XBOX 360 Red Ring Of Death DIY

Prevention DIY, not fixing. Yahoo! News is reporting that Microsoft has come up with a fix for new consoles, and it got me curious about the problem, so here we go:

They used the wrong kind of solder in the XBOX 360. They used lead-free solder. They used lead-free solder because the [deleted]s in Europe passed the RoHS directive and now you can't use lead solder in anything sold in Europe. Microsoft would like to sell XBOXes in Europe, so they used lead-free solder.

So?

So lead-free solder sucks. It is WAY WAY WAY less tolerant of imperfect application, as well as being harder to work with and requiring more-frequent replacement of your soldering tips. Oh, and it contaminates lead solder tools so you have to have two sets. And you can't use it on lead soldered boards, or vice-versa. Oh, and the main problem with it is that it's brittle

So?

So when your XBOX overheats, it melts the solder holding the two most important chips inside (the CPU and GPU) and they can move around. Moving microchips = bad = 3 red lights ring of death failure.

Hold on there.

How is this a DIY?

You can do what I did. When I first got the XBOX I noticed that, after running for a while in a cabinet with passive ventilation, the fans were loud as [deleted] and the exterior case was pretty warm to the touch. Being an electronics technician by training and an informed person generally, I know that when the outer case of an appliance is warm, the insides are REALLY FREAKING HOT!!!!!1!! and that's BAD.

I rigged up active cooling for my entertainment center. It ended up with a 6" fan directly behind the XBOX, sucking the hot air coming from the XBOX and blowing it out of the cabinet. Cool air was drawn in the bottom of the cabinet. The fan was quieter than the fans in the gaming console and, in fact, was often left on because we didn't notice it was running.

The fans on the console never sped up, ever, even a little bit, after that.

BAM! No overheating, no melted solder, no problem.

Obama: STILL Unwilling To Prove Qualification for Presidency.

This is not Chicago. Problems do not just go away in America because you ignore them. Philip Berg is still trying to get the President to prove (by showing one sheet of paper which he could request by mail if it existed) that he is not an illegal alien from Kenya.

Savage had Berg on the radio a few days back and I forgot to mention it but I will now, and mention that Berg is not the only Serious Person unwilling to just let the whole unpleasant affair drop.

Still I have not seen a report on this national controversy in the obama-friendly mainstream press. I guess it doesn't help my odds of seeing that report, that I don't watch the mainstream news. Nah, that's like saying that playing the lottery increases your odds of winning. (that's a government school math joke, haha)

U.S. Pulls Out Of "Durban II" Conference

Wow, that was fast. It hasn't even started yet, but it was pretty easy to see that the Durban Review Conference was going to go straight for pure racist and anti-semite before it even left the gate.

So we left the table before we sat down to it. I guess Freeman hasn't had a chance to poison BHO's mind yet.

Pray for your country, Christians, and pray for President Obama in particular, that he be given extra wisdom and discernment. With the crowd he's gathering around himself, he is going to need them.

U.S. Pulls Out Of

GOP Won't Endorse Queer Agenda: "What Are You, Crazy?"

Chairman Steele may not have the true meaning of the second amendment down pat just quite right, but here's one topic about which he seems to have got the message:

Americans do not believe in changing the foundational unit of society for the convenience of a 3% minority group's preferred, deviant, unhealthy, sexual behavior!

According to WorldNet Daily his exact words, when interviewed by Mike Gallagher were:

"What would we do that for? What are you, crazy? No."

I am about to fire off a congratulatory e-mail to Chairman Steele for his willingness to stand against the political pressure of the radical queers and ridicule the very idea of "the conservative party in America." going for such a paradigm shift away from everything that is good.

If the Good People out there keep the pressure up, we just might have a few half-decent candidates to vote for in 2010, and it will be 1994 all over again. THEN, by God, we would have some genuine liberty-friendly congressional deadlock!

Hurry Up Before the People Notice! U.N. Convention On The Rights Of The Child, PASS IT NOW!

Sorry, too late you commie [deleted].

Senator Boxer -D(ingbat, California) is trying to hurry up and get the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child ratified by the Senate. If you are a person who values the rights of a parent to raise the child, you should be calling your senators' office ON MONDAY MORNING to be sure they know not to sign on to this mess, especially if they are a Democrat.

