The personal blog of a regular guy

Yesterday I fixed an old broken LCD monitor and I thought I’d share the experience. Specifically, I replaced a bad capacitor on the LCD’s inverter board to fix the problem of the back light not lighting up. Repairing a LCD… sounds impressive right? Yeah, I’m proud of myself right now , but it’s actually a really easy job if you have a soldering iron. I have really shaky hands and if I can do this, then so can most of you. This article is part guide and part personal experience. You’ll have to excuse my blurry photos though. Read on if you are interesting or if your monitor is afflicted with a similar problem.

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I haven’t made a computer hardware post for a while, mostly because I didn’t buy anything significant until this month. As the title indicates, I bought a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 500GB portable hard drive. As with all of my hardware posts, this is not a review. It’s just a chance for me to show off my new gadget and write some thoughts on it. Read on if you are interested.

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TonyJiang.com has a new home! These last few days I have been busy moving my websites to a new server. For almost four years, my websites have been hosted by 50webs.com on their Webmaster plan. Over these years, I never encountered any major problems with my old host and I am satisfied with their service. However, their plans appear to be a little outdated with the storage and bandwidth limits (or perhaps they are just being honest), so with my current hosting expiring in a month I started looking for a new web host. I have heard no shortage of shared hosting horror stories out on the net, so I spent a couple of days doing research. After looking around, I decided to go with StableHost, primarily because they had a couple code that provided a very good lifetime discount on hosting. Their reputation seems to be decent too, so I signed up with them on their Stable Plus plan.

The move to the new host was pretty straight forward. I initiated the domain transfer process which took about a day, and during that time I transferred all my files over and set up the subdomains. Out of all of my websites, the only one that had any issues was this website. First of all, my new host uses the industry standard Cpanel which for some reason cannot point the default domain (tonyjiang.com or www.tonyjiang.com) to a subfolder within the public_html directory, so this WordPress blog didn’t work when I uploaded it as in a folder into public_html. Once I got that sorted out by uploading the WordPress files into public_html, I was met with the infamous White Screen of Death when I tried to access the admin panel. After searching on the web, I disabled all my plug-ins by renaming the plugins directory within WordPress, and my admin panel came back. After some troubleshooting, it seems that WP-Spamfree was the culprit, which is strange since I didn’t have problems with this plug-in on my old host. I killed that plug-in, but that wasn’t the end of my troubles. Afterwards, I tried to find a new anti-spam plug-in, but that caused WordPress to run into my host’s 32MB PHP memory limit. I didn’t want to delete any of my plug-ins, so I sent a support ticket to my new host, and thankfully they promptly replied by increasing the memory limit and everything was alright again.

I have settled into my new host, and everything looks okay so far. Hopefully my decision to move won’t come back and bite me in the behind. Since my websites receive little traffic, bandwidth and server load shouldn’t pose problems. Hopefully there will be no major downtimes or trouble with the host. Now that tonyjiang.com has found a new home, I’ll probably start working on some of my other websites.

What better way to end this year and decade but with a hodgepodge post consisting of three completely unrelated topics?

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Having not bought a video game console for more than seven years, my family finally caved in and bought a Nintendo Wii two months ago. Originally it was my mother who wanted the Wii because of the good things she heard about it, but as expected I ended up being the one who uses it the most. We only have the console and Wii Sports for now, and here are my impressions after playing for two months.

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I’m on winter vacation right now, and I don’t plan on going anywhere. Therefore, there’s no better things for me to do but to pay some attention to my oft neglected personal website. Over the last four or five days, I have been busy converting TJ Online from Xoops to WordPress, and the website you now see is the finished product of that effort. Xoops is a nice piece of software, but over the years I’ve discovered that it’s a bit overkill for a personal website. I chose to convert to WordPress because… everyone else is running WordPress. It is the most popular blogging platform out there for a reason, so it seems like a good choice. Converting my site into a blog also will help motivate me to write more… or at least I hope . I’ve also chosen to convert this site because it gets very little visitors, so screwing around with this site won’t really affect my total traffic by much.

Since WordPress didn’t have an automatic import tool for Xoops and that I wanted to keep as much of my old data as possible, I manually moved every article, download, and gallery picture from Xoops to WordPress. By manual, I meant manually copying and pasting posts, uploading photos, and modifying the database via PHPMyAdmin. It’s boring and time consuming work, but I am used to doing this stuff. Compared to moving my data, installing WordPress and plug-ins was pretty easy. I really like the fact that WordPress has integrated a plug-in search into the admin panel. It makes finding and installing plug-ins so convenient. Compared to Xoops, WordPress is simpler. There are definitely some areas where Xoops is stronger, but thus far I have found that WordPress is meeting my needs for this website.

Anyways, this is more or less the completed website. I might add some small things here or there, but the look (modified from the understated but elegant “Piano Black” theme from mono-lab) is here to stay. Since the theme itself is primarily black and shades of gray, I will try to use bright backgrounds to liven up this place, and as a start I’ve employed a photo of some of the fuchsia in my family’s backyard. Anyways, hopefully all the changes will make this site more user friendly and attract more visitors.

Lastly, I hope everyone will have a happy holidays.

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My family recently bought a new point-and-shoot digital camera and I decided to write a little article about it. We decided upon a Canon Powershot SD890IS which met all the requirements my family had within the right price range. This is not a review of the camera since I don’t know enough about photography or camera technologies. Rather, this is just an article for me to show off a brand new gadget and write some initial impressions from the viewpoint on an uneducated consumer, so here goes nothing.

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Here is another short article analysis I wrote for one of my university courses last term. The artilce is “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering” by Alvin Weinberg. Just in case your didn’t know, Alvin Weinberg is a famous (at least in the academic world) nuclear physicist who writes articles from time to time, and below is my take on his article.

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Last Christmas I decided to give a little gift to myself, and so I went out and bought a Wacom Bamboo Fun graphics tablet. I’ve been eying a graphics tablet for a while, but I waited until the Boxing Day Sale to pull the trigger. Here is my experience thus far with the product, and a teaser of what I might be capable of producing with my new tablet.

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It’s been almost four years since my family has gotten a new computer. Usually I’m the one who gets the fastest computer in the house, but this time around the new computer is for my dad. The old computer that he was using was getting unbearably slow even for web surfing and word processing, so it was finally time to get him a new computer. After considering all the factors, we decided to get a 17 inch laptop, the Compaq A900 series (model A939CA). This article is not a really a review of the laptop, but just a short document about setting it up and my first impressions of the laptop (and also Windows Vista), plus a couple of pictures of the machine for people to see.

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