Four Wheels Off

No, I didn’t take up racing and emulate Clunk (or was it Thunk) by over or under cooking a corner and ending up off the pavement. I decided to change the oil in the Miata today, even though it has been less than 2,600 miles since I last did it. Normally I change it every 5,000 miles and it was changed not too long before we left Aiken, when I had Automotive Workbench do the 75,000 mile service. Trouble is that was over 8 months ago…

As I usually do when the oil is changed, I change the location of tires from front to back and vice versa. That is why “four wheels off”, they are off the car.

While they were off I succumbed to luxury car anal retentiveness and lined up the center cap logos with the valve stems…

Fixed #1

My tech skills have really slipped since I left work at The Valve Store® and stopped being the group’s informal IT Guy. Question: What is the first thing you should do when any piece of technology stops working correctly? Reboot! OK, maybe the third thing right after making sure it is plugged and turned on, but that is all it took to make the PC talk to the Kindle.

Fixed #2

This morning while watching the FRS play against the Astros, dismayed at the lack of control I had over the way to watch afforded by the Samsung TV app, I went searching the interwebs to see if I could find others in the same predicament (phew, that’s a seriously long sentence.)

Somehow, someway, via a couple web pages and/or message boards, I ended up on an MLBTV Roku help page – https://www.mlb.com/live-stream-games/help-center/roku-requirements (phew, that’s a seriously long URL.)

There I found a list of supported Roku devices. I certainly hoped mine was, as it is fairly new, and when I checked it did in fact make the list. Another thing mentioned was to make sure the Roku’s firmware was up to date, with Version 9.1 being the minimum. When I checked this, my unit had version 9.2 installed. Darn, I was hoping that would be the problem. I then for the heck of it, checked to see if there was an even newer version, and there was, 9.3. After updating and a reboot, MLBTV worked like it did, just last week.

I speculate that MLBTV worked fine using 9.1, when they released 9.2 last week it borked it, so the fix came quickly in 9.3. Now, if I could just fix 1 & 3…

I Hate Technology

1. Over the last weekend I went to add a book to my Kindle using the software called Calibre. I have used this program for several years on both our laptop and desktop PCs with great success. But for whatever reason, now, it did not recognize that I have the Kindle connected to the PC. Searching the internet reveals solutions that may or may not have worked a decade ago, but nothing of help for me. Most are hopelessly outdated as to software or hardware. Wait, I just had a thought, I should try a third USB cable…

2. Regular readers will remember that I am re-watching the 2018 Boston Red Sox baseball season. It has been our, well mostly my, after breakfast entertainment for the past several weeks. I watch it using the MLBTV app on the Roku Premire attached to the living room TV. On Monday when I went to watch Game 1 of their series with the Atlanta Braves and an error message popup up saying, “The content I selected is unavailable.” I tried selecting “jump to an inning” instead of “start at the beginning.” no dice. I selected a different game, “Unavailable.” I selected the game I watched just the day before. Nope, still unavailable. My first thought was, “Well, I guess they decided to stop access to the archives.” I tried using the app on my phone and, what do you know, the game was watchable. Went over to the PC and tried from there, available just fine. Fortunately, the MLBTV app that I downloaded for the TV works, so I don’t have to watch it on the phone or PC (my mid-range phone cannot cast to the TV.)

3. We went out and did a bit of driving to do some geocaching today. Loading caches to our GPSr turned out to be a big hassle. Just like the Kindle problem in #1 above, software and hardware that communicated reliably for years and years suddenly stopped cooperating. Suddenly GSAK will no longer send the .gpx files to our Garmin eTrex Vista Hcx. I tried updating drivers, but that was no help. So my work around involves transferring the cache files to a Garmin based bit of kit, BaseCamp (which I hate), that then will load the info onto the GPSr.