Dan East

My son and daughter both got new DS Lites for Christmas. We purchased Nerf Armor for them both, knowing that they would be heavily used and dropped often. Well, around two months ago, my son dropped his DS, while it was open, onto solid concrete. One quick glance at it was all it took to get that sinking feeling in my stomach – the top LCD panel was toast. A crack ran diagonally from one corner to the other, and only a sliver of screen at the bottom actually rendered pixels. The Nerf Armor didn’t save it, but the fact that the screen was open when it was dropped was probably the main reason it was damaged.

So I began searching for replacement LCD panels. Having done quite a bit of electronic repairs in the past, I decided I would try swapping out the panels myself. I found some at various online retailers for $40-$50, but most were out of stock, and all were priced too high. By the time I would pay shipping and buy the special screwdriver required to open a NDS Lite, I would have had $70 in parts just to attempt a repair on a $129 product. So my son made due with only the bottom screen for a few weeks (hopefully that served as a good lesson in being extra careful with expensive electronic devices). I eventually started looking for LCD panels again, and found one for sale on eBay for $4.98. Yes, you read right. $4.98 USD, with $10 shipping from Hong Kong. I read through the user’s feedback, and it was good, however I learned the shipping would take around two weeks, and that buyers received no communication from the seller at all. So a couple clicks of the mouse, and less than 10 days later the new LCD panel arrived (didn’t receive one single email from the seller as expected).

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For those of you looking for the actual R7000 repair, I get to that at the very bottom of this blog. No, the power cord was not the repair.

I am the proud owner of a KLH R7000 tuner / receiver. It is a 600 watt receiver with Dolby Digital / DTS / Dolby Pro Logic II surround sound decoding, and a plethora of video and audio inputs and outputs. It has composite, super and even component video inputs and outputs, to allow easy switching of various video sources without having to resort to an A/B switch.

The reason I’m a proud owner of this receiver isn’t because I am in possession of this low-end, budget piece of hardware. It’s because it didn’t cost me a cent. Well, actually, it cost me $1.95, but I’ll get to that later. This receiver gets good reviews – when it works. It sold for as low as $99 at Best Buy (based on my googling), and has very good audio qualities for the price. The problem is they seem to die pretty quickly – usually in a matter of several months. So how did I happen across one of these receivers? Well, one day I was hauling off the trash (around here we have refuse centers where we take our trash and recyclables) and happened to notice a pristine-looking tuner / receiver in one of the trash bins. The power cord had been cut off, but besides that, it looked brand new. I snagged it up and took it home, where it sat for a good month before I finally decided to check the thing out.

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This blog entry is basically nothing more than me nitpicking at Rowling’s Harry Potter. If you’re a die-hard Potter fan that can’t stand to hear anything negative about the series, or if you simply don’t want Rowling’s illusion ruined, then you may not want to keep reading. I also discuss various things that are spoilers. So if you haven’t read the books, I may reveal more details than you’d like.

So let my whining begin…

A primary restriction Rowling has placed upon herself, one that is responsible for many inconsistencies throughout the books, is that she wants the magical world to be as different from the real world as possible. Thus she supplants our (typically electronic-based) technology with magical technology. However it simply would not suite to merely substitute one of our devices for a magically powered one. Instead Rowling must invent something entirely unique, otherwise it would not capture the imagination of the reader. For example, if we want to deliver a good old fashioned letter in our world, we place it in a mailbox, where it is eventually collected by a human and delivered to the recipient. In the Harry Potter world, the letter is attached to an owl, which magically determines the location of the recipient, and flies the letter to them. While the owls use magic to know where to go, the actual delivery is purely physical, and may take days to accomplish. That’s quite romantic, isn’t it? The imagery of majestic owls flying around delivering letters, newspapers and even packages is very satisfying, and isn’t remotely like anything we see in the real world. However the raw truth of the matter is that if such a magical world existed, they would simply have magical mail boxes, and as soon as an item was placed in a mailbox and the door was closed, it would immediately appear in the recipient’s mailbox. There isn’t an iota of romance to that, and thus that’s not how things work in Rowling’s world. It is a balance that Rowling never comes close to in the Harry Potter books – the true realization of how things would really be in a magical world verses her freedom to let her imagination run without hindrance.

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