purring noise and almost permanently turned on. The battery lasts under 2 hours, which is less than my 6 year old laptop did. I can't figure out how to make it last longer. All I want is to edit a file in Word or a text editor and have the machine last for longer than 2 hours, is that too much to ask?
The speakers are next to the keyboard and protected by a grill with the small holes drilled through it. The holes accumulate dust and grime and are impossible to clean with anything but a brush. I prefer speaker grill to be easier to clean or at least be some place that does not get dirty easily.
The machine is heavy but this is not a complaint. I knew how heavy it was when I ordered it. It does not bother me, but people looking for a lighter machine should avoid this laptop.
The bottom line that I miss my old laptop. It was slow but it was solid and had pretty good battery life. With my 2 batteries it could last a whole flight across Atlantic. This one not so much.
On the bright side, looking on how poorly this laptop is made, it will not last 6 years and I will have to get a new one in a year or two.

Nissan Cube is a bad car

I got this car as a rental during my week long business trip. I was somewhat excited to drive it because the styling is funky and I like hatchbacks. As I got more familiar with the car my opinion slowly deteriorated and eventually reached the low point. I would not recommend this car to anyone.
I will start with the good things. This car full of gadgets - voice activated radio with cellphone synchronization. Car comes with key-less entry and a lot of cup/bottle holders. I counted 7 total, but maybe there was more. There is a lot of headroom but I doubt that the tall person can use it.

Now for the bad things. The ergonomics of this car are terrible. I am not a short person but not a tall one ether. From the driver seat I could not reach pretty much anything in this car. I could not reach radio, dashboard, parking break, mirror, light switches in the front. I barely could reach steering wheel because it only adjusts up and down. The seat is utterly uncomfortable, there is no lumbar support at all, and that should be present given that the seating position is mostly vertical. Trunk space is tiny, I doubt that large piece of luggage will fit in trunk. I guess if the back seats are dropped you can fit pretty large piece in the back. The back door is large and can accommodate large TV or probably a twin mattress. The gas mileage is pretty bad for the car with such a small engine. The indicator in the car showed that I was averaging 29MPG. I guess this is because of the car's boxy form.
The materials inside are cheap as pretty much expected for the car in this price range. The interesting thing that with all the gadgets presents, the simplest features are missing. There is no automatic light turn shut off which should be present at any price range in this point of time.
I honestly cant tell who Nissan was targeting with this car and I honestly wonder how many did they sell.
I would not recommend this car even as a rental because of uncomfortable seats.

Driver Sweeper - a handy utility

Driver Sweeper is a handy utility to remove traces of the drivers that uninstallers leave behind. I did not know about it until a guy from PowerColor tech support pointed it out. Even when re-installing new version of the driver it may be handy to run this utility to remove all files from the old driver. Turned out that NVidia uninstaller leaves a lot of things behind. This utility is currently maintained so it should be safe to use.

PowerColor Radeon 6850

I got PowerColor Radeon 6850 to replace my aging EVGA-8800GT. I run a lot of benchmarks with that card and my conclusion is not very favorable. The card works only slightly better than the old 8800GT. People report huge improvements with this card, but I did not get any of it. There is an improvement but it is not that great and mostly at higher resolutions. At lower resolutions the 6850 performs worse than the 8800!? Maybe it is my system but I am not at all happy with the result. I will keep this card for a year or so and then will probably upgrade it.

One advantage the new card has is that it consumes less power when running in plain windows and not doing anything 3D. It also allows computer to go in to low power standby. Previous card had trouble shutting down completely.

Update:
After using this card for a few days, I would say it is more or less OK. I would not consider it a bargain but since I already paid for it, I would use it until something better comes along.
It plays Crysis 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 well enough.

Printing from Picasa on HP 6500

Picasa is our standard image organizer. It has just enough features to be useful and the integration with picasaweb.google.com is handy. We used to run a small server at home using our DSL line but after using picasaweb we gave up our server.

One can print images from Picasa but one needs to make sure that color management is set correctly and correct print settings are selected in the Printing Shortcuts tab. Correct settings will allow the printer driver to select proper color management so the colors in the image look natural.

