The other day I opened my pride-and-joy to discover, horror of horrors, a Matrix-like green splotch of dead pixels, precipitated by a large crack in the LCD. Apparently my almost total disregard for the well-being of my electronic devices is not without its consequences.

Although the patches of dead pixels are relatively small, when the screen itself is only 8.9″, that’s a significant chunk of screen real-estate! Now, the good thing about netbooks is that they are relatively cheap, but not quite cheap enough to treat like disposable appliances! So I began to search for a replacement screen, and to my great pleasure found a company selling super-cheap authentic replacement screens based in Vancouver: ScreenCountry.com, where I was able to buy a screen, complete with shipping, for about $90. And it arrived within 36 hours of me ordering!

Now everywhere I read said that replacing LCD screens is a simple process, but for the life of me I couldn’t find any guides for the Acer Aspire One. But being an enterprising sort of chap I thought I’d dive in anyways, and hopefully pass on my wisdom to others who might find themselves in a similar predicament. The process is really simple and doesn’t require any technical skill beyond a steady hand. Here, then, without further ado are the steps needed to replace the LCD on you Acer Aspire One:

Disclaimer: This is an easy process, but by providing these instructions I accept no liability for damage to your netbook which might result from your attempts to follow these instructions.

Before you do any of this, make sure to turn off the computer and remove the battery!

1. The screen is flanked by 6 rubber tabs which mask the screws which hold the LCD in place, illustrated below. These need to be removed – scraping them off with a flat-head screwdriver or something similar (even your fingernail) will do the trick. Keep these somewhere safe to be reapplied later if you wish.
   
2. Now that the screws are exposed they should be removed. Make sure to user a properly sized screwdriver and to apply enough force to ensure you don’t strip the screws. Make sure to keep the screws in a safe place for later use.
   
3. The next thing to do is remove the black plastic sheath surrounding the screen (the part with Acer written on it). Pry it from the backing section by inserting a flat-head screwdriver or something similar. It need to be popped out near the bottom (where the screen attaches to the body of the netbook), but should pop right out. Just be careful not to crack the plastic. Once this is removed the LCD screen and its attachments will be exposed.
   
4. The LCD is attached by four screw brackets, circled above. Each of these brackets have two screws, and for a bent L-shape. Remove ONLY the screw attached to the actual LCD, leaving the bracket attached to the netbook. Do this for all four brackets. Make sure to keep these screws seperate to those which were around the edge of the plastic as they are a different size.
   
5. Now that the screws have been removed the LCD can be lifted off the back plate. This will make it apparent that the LCD is attached by three sets of wires to three plastic clips. These clips, which are shown below, need to be removed. The replacement LCD will have it’s own set of wire which will be attached in the same manner.
   
6. Now out with the old (LCD) and in with the new! Attach the wires of the new LCD in the same manner that the old was attached, slide it into place, and replace the screws through the side brackets. You can then reattach the plastic edge around the LCD, using a screwdriver to pop the plastic tabs at the bottom into place (see picture below), and replace the six screws around the side. If you have the right sort of glue (Im not sure what this is…) you can reattach the rubber tabs too, but I didn’t bother – I kinda like the look of the visible screws!
   
7. Now the new LCD should work! wOOt!
   

All done! Now all I need to do is think of something cool to do with the old, slightly damaged LCD. Any ideas?

On a related note, can anyone tell me why AdBlock Plus has stopped working for me in Firefox 3 for Windows Vista?

Item the First:

Item the Second:

Item the Third:

Item the Fourth:

Conclusion:

Exeunt.

As I was sitting at my desk at work, watching code roll by as my Monte Carlo runs worked, I thought about how nice it would be to go do something else while I waited for data.  An email notifier wouldn’t be enough, as I might want to be away from wifi.  Then I remembered that Bell has an email to text message gateway, number@txt.bell.ca .  In the course of ~10 minutes, I was able to whip up a python script that will send me a short email notifying me that my jobs have completed.  All I have to do is add a line at the end of a script with the python script and the job name, and it will send me a message as soon as the script run completes.  I simply store the password for my local smtp server in ~/.pass, and it fires of texts like magic.  Python makes everything easy.  Code after the jump.

