Season of the Witch

Donovan Season of the Witch
Because Dustbury put up a link to Mellow Yellow, which is a fine song, but nothing to compare to this one which is just awesome.

Update February 2017 replaced missing video.
Update March 2018 replaced missing video.

Update March 2021 replaced missing video.

Dodge Dakota Serpentine Belt Tensioner

Notice the very slight difference in angle between the arm that holds the pulley and the pin directly to the left of the mounting stud. Not much, maybe 10 or 15 degrees.

About a week ago I was giving John a ride to school in the truck. It started squealing shortly after we left the house. It sounded like a bearing going bad, but it's had squeaking problems before, so I drove on thinking it would stop in a bit. It didn't. It squealed all the way (12 miles) to school and all the way back. I was saying my prayers that it wasn't going to blow up and leave me stranded.

Got home and took a look and the belt is loose. All the pulleys and bearings seem to be in good shape, just the tensioner has lost its' spring. I might have been able to save myself a little trouble if I had only taken the tensioner itself off, but the bolt that holds it in place is obscured by the supporting bracket, and the three bolts that hold the bracket in place are in plain sight.

However one of the these three bolts is behind the dipstick tube, which means taking the tube loose from the alternator, which wasn't too bad, but putting it back in was a real trick. I mean it's in plain sight, but you cannot get your hand in there to put the bolt it. It took some real finagling to get it in the hole.

Tensioner support bracket mounting holes.

Taking the nut off of the tensioner itself might have been slow (it's a long bolt), but I don't think it would have required the dexterity of Houdini to get it back in.

Hooking wrenches together to
get more leverage.

Putting the belt back on required compressing the spring, and these springs are strong. I put the box end of a combination wrench on the bolt holding the pulley on, and then put the loop at the end of the handle of an adjustable wrench over one of the claws. That gave me a lever that was long enough to make it easy to compress the spring. (This is a picture I found of a similar arrangement.) It works in most cases, though if the bolt is really stuck, and you apply enough torque you can bend the claw of the combination wrench.

Update February 2017 replaced missing pictures.

Audio Stutter

or, Windows is Wonderful, Part 9490

My wife's laptop developed arthritis over the last couple of months. I dinked around a couple of times trying to get the kinks out, and it sort of got better some of the time. The last straw was when the audio started stuttering. I spent the better part of the day tracking this one down. Learned a couple of things on the way, like how the prefetch directory accumulates stuff over time and can slow your boot time to abysmal*.

The stuttering audio problem was caused by a value getting changed in the registry. This particular value tells the hard disk driver whether to use PIO (Parallel Input/Output) or DMA (Direct Memory Access) to transfer data to and from the hard disk. DMA has been the way to go since hard disks had hydraulic actuators. The only reason for using PIO would be because you worship Satan and you like to suffer, maybe?

Anyway, after much poking around I finally found these two pages:

• The stuttering DVD drive or the lame hard disk


• Stuttering audio on Windows XP

I thought about using Regedit to go in poke at the registry myself, but then there was a little confusion over just which entry needed to be changed, so I downloaded the magic program and ran it and it seems to have fixed the problem.

There is one thing still bugging me and that is how this setting got changed in the first place. Was it malicious, or was it someone's programming error? I don't think it's random, I mean it is common enough that someone took the trouble to create a solution, and the solution is very specific.

The other thing that is weird is that none of malware detectors I ran (anti-virus, Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy) found anything wrong.

*Windows Prefetch directory is controlled by this registry key:


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\
EnablePrefetch


Set it to 2 to include system files only and exclude applications.

Unlocking Locked Files

or Windows is Wonderful, Part 9489

This happens occaisionally on my Windows XP system: I am trying to move or delete a file on my computer and Windows pops up with a message like this:

In case the picture doesn't show up, the text of the message is

"Cannot move -filename-: It is being used by another person or program."

Notepad++ is a common culprit on my system. Closing a file is sometimes not sufficient to release it, however, closing the program will do the job.

Sometimes this error pops up and Notepad++ is nowhere to be found. Running checkdsk /f will usually fix it. It takes time though.

It happened again today, and it caught me in the mood to get to the bottom of it. I came across a couple of different suggestions. Here's one that sounded pretty good:

My solution, which works most of the time, is to ctrl-alt-del to bring up task manager. In there, shut down explorer.exe, then while still in task manager, hit file > run and restart explorer. Not really a solution, but the only workaround I've found.

It didn't work for me. Didn't do any harm either. It was a little spooky seeing all my desktop icons disappear, but then I restarted explorer and they all popped up again.

I finally gave up looking for a quick fix and downloaded the Unlocker program. It installed without a hitch (though it did put a shortcut to E-Bay on my desktop. What's up with that?), and when I ran into another locked file, it unlocked it without any fuss.

It seems like a too much fix for such a small problem, but evidently that's what it takes.

Update February 2017 replaced missing image.

Quote of the Day

"Play a Windows CD backwards and hear satanic messages. That's nothing, play it forwards and it installs Windows."

From Colonel Sander on Bit-Tech Forums.

All's Faire

Job Fair, Welfare, Warfare, Animal Fair!

Pixelation

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. - Arts and animation videos.
Found on No You Shut Up.