Light Bulbs
Whatever happened to spiral (CFL) light bulbs? How I became aware of this is because my new apartment came without overhead lights for the living room and the bedroom. (I'm used to the former, not the latter; my last few apartments had a mounted ceiling fan/light fixture. So I had one floor lamp in my household goods but needed one for the bedroom. I went to Walmart yesterday and bought an inexpensive floor lamp, which of course did not come with any light bulbs; the package stated 33 W florescent spirals or 150 W 3-ways. It never occurred to me that Walmart wouldn't carry the light bulbs used by the floor lamps it was selling; in fact, I still have several spirals (different watts) in my home inventory, almost all of which I had purchased from Walmart or Sam's Club. (Now of course I know you can buy 33 W's online or perhaps from home improvement stores.) In my local Walmart, one side of an aisle is devoted almost exclusively to light bulbs, but incredibly I couldn't find a single spiral in the aisle. I tried looking in other aisles and finally flagged down a sales associate. He managed to fish out one spiral, a black shade light, in the aisle; another associate said some time back they had rotated out their spirals in favor of more conventional bulbs. I did find a small supply of compatible 3-way (standard bulb) GE bulbs and purchased 2 twin packs. (I was going to return the floor lamp until I noticed the second alternative bulbs.)
My Lazarus Laptops
I have had some bad luck with laptops over the years, with an estimated lifetime of 2-3 years. Sometimes I had freakish water/coffee spill incidents. While in WV I had to buy a replacement HP after a splash wave from a spill (away from the laptop) messed up my electronics (it was still running, but after I powered it off, it wouldn't power back on). I needed to do some remote training/HR stuff via the Internet, so I went to Sam's Club. I had bought my ASUS laptop as a backup when I found my desktop, buried in self-storage from my move to WV, wouldn't start after my move to SC. I tried several times over to start up my desktop and was about to junk it when I noticed a sign of life from the desktop; I had some additional problems (including an issue with my copy of Rollback RX), but since then I deinstalled the software package, no issue. But I had the movers take the desktop on my recent move to Arizona.
On my first travel night (in Alabama), I noticed I could not start up my HP laptop. It had been in the laptop bag, but a spilled drink had seeped through the bag. Then to make matters worse, my ASUS, in my luggage, went dead in my Texas hotel room the next night. It booted up, but as I prepared to attach an external drive to work on converting the laptop to my primary, it went dead. (I mentioned in a post a few weeks back that I contacted ASUS support, but I was told my warranty had expired, and they would require at least $330 for a repair, while vendors priced a new machine for about $100 less.) I noticed in a Google search several people mentioned power issues with ASUS, which basically required extracting and reinserting the battery, easier said than done because the battery is not externally accessible.
So over the weekend, I once again took the HP out of its bag and tried again to power up. I was startled to see it power up; long story short, it is now operational although the battery won't charge up. I'm okay with that. The biggest pain was the Windows updates, including the big anniversary one. I've run into occasional stuck overnight issues with patches (what eventually works is deleting the software distribution folder contents after turning off 3 Windows services (update, background intelligent transfer, cryptographic) and then turning them back on). So that one failed a few times but finally worked yesterday.
Maybe pressing my luck, I looked at the ASUS again. I was startled to see a splash of light flicker over the screen; a couple of additional presses and another flash of light. Almost like lighting a campfire, I managed to stoke the notebook back to life. Just like the HP, I had to reinstall security software and do some catch up patching. I'm a little wary of shutting down the ASUS, like a reawakened coma patient falling asleep again: will he wake up this time?
Playing More With Portable Apps
I recently purchased a 256 GB thumb drive and looked at some new launchers including Appetizer. I've written a prior post on Quick Cliq. One of the attractive things about Appetizer is you can import binaries comprehensively (you can then group the software icons into folders); QC provides a good way to configure system utilities (e.g., force shutdown) and it's easy to drag and drop executable files (e.g., via Search Everywhere) to new menu item command lines. In terms of portable apps, I've looked at services like Liberkey and PortableApps. (There is some overlap.) The nice thing is both services make comprehensive updates of downloaded applications a breeze.
