Emergency Laptop Repairs

We are 4 days from leaving for Africa and a Dell C400 laptop had its cooling fan quit. What do I do when there is not enough time to order a new cooling fan? Cobble the repair, so here is how it is done. First I replaced the fan with a normal cooling fan, it is glued into place. I cut the top edge of the fan back a little bit to allow more air to escape towards the CPU cooling heat sink.


The next problem is that the old fan ran on 5 volts and the new one runs on 12 volts. So I had to tap into 12 volts somewhere and here is where I did that.

Cheap printer Cartridges

About a year ago I bought some generic ink cartridges on EBay. They leaked and were replaced with a second set of generic cartridges. Unfortunately they did the same thing. It was so bad that the blue turned red from the leaking ink! Note that the only clean one is the Real Epson cartridge. The moral of the story is to use the genuine ink cartridges.

Frozen Pipes

I returned from Florida to find out that the heat was off and that the pipes were frozen and had burst. Some of the valves and fittings were burst as well.


So I moved the sink out of the way and cut a hole in the floor to find the breaks in the pipes. Three of the pipes were broken as well as some fittings.

I removed all of the copper pipes, then started in the basement and ran all new 1/2 inch CPVC pipes. OOPS! I had to open it all back up and put in a new drain to the sink..

Then we replaced the drain to the tub as well. this required cutting a slot into the wall. You can see the water damage in the discolored wall paper.


The new drain pipe runs all the way down to the basement. We covered it with new 3/8 inch sheet rock so it all looks great now.

Yellowstone Rumblings and Earthquakes

I thought I would update this post by showing a map of the US and the locations of all of the earthquakes that have happened in just the last week. It is getting crazy. They are now predicting a volcano in Alaska as well as Yellowstone. What about southern California??

Rumblings, that's how I would describe it. In the news just a few days ago there was a report on the rumblings at Yellowstone. They quieted down on Jan 2 but rose up again on Jan 9 then quieted down again. The picture below is from Big Hole Peak Montana where there are rumblings going on now. As you can see after a few hours it quieted down too. What is going on here? I found similar results for January 2 and December 29 th.




If we hop over to Whitefish Montana there is something going on there too. This is more like an earthquake or more like a swarm of them, smaller ones at that. This has been coming and going for a few days now.



What do I think about it? I do not have a clue. Someone speculated that it could be caused by waves of magma moving. There is no evidence as to what it is. I read someplace that it could just be miners blasting, at least the collection of smaller earthquakes could be that. Who knows but there is something unusual happening.

Here is a link so you can check them out for yourself.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/helicorders.php