captlychee | Aug. 29th, 2017

There's no getting around the fact that I'm sad.

There's hopefully a way to get around the feeling of sadness. Well, time will, as it usually does, heal the wounds, but at the moment I'm in one of those periods of grief and boredom that mean I'm just not going to do anything. I was sitting in the armchair listening to The Lady in the Lake on the Kindle and gearing myself up to going through to the end and then suddenly realising it was ten o'clock and time to go to bed, when the stupid Kindle announced that its battery was runing low and would I please recharge it? So, with that distraxtion taken away, I thought I could either remain in the armchair, occasionally stirring to make a cup of tea or visit the lavatory to make room for another cup of tea, or I could sit on the office chair and write something.

So here we are.

What brought this sadness on was the failing of a VGA monitor incredibleloon had given me some years ago so I could plug in the ol' 486 machine and have fun in Windows 3.1 Well, I found an old HP machine in one of the boxes that litter the loungeroom (or rather, Mum found it) and that seemed to start up okay, with the usual beeps that accompany lack of a mouse, keyboard and monitor, so I thought I would get out an old monitor to have a look at it. I found my old Philips LCD monitor first, but for some God-forsaken reason it had neither a video cable or even a power cord. A quick check of the back of the HP desktop computer showed that it had VGA output and that was it, so I had to find another VGA monitor. The one referred to earlier, that incredibleloon had given me was wrapped up in packing stuff still, but it was the work of twenty minutes or so to unwrap it and get it plugged in.

On pushing the power button nothing happened—at first. Then there was a brief high pitched squeal, right on the ol' 15625Hz we may remember from the old CRT monitor days before constant exposure to it buggered our ability to hear it so well, then there was a loud pop and a smell as of burning something or other. It looked like a fuse had gone in the monitor. Damn.

I wondered then why the trip switch hadn't tripped. I went and had a feel of the switches, but nothing had happened there. I turned all the power off and went back to unplug the monitor. It may have been the power cord, which was an old beige one dating from God knows when, but whatever it was the casualty was the monitor.

This has saddened me. I do like to have old machines running and I was looking forward to trying some stuff, notably Python, on the old HP machine out in the back room, where I could sit in the warm summer nights, have a few beers and write code, particularly as I can run the macnine in whatever OS I like—maybe even Unix!—and have it isolated from the network and everything. Plus I like to keep old things in good condition, including to some extent myself, and now that that monitor is dead…well, that's the end of that.

Also, there's my Pioneer DVR. Mum found that ont the weekend, too, and I was surprised to see that it fired up. An error message comes up telling me the HDD on it is incorrect and that I needed to reinitialise it, which would be great if the bloody remote worked. Now, I have got everything off the HDD so no worries there, but I wanted something I could play DVDs on without all the region code bullshit. Anyway, I got it connected up eventaully, discovering yet again that the TV has no digital audio input, which makes sense when you consider that you would be running digital audio out of the player and into the amp, not the TV, and that the DVR had no HDMI out—not too bad at the moment as I can't find a spare HDMI cable. It didn't take long to find out the remote control wasn't working, but I did have the remote for the TV which, while a Samsung, could control the Pioneer if I had the bloody code for it.

I rang Pioneer support and I got through immediately. The first guy didn't know what I wanted, but he did put me tnrough to tech support, who immediately hung up on me. This wasn't a phone error, I heard the recefver go down. I called back and was put through again. This time I spoke to some bloke who gave me a long pitch about remote library files and how I could update firmware to control the TV etc. I listened to this and agreed wih it, but then had to explain again that I didn't want the Pioneer remote to control the TV, but the TV remote to control the Pioneer, and what was the three digit code I needed to plug into the TV remote? He then said it was usually in the back of the mnual. I replied that it wasn't in the back of the PDF I was looking at right now, and did he know what it was, or could he look it up? He told me the story of having to experiment with his remote until he got a correct code. An interesting anecdote indeed, but did it get me any closer to a solution? Jellk, no.

In this life you can either have quick support or good support, but you can't have both. Not from Pioneer, anyway.

So, that's another of my old appliances that may have to just go down the tip. The front panel still works, for what that's worth since you can't do much on it, and it will play CDs which is mainly what I want it for, but its demise for all practial purposes just adds more to the sadness.

I have an LG DVD player/VCR combo that was supplied by the insurance company to replace my old VCR that got ruined in the storm of 2011, but that is five years old and still in its box. Unaccounably, I have an LG remote but I have no idea what it's for.

Huh! Even writing this down has helped alleviate the sadness a bit. The unpacking continues.