I have had Altec-Lansing external speakers for my lap top for eight years. They have separate left and right speakers, plus a base speaker. The unit is 120VAC and has treble/bass adjustments. It has been a work horse. I turn it on in the morning, and off at bed time.
One day, no sound. Internal speakers work. I plugged in another external speaker in the laptop jack and it worked.
Off to the bench. Disassembled the device, hoping for a blown fuse. No fuse. Decided I was in over my head, and put it back together.
Decided to give it another chance and hooked it back up. It was then that I realized that the problem was the volume was turned off. I had gotten a phone call and turned down the volume. And forgot to turn it back up.
Embarrassing, but a very happy ending. I have to add that these speakers are the greatest!
An old boss was in the office toilets (restroom?) trying to wash his hands and complaining that the soap dispenser was empty. He went for a new one then complained that the new one didn’t have a top on it. He proceeded to decant the liquid soap out of the new one into the old one. He was half way through this messy job when I arrived and pointed out he could just swap the head over from the old one…
Recently. Well, almost. Grinding the coffee beans one morning and the grinder suddenly started making a noise like it was eating itself. Shut it off, unplugged it, took off the hopper lid, dumped out the beans. Looking at the grinding burr, I saw a nut that could be removed from the shaft and took it off. No dice, the burr wouldn’t come out.
There are some other removable screws with allen heads in there (which usually means “don’t fuck with it”), and I was about to go get my wrenches when I noticed something stuck in the burr. I hadn’t noticed it before because it was a similar color and, like everything else, coated with coffee dust. Turns out, it was a small stone that was easily removed. The simplest solutions are always the best, but my default response is usually to go buy a new item.
My motorcycle was overheating in traffic last week. Only when I was in stop-and-go traffic. It has a water-cooled engine with an electric fan, so my suspicions were with the fan.
After a little intense observation, I determined that, in fact, the fan was not coming on. In looking on-line for this problem with my make and model, I saw a way to test the fan was to disconnect the sensor wire from the radiator and short it to ground. That should make the fan come on.
So, I got a little jumper wire, crawled on the ground and found the sensor, connected my wire to the connector and to a good ground. I turned on the ignition. No fan. Thinking maybe I didn’t have a good ground, I got a longer piece of wire and connected directly to the negative battery post. Still, no fan.
Great, I thought. This means my fan is bad. I start looking into what is involved in removing said fan and in walking back to the garage to get some tools, I said to myself, “You know, if someone else told you that they had this problem, you would say to check the fuse before you even tried to ground the sensor wire. You should probably check the fuse.” So, I check the fuse and find it blown. I replace the fuse, reconnect the sensor wire and everything is fine.
The funny thing is, I was really debating on whether or not I should check the fuse or not. Kinda like, if you check the fuse and it is good, you will have wasted your time, but if you check the fuse and find it to be bad, you have already wasted your time in trying to ground the sensor wire. Either way, I was wasting my time. Good thing I came to my senses before I started to tear the bike apart.
“Have you checked to see if it’s plugged in?”
“YES, gahdammit, it’s plugged in!”
[Insert one hour of increasingly frustrated testing and checking]
“…Oh.”