Viking Sized!!!

These little buggers bonk out because the capacitors were too weak to handle the voltage and heat in this unit. You can put in better capacitors and fix the unit. Before the fix the unit would get really really hot, and the ports would stop auto negotiating properly… example… getting 10Mb with Gig ports… passing traffic one minute, then flapping the next… being better at keeping my coffee warm than passing traffic, etc, etc… and no, I only started using it to keep my coffee warm after it stop working.

Here’s a before and after… thanks goes to my boss for giving me a quick soldering lesson, I am afraid I am still not very good, but it was good enough… I don’t get much practice.

See how 4 of the 6 caps (the ones with gold markings) are exploding out the top? bonk! Click it to see it closer.

And here we have nice new green caps with higher voltage rating, 35v as opposed to the 25v, should last longer than old ones. Click it to see it closer.

OK… everyone is waiting for a full featured light scribe proggy for Linux… I am sure someone is working on it now… by now you have probably found the one and only free Linux lightscribe app out (that I know of), Simplerlabeler… if you don’t have it, get it, install it and get it working before you bother to read the rest of this post… in this posting I’ll tell you a little trick to make the app do a little more… not much, but its better than nothing until we get a real app… and its no great hack on my part, but it might be useful to someone…

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