Archives (stuff since 2006)

Replacing an oxygen sensor in a 1998 Honda Civic (how-to with pictures)

March 13, 2013
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So it was time for a little pre-emptive replacement of the oxygen sensor on the 1998 Honda Civic… I didn’t know when the last time was that it had been replaced, and since I’d already replaced most of the other maintenance options, I figured this was probably due anyway.

This should be virtually identical for 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000 Civic models (96-00).

 

If you’ve replaced an oxygen sensor before, you probably don’t really *need* this write-up… the O2 sensor here is pretty easy to get at and they’re “all the same”. That said, if you’re tackling an oxygen sensor for the first time ever, hopefully something here will help you.

Before we get started, let’s identify what we need to disconnect. You can click on the image for a larger version.

1998 Civic O2 sensor removal locations

What you’ll need to disconnect (yellow=mandatory, red=possibly)

Circled in yellow are the 2 things you’re going to continue reading…

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Sony HDR-CX220 Handycam review – not impressed with this camcorder

February 16, 2013
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So, 2013 models of consumer-grade budget camcorders have started coming out slowly-but-surely. Since I was in need of a 1080p camcorder, I did a little looking and gave the Sony HDR-CX220 (a $250 camcorder) a try.

The full video is available at the very end (scroll all the way down if you feel like watching instead of reading).

 

Let’s start with a quick “unboxing” bit (though technically it had been unboxed for a couple days).

 

Unboxing:

 

The battery has already been connected. Beyond that you’ll see 2 cables, some pamphlets, and the HDR-CX220 manual. The first cable is simply a USB extension cable, and the 2nd is an HDMI cable which you’d use if plugging the camera into your TV.

Sony HDR-CX220 Overview Sony HDR-CX220 front shutter Sony HDR-CX220 side view with integrated USB connector Sony HDR-CX220 screen (powered on) 1 HDR-CX220 screen Sony HDR-CX220 screen showing menu options #1 Main menu options on the Sony HDR-CX220

(note that while the pictures of the display tend to be a little blurry, it was just bad photography on my part – the display itself is quite crisp)
continue reading…

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9 marbles and a weight balance – which is the heaviest one?

February 3, 2013
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So, you have 9 marbles and a balance. Or weight scale. Or weight balance. Or whatever you want to call it.

Essentially, this:

9 marbles and a weight balance

My awesome drawing of a weight balance and 9 marbles

Because I draw like a 2 year old, some clarification as to what you see above. A real weight balance (or scale) looks slightly like the apparatus I drew above. You can put things in the little “buckets” and the scale will tip to the heavier side.

Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have even bothered with the picture. In any case, on to the riddle.

1) You have 9 marbles (as seen).

2) 8 of them are exactly the same weight. The remaining marble is slightly heavier than the others. You don’t know which is which.

3) You are allowed to use/set the scale TWICE in total. In other words, you get to take 2 measurements (or “comparisons”) here.

4) Each “bucket” has enough room for multiple marbles. As long as you have the same number of marbles in each side, the heavy marble has just enough weight to tip the scale to it’s side.

 

How do you find the heavy marble?

(scroll down slowly for tips and to eventually the answer!)

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TIP #1: You continue reading…

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Updating the Eyeglass Retailer Reviews retailers… part 2

February 3, 2013
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Continuing from yesterday’s post…

(as a reminder, the taglines are meant in a tounge-in-cheek sort of way. And the “suggestions” are just based on what I see & assume which may or may not be correct)

 

— continue reading…

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Updating the Eyeglass Retailer Reviews retailers…. part 1

February 2, 2013
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Now that my 80-120 hour work-weeks of fun on the theme this site uses is complete, another site of mine was long overdue for a rigorous revamp. The glasses one. The one I shamelessly throw banner ads for in the sidebar here. No, a 3 year old didn’t create those ads… those are the best stick-men I can possibly draw.

After making changes to the theme & layout on the EGRR site to look slightly less as though a child decided to draw a web site, I popped in some old user-submitted reviews that had been sitting in my inbox for years and shuffled things around so that the site feels a little more consolidated.

Today it was time to start going over all the retailers. I hate this part. It’s about as fun as using tweezers to yank out a stray nose hair. It takes forever and a day. And when I finally have the updated information, a retailer will go and change their entire site around, making everything I wrote about them wrong. This usually happens the day after I’ve posted my update.
For some reason, this time has been a little different. Enough that I almost considered starting up a blog on that site. Unfortunately that would be yet-another-thing-that-absorbs-too-much-time, so I’ll use my blog here. I don’t care if Google struggles to determine how a site with insanely popular x264/Handbrake posts relates to an eyeglass purchase – it’s my site and I’ll do what I want, darn it!