Photos on Officejet 6500

After I refilled ink in the HP Officejet 6500 I started to wonder how would photos come out when printed on this printer. The ink being not a problem anymore it was worth giving photos a try. I run out to the nearest store and got a cheapest HP paper I could get - HP Everyday Photo Paper. It runs just under $10 for a pack, still expensive comparing to Costco prints, but it was the cheapest paper in the store.

First 4 photos I tried to print from Picasa. They came out a bit dark and with a strong green tint. I was somewhat disappointed and started looking for a printer calibration software. Not finding anything free and simple, another idea downed on me. What if I print directly from the printers memory card slot? I found a nice picture still on a memory card with a lot of colors and blue skies. The printing procedure on this printer is a bit cumbersome. The menu system is not very intuitive and a bit awkward to navigate. At the end it was not so bad and I manged to print that picture. It came out very good! Colors are accurate and bright. Photo itself is very reasonable for a quick print. I have re printed another picture just to make sure green tint was gone, and it was! So I guess if the software does not give the desired results, there is always a memory card slot.

I think this printer is very usable for printing photos and refill ink is great! Not worse than the original HP ink.

Inkjets and Razor Blades

My HP printer run out of ink after only 20 pages or so. I went to Costco for more ink and was shaken by the price of the OEM ink cartridges. The set of color and bw cartridges cost $100!? This is pretty much the price of a new printer on sale. My initial reaction was to return this printer back to Costco and never touch any inkjet printer again. If I had found out about this sooner, like within 90 days, I wold definitely return it. Now I do not feel like pushing my problems on Costco. After all it was my fault that I did not do enough research.

This time I researched my alternatives to the HP ink rip off. Surprisingly there are several alternatives:

• Re-manufactured OEM cartridges. These are the original cartridges that were re-filled by someone and re-sold. They are much cheaper than the originals but people have mixed experience with them. They are still too expensive per page.
• Refill services. You take or send your cartridge to the refill place. They clean it and refill it with the ink. The one I was particularly looking at was Costco refill service.
• Refill kits. You get ink in a bottle and refill cartridge yourself. This is the cheapest method.

I tried the Costco service to refill the black cartridge. They did a good job and were relatively cheap. Not much cheaper than the original HP cartridge though. The Costco refill cost me $8.60 and the new cartridge of the same type costs $10. If you have a larger XL cartridge it may be worth it though.

I went to Amazon and ordered a refill kit for around $15 including shipping. The kit came with total 6 bottles of ink - 3 black and 3 color. Each bottle contains 100ml of ink. The kit also came with 4 syringes with needles, plugs, drill bit and instructions. The instructions can be found in many places online and I have read them before.

I refilled ink by slowly dripping it in on the felt in the outlet port. Each color cartridge took around 4ml of ink. I overfilled yellow as it was my first cartridge but after that all went very smoothly. Now I have 4 full cartridges and can print anything I want.

The price for the ink does not even compare with the price of a new cartridge. Effectively for the price of 1.5 cartridges you get 25 refills of color and probably more of black. I am not sure how many times the ink can be refilled but even one time was worth it.

This experience really makes me wonder how much profit HP makes of these cartridges and what is their profit margin. The razor blade business has nothing on the inkjet cartridge business.

How to make a great pizza

I was working on my pizza skills for several years, trying to make a perfect crust. Now I want to share my findings to help people in avoiding mistakes that I made.

Over several years I read a lot of theory and tried a lot of dough recipes. Occasionally the pizza would come out great but most of the time it was hit and miss. Finally I found the magic ingredient - water. At the end it is all about hydration. The correct ratio of liquid to flower makes all the difference. We like very particular kind of pizza, chewier, stretchier crust, and that what was hard to obtain.

We make our dough in a bread machine, but mixer would work just as well. You would have to find a warm place to let the dough rise, but other than that the steps are the same. You definitely need a kitchen scale to measure the ingredients. I tried to use measuring cups but it is just too imprecise to get consistent results. This amount of ingredients makes one 12" crust or two smaller ones:

• 300 g of all purpose flower or a bread flower. Bread flower makes for a better dough but regular flower works just as well.
• 2 tsp of active dry yeast. You can use a little less but no less than 1tsp.
• 3/8 tsp of table salt
• 1 tsp of sugar or 1 tbsp of honey. Honey will make dough taste a bit on a sweet side.
• 200 g of water, room temperature (70 - 80F)
• 2 tbsp of olive or vegetable oil. We use olive oil from Costco which appears to be pretty good. You can use any vegetable oil that you like. I used safflower oil with great results.

