So very excited to tackle a project and work with my hands I set forth on Thursday night…and it went a little something like this..

This was the borrowed TV that I had that needed to go.

face down this is what the 37” LCD looks like

This is the hardware from Sanus to make it happen

Hardware mounted to the TV

This is the space sans the old TV

This is me finding and marking the stud. I have recently been told that this may not be the best way. However when you are hanging 75 lbs of TV 18 inches off the wall it really does matter if you are dead center of the stud!

That is an impact drill, lag bolt, mounting plate, and a … torque wrench ~ I mean really who wants a TV to fall down, this shit counts!

Mounting plate is on the wall with three lag bolts in it, and yes the little orange thing is a level, just wait…

Yes I noticed it is slightly off, but let me see you do better.

………

And now we segway into the BullShit…

So at some point into this project I put my knee or arm into the screen because after mounting it … something just wasn’t right, you be the judge…

and that was the horror I seen when I decided to plug in the TV before hiding all the wires… ugh

this is what it looks like full screen, yeah I jacked it up, somehow, someway!

….

Moving on I now have a $150+ mount on the wall with a busted TV, guess it is now time to buy a new one, even though I hardly watch TV…

Enter…

So on the right is the broken one, and on the left is the new 32” LCD TV that includes a DVD player. I went with the smaller one because it was the only one I could find in stock between Bestbuy and Costco. Anyways this isn’t for home theater it is just for sleepy time.

Now the mount has been moved from the busted ass 37” to the brand new 32”

….

So you might be wondering why does this matter?

this was what I had from bed before..

as you can see … it sucks. no view.

and now?

We have a 32” LCD hanging out saying ‘Hello’

this is the side view at full extension, if you ever want to hang a TV with intention use Sanus, they have beefy mounts that work!

This is what it looks like from the front, anybody see wires??? yeah I don’t think so, that is not how EvilBobby rolls!

If you made it this far at least leave a comment

enjoy!   Picture [2500 x 1600] <—it’s big

these are the steps that I went through that eventually ended up with my bricked phone:

1. Swap the battery with a known good one. It stopped dying so I gave the good battery back to Nicole and ordered one. Which also meant I looked like a total retard carrying around an external battery for my cell phone until the new one arrived.
2. Web pages throwing errors? I tried wiping the phone from the internal device menus, reconnecting to my exchange server. I doubt the exchange server had anything to do with it but I depend on that connection. Anyhow after wiping it the web no longer had any issues.
3. GPS still not working? I downloaded the latest Google Maps and It still would not lock in. Finally I called AT&T customer support to find out why the GPS stopped working. This was one of the most painful conversations I have ever had with tech support. I spent 1 hour trying to explain that GPS has to do with satellites and not any mobile communication networks EDGE/GPRS etc. The one rep even tried to tell me I had to pay for the AT&T mapping service so that my phone could get the GPS signals from the wireless network??? I finally gave up and decided I would do more research on my own.
4. Try upgrading the firmware on the device. I had actually never hooked my blackberry up to the computer because I used exchange and everything I needed before came over the air. So I had to download the blackberry desktop manager software and the newest firmware which was 4.5.0. I followed the instructions I could find online and after the second failed attempt the device no longer responded, hence the term brick.

So now I have a phone that does not work at all. So I used web chat to contact AT&T since I got the link for all of the above software from their site. After about 30minutes of chatting it was determined by the rep that since the computer would no longer recognize or connect to the device that nothing could be done. He was very knowledgeable (so I thought) and did not waste my time, he could tell I was no amateur.

The phone is just over a year old and thus out of warranty. I looked about replacing the phone with a newer model but just didn’t like the thought that it could really be dead. I did some more searching and pieced together some ideas.

Basically I just opened the blackberry desktop manager again, connected the phone via USB (which still only showed a sad little blinking of the power LED, but no inkling that the computer recognized it) and attempted to delete all the applications from the phone. Strangely the computer software started to do some processing? Then it switched to say deleting applications from device?? how was this the computer did not even show a USB device attached and there was no change in status on the bricked phone. After about 10 minutes the computer software said that the operation was complete, I hit a button on the phone and it said it was connected to the computer.

Strangely enough the upgrade to the new firmware had somehow taken place, and the phone was no longer bricked. Better yet it somehow kept all the settings to my exchange server and started re-importing all of my emails, contacts, calendar appts and notes.