 

So, I started going down the list of retailers, and writing this to keep some level of sanity as I went through.

 

As a bit of forewarning in case a retailer does stumble upon this (or in case somebody decides to go pasting something I said elsewhere on the web to use as evidence that X-retailer is bad), the taglines are meant in a tounge-in-cheek sort of continue reading…

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removing jQuery from WordPress

January 5, 2013
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If your WordPress site doesn’t make use of jQuery on the front-end (the part visitors see), you might be tempted to remove jQuery and save your visitors that 30-40kb download.

Doing it is pretty easy. The short, dirty version (that might break things on the admin end) is as follows continue reading…

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How to remove a fulltext index in MySQL – switching from MyISAM to InnoDB

December 30, 2012
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So, I decided to uninstall YARPP (the “yet another related posts plugin” for WordPress), and convert my wp_posts table from MyISAM back into InnoDB.

Of course, when I went to do the MyISAM -> InnoDB conversion, I got an error from myPhpAdmin:

The used table type doesn’t support FULLTEXT indexes

Not unexpected… versions of MySQL < 5.6.4 don’t support FULLTEXT in InnoDB, so I knew I had to drop the FULLTEXT indexes but didn’t quite know how. And it took a while to find the solution. But here it is:

 

continue reading…

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contact form on a WordPress site not sending email

December 24, 2012
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So it happened again. I’d recently moved my sites to another host, decided to put a “Fast Secure Contact Form” on the WordPress site, went to test it, and…

No email.

I mean, it looked like it sent (no errors), but I wasn’t receiving anything. I started the troubleshooting process by continue reading…

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css blocking – wordpress and W3TC – how to get parallel downloads

December 24, 2012
1 comment

It’s almost 2013, and I have to wonder why modern browsers still get tripped up over CSS stylesheets when it comes to blocking parallel downloads. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, I’m talking about this sort of thing:

CSS loads by itself. CSS and JS loading together CSS loads with 2 JS. The 3rd JS loads later with images.

As you can see (you can click for larger images, by the way):

  • in the 1st image, the CSS loads all by itself. Everything else is blocked until the stylesheet finishes. What an inefficient use of time!
  • in the 2nd image, things look a little better. The CSS and 2 javascript files are downloaded simultaneously. It’s a friendship made in HTML-land. All those images don’t start until the CSS finishes though (they’re blocked).
  • in the 3rd image… something looks a little off. One JS file started with the CSS, but the other one is still blocked just like the images! What gives?!

If you’re using WordPress (and to a lesser extent, W3 Total Cache), at least one of the above images probably describe your situation. Let’s face it, you’re reading this for a reason, right?

The really exciting part continue reading…

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A WordPress “related posts” plugin that works with InnoDB

December 22, 2012
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The last few hours were a bit of a journey… trying to find a WordPress related-posts plugin that didn’t need the database’s wp_posts table to be in MyISAM isn’t an easy task.

I did finally find one, though it’s got it’s own mix of pros and cons to it. It’s called nrelate. I’ll assume that if you made your way here, you’ve spent some time looking at other plugins (you know, the ones that won’t work with your InnoDB tables), so I’ll break down a few of the differences you’ll find, because nrelate is drastically different in some ways.

 

nrelate vs YARPP and Contextual Related Posts

How they work:

nrelate is essentially a service that runs on another server. The nrelate plugin that you install inserts some javascript into your pages, and sends a request to the nrelate servers asking them to scan your website. Over the course of a few hours, the nrelate servers visit/index your website, put the information together, and come up with “related posts” for your pages. From then on, when a visitor loads your webpage the javascript on your pages has the visitors browser pull your “related posts” from nrelate’s servers. That might all sound a bit complicated, but in many ways it’s similar to Adsense (for those who run an Adsense plugin). Except that instead of displaying ads, it’s displaying your related posts.

YARPP and CRP on the other hand are typical plugins. They reside on your own server, literally scan your database, do their fancy magic on your web host, and provide the “related posts” via the plugin itself.

I won’t go into all the differences, but I’ll give a few pros and cons to dump out some info while trying to help you decide whether it’s worth a look.

Just before I get started, note that if you’re using CRP it will work with InnoDB as long as you’re using MySQL 5.6 or higher (version 5.6.4 supports the FULLTEXT search in InnoDB that’s been keeping these related posts plugins from working). In fact, looking at the php it looks like if you’re using MySQL 5.6 or higher, the plugin will just go on ahead and convert your wp_posts table to InnoDB. And if you’re using an earlier version of MySQL, it will go ahead and convert your wp_posts table to MyISAM.

All without telling you.

Pretty ballzy imo.

continue reading…

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