Now all you need is time and patience. Put ingredients in above order in the bread machine. Turn on the bread machine and let the ingredients mix and form a dough at the bottom of the pan. It should take about 5 minutes or less. The dough ball does not have to be smooth, the ingredients just have to be mixed well. Now turn off the bread machine and set your timer for 20 minutes. This step is very important to make a stretchier dough. During this step gluten forms due to chemical reaction between water and flower.

After 20 minutes pass, turn your bread machine on the dough cycle and let the cycle complete. It usually takes around 1:30 min to complete. At this point your dough will be almost ready.
If you are using a mixer, knead the dough for about 20 minutes until it forms a ball that clears the sides of the mixing bowl. After kneading is complete, place the dough in the oiled container in a warm place to rise for an hour.

If you were using a bread machine, transfer the dough in to an oiled container and cover with clear plastic wrap. Container must be about 2x size of the dough ball as the dough will rise more. The dough will be sticky and to prevent it from sticking to your hands just oil them. After the dough is in the container and covered, put it in the refrigerator for a final rise. You can bake it immediately but pizza will be better if you let the dough rise. The dough will also be easier to work with when it is cold. The dough can be kept in the refrigerator up to 24 hours. Usually I make the dough in the morning and have the pizza for dinner so the dough is rising in the refrigerator for about 6 to 7 hours.

After few hours you are ready to bake your pizza. Real pizza places have big ovens that run at over 500F and a lot of people think that this is the only way to bake pizza. I think that this is completely wrong. One can bake pizza at home in a regular oven and get a great result. Modern home ovens go to 600 F which is more than enough. But even if your oven does not go that high you will be just fine.

To bake your pizza you will need a pizza stone and a pizza pan. The stone will let you to get a good crust. You can buy one online or in the store. The prices range from $10 to $50 but any stone should work. More expensive one probably holds heat better. We use one for about $20 and it works fine. When not in use you can just leave it in the oven. You can clean the stone with the rest of your oven on the cleaning cycle. The stone comes out like new.

Place the rack in the lowest position, just above the heating element. Place the stone on the rack in the center of the oven. Normally you can not bake anything directly over the element but the stone will block direct heat and protect your pizza from burning. Set oven to 500F and let it heat for a good 20 minutes or more.

After you started your oven, take the dough out of the refrigerator and place it on a flowered surface to warm up. After about 10 to 15 minutes stretch the dough in to a pizza pie. I use a 12" pizza pan, which is convenient for larger pizza. When selecting a pizza pan do not buy a heavy cast iron pan because it would take a long time to heat up. Aluminum pan with a large number of holes works well as it allows hot air trough and reduces weight of the pan and lets the pizza to get hot quickly.

If you are having trouble working with the dough, oil your hands a little or put some flower on your hands. The dough is soft and sticky as it contains high amount of water. This water will allow the dough to rise when placed in the hot oven. After you formed the pizza pie you can let the dough relax for a few minutes. If you want a thick, puffy crust, cover the dough with a kitchen towel and let it rise for 30 minutes or so. During this time you can cut your toppings and shred your cheese.

One thing to remember is not to overdo the toppings. When baked in a large oven, pizza can have more toppings but in the home oven overloaded pizza will come out soggy. My topping list consists of following:

• about 100g of cheese - a rectangle an inch thick cut from the block of cheese.
• quarter of a bell pepper
• half of circle of a large onion about 5mm thick
• one sweet Italian sausage split small pieces about 1/2" in diameter.
• several tbsp of pizza sauce to cover the crust in a thin layer.

Total maybe 200g to 250g of toppings. You can try starting with this amount and slowly increasing making sure that your oven can handle the amount.

Put your toppings on the pizza and place it in the oven. Close the oven and lower the temperature to 460-450F. Pizza should finish baking in around 10-12 min depending on the amount of toppings. When the cheese becomes golden brown and bubbles all around the pizza the baking is finished. Also watch for the crust edges to become slightly golden. Be sure to monitor your pizza through the door as things can change quickly. Do not open and close the oven door because it lowers the temperature of the oven.

When pizza is ready, take it out the oven and let it rest for a few minutes. You can garnish it with fresh basil or shredded Parmesan cheese.

Enjoy your pizza!

These are few of mine.