I guess that point is don’t ever underestimate a true geek when he is determined not to let the ghost in the machine win!

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting Newegg.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We need to issue refund for you if we sent you the wrong item since we have no idea if our vendor send us the wrong item or our warehouse sent you the wrong item by accident. This may have caused several customers placed order for the same wrong item. Our related department needs to do investigate to see if our vendor send us wrong item. Please reply to this email with the model number and description of the item you received. We will then be able to further assist you. For your reference, the correct model number should be iVoiceIII. Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please visit our FAQs page. If you still need assistance, please feel free to email me directly and I will be happy to assist you.

Thank you,

Pheobe Fan

Needless to say I am very unimpressed by the customer service at this point

If you are not familiar with my setup I have my monitor, keyboard and mouse on a suspended desk and the computing hardware buried away inside the closet. This requires about 15 foot of extension cables of various types to achieve. Sadly enough my monitor was only able to achieve 1920 x 1200 on the existing cable that was in the wall. This may sound like plenty but it is not why I went with a 30" monitor and an Nvidia GeForce  9800 GT with 1gb of ram. I was surely looking for more. After examining the patch cables I discovered that a while back I had installed three cables to connect the previous monitor to the previous computer, which happened to be 2 dual link DVI cables and 1 single link DVI cable. And further the one that was buried in the wall was the single link.

All was not lost though, I had thought ahead and installed some PVC piping in the wall that contained all my cabling, however due to the aftermarket install it was limited to about 1.25" in diameter that was inside the wall. After reviewing my pictures from the install I remembered that I put the original DVI cable through before closing up the wall, because it was a tight fit. This same pipe contains a network cable, usb cable, two audio cables, and an RG6 coax cable. Needless to say it was a tight fit.

I started looking for options. My monitor would support HDMI input (which has a small connector) but that after extensive research was to no avail. Turns out that HDMI only supports single link (1920 x 1200) DVI conversions. There is a HDMI type B connector that supports dual link but nobody is producing it. So I was now forced to feed through a new DVI cable in this narrow pipe. Turns out that some of the PVC pipe connectors must have come loose since the install because just
pulling out some of the unused cables they seemed to snag, WTF!. I was not going to open up the wall again because it looked like this when I broke it open before about two years ago. Ouch!  

 
So after trying countless times to push/pull a new dual link DVI cable through the wall that I was going to have to create a new approach.

At this point the situation looked like this.

It took a good nights rest and another trip to Fry’s to figure out the new plan of attack. And then it came to me, use a smaller DVI connector, but did it exist….kinda

This is what a DVI connector looks like (this happens to be the P.O.S. that I for some reason installed inside my wall) it is very large and has lots of points that could snag inside of the wall. In order to work around this size limitation I needed to chop it down to size, but would it work? I used the single link cable as a tester to see if I could hack it down.

  The connecter could be hacked down to a much smaller profile. Keep in mind this was still the single link cable. I was not ready to start hacking away at my new $50 cable that needs to go inside my wall. Also notice the large gash in the right side cable. Something in the wall was surely causing a hard snag…ouch. So now I had my plan of attack, cut the new dual link cable connecter down to size and shove it through the wall.

  I had no problem using that big ol’ saw to chop my new DVI cable down to size to fit through the narrow opening in my wall.

  Finally I had a solution, the new dual link DVI cable was hacked down to size and I was able to get it in the wall, and further I could push my other coax, usb and audio cables back through also.

These are the finished shots after having the cables all buried back in the wall.

That big black box is the monitor power supply

That strip of yellow wall has all my wires running through it and into the closet.

So back to my original point, ‘What is Dual link DVI?’ I have learned that if you want 2560 x 1600 (holy sh!t that is big) than you must use dual link DVI cables to push that signal. HDMI cables are great if you want to do 1080P (regular hi-def TV signal) but if you want the ultimate in screen resolution then dual link DVI is the only way to go. Single link DVI maxs out at 1920 x 1200, and my monitor limits the HDMI to that same resolution. Found out this little gem deep in the owners manual

I have added a screen shot that was just taken with print screen to show you all that can fit on this large of a monitor…this is awesome!!!

If you are a geek you can view this image alone by itself or download it but you will see this is massive. Wow doesn’t the Google/Firefox search page stuff look strangely small??

