New Door Closer

Perhaps it is already too old. Perhaps it couldn't withstand being opened up to 120°, sometimes up to 5 times per day. My DIY door closer quick and dirty repair only lasted 9 months. I had a final look at it and concluded that it is really beyond repair this time. There is nothing more that I can do to revive it. The only thing I could do now is to get a new one.

So, I went online and bought a new one from Lazada Malaysia. Looks nothing like the old one but it is functional. Installation is easy. It is just a matter of drilling the necessary holes on the door frame and later attaching it with the provided screws. Tension on the new door closer is adjustable (hex key is included in the package) but I find this unnecessary.

New PSU For My Lenovo Thinkcentre m70e

Now that I know the offending component is the power supply unit (PSU), now to go out hunting for one.

Prolink DH-5102U USB Wireless Adapter - My Experience

First off, this is not a sponsored post nor was I paid by anyone. And second, I am not a expert in USB wireless adapters for PCs. All I am doing here is to share my knowledge and experience in using this USB wireless adapter from Prolink model DH-5102U (Note: This is a Lazada Malaysia affiliate link). The only reason why I bought this adapter is because it was being offered at a special price at my time of purchase in July 2023. More importantly, it supports the Linux operating system. So far, I have used it on Windows XP, Windows 7, LUbuntu 18.04 and Linux Mint 21.2 XFce. On the whole, I find this device to be usable. Unfortunately, it has its limitations too.

Resurrected And Still Good

Would you believe it. After three years my 'dead' Lenovo Thinkcentre m70e desktop PC is still good. All I did was to just plug in a spare over-sized power supply unit (PSU), power it up and it just came back on - right into the screen complaining about no boot media. To get rid of this error screen, I then plugged in its hard disk (which I have removed for other uses) and Windows 7 just booted up like nothing has happened since July 2020.

I can't believe it. I almost trashed a good working computer.

Keeping Canon Selphy Printing Glitches At Bay

Nine months ago I bought a Canon Selphy CP1300 photo printer. Printed some photos when I first received it and I was happy with how the photos came out. Superb print quality. The best part, I bought it at an unbeatable price because of the Lazada 11.11 sale. Essentially after all the discounts, I got the photo paper and cartridge for free. In case you didn't know, no paper or cartridge is included with the printer, unless it is a bundled deal.

Some 2 weeks later, I printed some photos again. Not sure why, but this time there was a glitch on the first print. Three coloured dots on the output that were not in the original JPEG image (see picture above). I was disappointed obviously. Subsequent prints however went perfectly. A big sigh of relief. Thank god.

But what went wrong on the first print?

Dual Boot Linux Mint Upgrade

Not too sure what happened but my LUbuntu upgrade (reinstall actually) from 18.04 to 22.04 went horribly wrong. What I ended up in the end after the 'upgrade' was a non-bootable PC with no recognisable operating system detected! I panicked obviously. Something about problems in creating a file system and unable to proceed. Nothing that made sense to me.

I reinstalled WinXP from backup, reinstalled LUbuntu 18.04 and everything was back to where it was. A big sigh of relief. Luckily. Nothing went missing or corrupted. Next course of action - backups. Before that I didn't do any as my previous Linux and Ubuntu installation were non problematic.

Linux Mint

I looked around for another distro, found Linux Mint Xfce with favourable reviews and it suites me fine with my 2GB RAM PC. I then decided to give it a go.

Chinese Pond Heron - Breeding Plumage

Learnt something new today. These Chinese Pond Herons, they look different depending on the season. This blog post contains pictures of a Chinese Pond Heron in its winter plumage.

The two pictures in this blog post here is how it looks in its breeding plumage.

Replacement Thermostat For Morgan 1.7L Cordless Kettle

It has been 4 months. So far, so good. The replacement thermostat, a Sunlight SLD-118, works fine on my Morgan 1.7 litre cordless kettle. Rated at 10 Amps 250V, it still boils water within 5 minutes. Auto shutoff works.

Replacement was easy. It is just a matter of pulling out the live and neutral wires, removing the old thermostat and then putting in the new, and plugging in the wires back again.

x264 Warning: MB Rate [489110] > level limit [245760]

I got this warning dialog box towards the end of Step 1 and Step 2 while saving my video in VirtualDub2.

Never had this before ever since I processed my videos before uploading to Dreamstime. I was stumped.

But this helps. I set the 'Level' parameter in the x264 configuration dialog box to 4.2 (from 4.1) and the warning never occurred again.

Problems with the frame rates per second (fps) of my video I think. I never had this problem with 30 fps video, but this popped up when my video was set at 60 fps.

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More Kittens

More kittens in my house.

Date of birth: 3rd April 2023. Time: around 2:15 p.m. That was when we heard the sound of some baby kittens crying. We counted four, but one died 4 days later on April 7th. Mother cat is in the pink of health. Likewise for the rest of the kittens too so far.

Here are two short videos that I've made of the kittens on April 6th:

Old Door Closer Repair

Took me a while to figure it out, but I managed to repair the old door closer to one of the netting doors in my house. All I used was just a small block of scrap wood and a screw that I scavenged from an old VCD player.

Misleading Error Message - "A New CPU Installed"

I didn't change anything. The same old PC that I have had for 13 years. Still runs fine. But why this "New CPU installed!" error message every time when I boot up my PC?

The answer finally revealed about a fortnight ago.

New Cat In Town

New cat in town. Date of birth is 17th November 2022. Time of birth, around 9 A.M. Kitten has another sibling but it went missing 4 days later. We have no idea what happen to it. So sad.