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
import smtplib

if __name__ == "__main__":
	pwd = open("~/.pass").readline()[:-1]
	toaddr = "number@txt.bell.ca"
	fromaddr = "username@smtpserver"
	msg = "Job "+sys.argv[1]+" is done"
	server = smtplib.SMTP('smtpserver')
	server.starttls()
	server.login('username', pwd)
	server.sendmail(fromaddr, toaddr, msg)
	server.quit()

So,  I have been the proud owner of a galileoscope for about a month now.  While I am quite happy with the optical quality (and the price!), the focusing mechanism leaves a bit to be desired.  In order to cut costs, the ’scope focuses (changes the distance between the objective and eyepiece lenses) simply by having a pair of concentric tubes that you manually pull out or push in to focus.  While this may be fine for the 25x eyepiece, the additional wobble from having to push or pull the eyepiece tube as well as the imprecise nature of the motion makes using the 50x barlow VERY difficult.  So, I spent Sunday night at protospace hacking together a brand new focusing mechanism!  Behold my new galileoscope, in all it’s ugly-yet-functional glory:

Galileoscope: It works now!

So, you might be asking: how can I get my hands on this marvel of modern engineering?  Well, you can do what I did:  scrounge for junk parts and throw it together on a lazy Sunday!

Parts

• Polycaprolactate Thermoplastic (AKA Polymorph)
• Lego!
• Yup, that’s all.  Lego and Thermoplastic

Construction

I’m not going to give an exact step-by-step guide on construction, as I mostly worked with what I had, and so my setup is far from perfect.  Essentially, you need these two Lego parts (among others for simply building the structure

Linear gear

Regular Gear

Together with a wheel for turning the gear, a rod to attach to the linear gear, and a mounting harness to attach one part to the main body, and another to the eyepiece tube, that pretty much sums up the Lego components you need.

Main Body Harness

Eyepiece Tube Harness

Focusing Wheel

The other component you  will require is thermoplastic.  This will both bond your two harnesses to the telescopes (PCL bonds well to ABS, which is what Lego and the galileoscope are made of) and keep you Lego from flying apart from the force of pushing the tubes against each other.

Thermoplastic: bonds and strengthens

Notes

So that is pretty much all there is to it it.  The gear mechanism pushes the Lego bar, which in turn pushes the eyepiece tube.  Easy radial-to-linear force conversion.  A few things to be wary of when constructing your focusing mechanism.

1. Make sure you mount the harnesses with enough range of motion.  You need to be able to push the eyepiece tube fully out, and pull it fully in.  This means mounting the eyepiece and body harnesses at the right distances for the length of your bar.  It also means you want your eyepiece harness to be as thin and mounted as far back as possible, as it will jam against the body, limiting your focusing range.
2. Mount your focuser on the SIDE, not the TOP.  I made this mistake, and now I have no use of the galileoscope’s built-in iron sights.  Luckily I have a hole in the focuser that I can viewfind with, but your design may not include this.
3. The body tube is curved.  Make sure you mount the mechanism so that the Lego rod is parallel to the eyepiece tube, NOT the body tube.  If the angle between the Lego rod and the eyepiece tube is not 0, then you will be applying perpendicular force to the eyepiece tube, and it may make it impossible to extend the focuser all the way, or possibly even damage your scope.

More Pictures

Body Harness without focus wheel

The Mechanism

The Mechansim Again

Yet More Mechanism

Despite my great ambitions, I have managed only a fraction of the reading I had hoped to achieve this summer. In fact I’ve really only read about 1.5 books since the school term ended. This is an embarrasing state of affairs, and is in spite of the recent addition to my room of a giant comfy chair perfect for reading.

The fact is that I have not been making enough time for reading, something I want to change. In order to facilitate this I am trying out a new rule for myself:

On any given evening, I will undertake no other leisure activities (TV, computer games, music etc.) unless I have read for at least 30 minutes.

I think I will extend it to say that if it is before 9pm I must read for at least an hour. I just read for a solid three-quarters of an hour, so the rule is a success thus-far!

I’ve created a new element to my website; a blog which aggregates all my writing from the two blogs I write for (here and the Terry blog). I’ll also write personal news etc. there. All the posts syndicated to the site link back to their original source, so comments etc will still be on the original blogs. The other great benefit is that I can have one destination and RSS feed for all my writing.

To do the aggregation I’m using a great WordPress plugin called FeedWordPress, which syndicated posts from RSS feeds into a WordPress blog. This plugin was suggested to me by Andre Malan. The theme is based on “Pretty-Parchment” by Lloyd Armbrust, with my own modifications.

I was amused to see this ad pop up in Gmail for Microsoft’s newly-released search engine, Bing. Is this an oversight by Google, or the ultimate show of contempt for the supposed “Google Killer”?

Visit the UBC Website right now and this is what you see:

Hacked? Hosting Fail? Alternate Reality Game? I’m confused…

Update: I think this must be a local DNS problem. Through comments and Twitter I’ve determined that http://www.ubc.ca is resolving to omegasupreme.ca only for people within Vancouver. It is not affecting access on campus.

Why?