Finally done, note to self: if you want massive resolution then use dual link DVI and no
thing else.

So I booted from my Windows Home Server pc restore ISO (image of a cd) and got ready to go but suddenly realized the VM had no access to my network. It turns out that the restore cd didn’t have drivers for an antiquated AMD network card, which happens to be the network card that VMware uses to virtualize a network card. Off I went to the net to find some program to make a floppy disk image. I discovered WinImage, which has a fully functioning trial and was able to burn a floppy image of the drivers that I got from AMD. Once this whole process was done I was able to mount the floppy image to my VM and told the restore program to scan the "floppy" drive for drivers for the network card. And Viola, the system now has access to the home network, and thus my home server.

The Windows Home Server was able to then restore my system in about 15 minutes. Using this little technique I was able to turn my laptop into a virtual machine and now it can be run from my current desktop. Even further I am able to backup the VM to the home server so at some later date I can just restore it back to my laptop when and if I decide to fix it.

I can remember it vividly. I was waking up to go in to work and my alarm clock at the time was set to play the radio to wake me up. I started to piece together that an airplane had hit one of the world trade center towers. There was much confusion about what had happened and why. On my way into work I listened to talk radio, as I commonly do, and could hear the distress in the voices of those hosting the show as well as the callers. Something just wasn’t right. By the time I made it into work everybody was crowded around a tv in our waiting room, and we watched the replay of the second plane hitting the other tower at the WTC. By now it was all very clear, this was no accident.

During this time I worked at a car dealership in Vegas and was close to a smaller hotel/casino that had lots of meeting space and we were relatively close to the airport. Needless to say there were lots of business travelers that frequented the hotel. As the planes were being grounded all across the nation the skies became eerily quiet and still. Many of the business travelers were showing up looking for rental cars to drive back home, many of them several states away, knowing that travel by plane was out of the question anytime soon. Almost all of my appointments for the day never showed up, and the people who did show up usually cancelled any major service work and were in and out quickly.

For the days and weeks following the attacks of 9/11 there was a somber but patriotic tone about my co-workers and customers. I no longer had any of them complaining about the little things because we were all focused on the bigger picture. I was in charge of our service menus that were handed out with every scheduled maintenance, as of September 12th, 2001 I changed the header to the image you see below. I don’t remember how long we left it that way but we got comments of praise for it all the time.

Several months after all of this occurred we had our friend from Germany visit and she was thinking, Wow! Americans are so patriotic with their American flags on cars, houses, shirts and just about anyplace else you could think of. We informed her that it was the events of 9/11 that spurred this outpouring of patriotism. While many have pushed it to the back of their mind, I still have not forgotten.

Our New Plates ! GO USA

So those of you who have been over know that there is normally a treadmill in this spot, so what is going on here? Why is there blue tape on the wall?

Well first I had to make a big mess, because that’s what guys do when working on projects. This also involved getting out every tool that I own, just to prove to my other half that I really did need to get them.

Ok so now that I got that out of the way I could start cleaning up, and of course Jewel could resist and wanted to know what was in the hole in the wall. Well it was just to access the wires to the new project.

So now that I cleaned the mess all up, no thanks to Jewel, I can present the finished project!

We now have a TV hooked up in our workout room!! And if you look real close you can see that there are no cables running down the wall. I managed to run power and coax up to a new box. And if anyone has seen our house aesthetics are a must. I even learned how to wire high and low voltage wiring in the same junction box (hint, you have to use a physical barrier). So now when you visit we can watch TV in the workout room too. Don’t worry about those wimpy little speakers on the TV because the sound actually is piped through the Sonos system so it is great.

If the TV looks a little old, it is. It is actually the monitor from our office, which prompted our visit to Fry’s (if you noticed the tweet yesterday).

So this is the new power supply, it is about as big as my friggin laptop!

So what could possibly go with a power supply that big….Our new 30" flatscreen!!! The picture below does not do it justice, it is only at 1920×1200. That is all that our 5 year old Sony Vaio can do. But when we get the new computer it will show this baby’s full resolution of 2560×1600! You can see the side by side comparison with the laptop both looking at Picasa, massive difference. Also included a pic compared to the plasma screen. If your interested I included all of the project pictures in a flickr album.