Children don't have rights many rights of their own, aside from the right to life, except as devolved from their parents. Unless you don't believe in the authority of parents because you had a bad father and became an international socialist, that is. I'll let WND's writing stand in for mine, because it's the same arguments no matter who typed it:

"According to the Parental Rights website, the CRC dictates the following:

Parents would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings to their children.

A murderer aged 17 years, 11 months and 29 days at the time of his crime could no longer be sentenced to life in prison.

Children would have the ability to choose their own religion while parents would only have the authority to give their children advice about religion.

The best interest of the child principle would give the government the ability to override every decision made by every parent if a government worker disagreed with the parent's decision.

A child's "right to be heard" would allow him (or her) to seek governmental review of every parental decision with which the child disagreed.

According to existing interpretation, it would be illegal for a nation to spend more on national defense than it does on children's welfare.

Children would acquire a legally enforceable right to leisure.

Teaching children about Christianity in schools has been held to be out of compliance with the CRC.

Allowing parents to opt their children out of sex education has been held to be out of compliance with the CRC.

Children would have the right to reproductive health information and services, including abortions, without parental knowledge or consent.

The government would decide what is in the best interest of a children in every case, and the CRC would be considered superior to state laws, Farris said. Parents could be treated like criminals for making every-day decisions about their children's lives. "

In Case You Were Getting Your Hope Up

Here are 20 graphs from Calculated Risk to smack you back down out of the glowbama.

The economy is still on the way down, big-time.

You may ask: Why all the fuss and focus on the housing sector? Because, unless you're a business, a house is where all the "stuff" that makes up the industry of our nation ends up. If you don't have a house, you don't need appliances, large or small, like you do in an apartment. You don't need garden tools, you don't need about a zillion other things that people produce here (providing jobs) to sell here (providing more jobs). If you failed economics 101, this will not help you.

If you understand what's going on, you will only have to say, "yep."

Despite the reports of slightly less-negative indicators here & there by the mainstream press, I have a message for you: The hurt will continue. Stand by.

If David Is Not His Job, What Is His Job?

I just wrote that I am not my job. The question arises then, what do I do for a paycheck?

I sell junk on eBay.

It's a little more complicated than it sounds, but that's the cliff's notes version. I work at a company of about 20 people, with a 90,000 square-foot $4M building mostly full of pallet racks holding "stuff" 3 to 5 levels high. The buyers go to auctions, facility closings, garage sales, wherever they can 'buy low.' The stuff is sorted and a lot of it gets sent straight to a recycling division. Those things worth the effort/time/hassle are taken apart and the cool bits are sent along to the distribution area. Testing, cleaning and photography, as well as making ads, is my part of it. I put a barcode label on an item and stick it on a shelf and the inventory fairy makes it disappear until it sells, for anywhere from negative to multiples of 100% profit. All told, the gross is somewhere in the $1-2M range annually, and the fees we pay eBay each month, and the electric bill every quarter, are more than I pay for my mortgage note each month.

BDI Baltic Dry Shipping Index: Recovery or False Hope?

I mentioned previously that the BDI had fallen off a cliff but the crash seemed to be slowing in November 2008. Here it's February 2009 and the our clueless fearless leaders are starting to get the idea that the economy in the US is still on the decline. Well, duh.

But have a look at this here: (click the image to enlarge)



It is entirely possible that this is a sign of foolish optimism on the part of people who make things that require dry shipping. The whole shebang could fall down again. I would prefer to see this new, slightly higher-than-historic level of the BDI continue. If it does, that means we have possibly (worldwide) gone from the leg to the bottom of the current L-shaped recession/depression.

If there is a rebound to levels like what we saw in 2008, that is actually bad for your wallet. We need this depression, as I have previously said, to return the worldwide economy to sane price/income levels. I anticipate that, whatever level the BDI settles on for a few months, it will not rise much beyond that for the next year because of the huge bubble-burst we are going through.

Anyhow, it looks like the end of the world is not yet, and TEOTWAWKI fears are not (yet) going to come true.

Good.

P.S. if you don't know what the Baltic Dry Index is, or why it is important, have a gander at wikinvest.com for more information.

Did You Ever Wonder What The Temple Looked Like?

Like this, maybe, less the 600 foot-tall man in the outer courtyards:



This is what 30,000 hours of dedication has gotten for Alec Garrard. a 100:1 replica of the structures King Herod erected on the Temple Mount.

(Unless you are a muslim in which case it's all just so much Zionist historical revisionism and lies). Dome of the rock my [deleted].