Finding information about stuff like this online is always annoying difficult due the variance in search terms. Is that LED blinking, flashing, cycling, going on and off or any of a number of other descriptions. I found several references to this problem on a mix of forums, but eventually found a thread describing how to fix a phillips plasma tv with a flashing red led on avforums.

From there I managed to find that the type of TV I have is covered by the FM23 AC Service Manual, available here in the annoying form of a 16 part rar file which unrars to a single PDF.

Most of the successes in the thread seemed to have come from following Barbusa's instructions in the thread linked to above, detailing three capacitors that wear out on the main power board. Diagnosing this was based rather loosely on the fact that if I kept switching it off and back on every time it went into protect it would eventually power up and run just fine. I'm guessing that this comes from the caps managing to build up enough charge over several power cycles.

Capacitors like these are really cheap to replace, I bought some from a local Maplin for the grand total of £1.14. I also bought a new soldering iron, a fine tipped butane one as Barbusa recommended for the job, bringing the bill to a lofty twenty quid - far less than I'd have to pay just to get someone to look at it for repair.

Armed with these new caps and the stupidity necessary to play at soldering inside a high voltage appliance I started stripping it down. Lying the screen flat on its front (on something soft) to remove the stand and screws from the back panel which gives us a great view of the insides - click for larger images.

In the middle here I've outlined the main power board, it's the one with big capacitors, transformers and the two really big metal heat sinks (one black, one silver) running up the middle of the board.

To remove it, we first have to disconnect all the connectors, I took a few photos so I could put them back, but it seems the cabling routes and different sizes of connectors means that they will only fit one way. There are several screws all around the edge and one in the middle of the board, there a small torq fitting, the same as the case screws not sure what size these are, but they're the smallest torq I've got in my toolbox.

Having removed the board we need to find capacitors 2662, 2663 and 2664. In my 32" screen 2662 is a 1000μF 25v 85°C with 2663 and 2664 both 25v 100μF 25v 85°C. I took Barbusa's advice and bought 105°C rated caps to deal better with the heat. For 2663 and 2664 I couldn't get the 25v caps, so bought the higher rated 50v ones that are fitted in the 42" plasmas. I'm no expert, but thanks to some friendly advice in #electronics on freenode.net I was confident they would be safe.

Finding them is easy enough, the board is numbered, so with fingers on the capacitor and my new soldering iron on the joints I slowly pulled the caps out and replaced each one in turn.

The numbering is on both sides of the board, here I have replaced 2662 and I'm just about to replace the other two.

Carefully putting everything back together - deep breath - it all works, powering up first time and running fine. Many thanks to the help of strangers :->

Demonstrate Empathy

Encourage Empathy

With 20 slides at 20 seconds each he explains the concept clearly.

It strikes me that we could use these techniques when writing the messages that come out of our apps, making them more friendly. Isn't that what Flickr do with the kitten pictures they show during outages?

Winston sat at his usual table in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, it was unusually busy on this hot, sunny day. The waiter passed his table then returned with the gin bottle; filling his glass with the gin infused with cloves that the cafe was famous for.

The telescreen announced its imminent news of victory with a trumpet fare. It talked about further arrests of disidents, those who had commited crimes against Big Brother. Winston glanced across the room to Big Brother's kindly smiling face looking down at him from the wall, a poster from floor to ceiling filling the cafe with his benevolent presence.

A commotion outside caused Winston to look out. The Thought Police marching past. They weren't coming into the cafe today, nobody here of interest he guessed. They marched on.

The Brotherhood he now knew was real, but how could he really know how many others like him there were. O'Brien had told him he would only ever meet one or two others. He would do exactly as he was told. Follow orders. Was there really any hope of overthrowing The Party? He couldn't see how, but that didn't matter. Any act of rebellion however small felt great.

Maps of the war were now scrolling across the telescreen, they showed Oceania's progress against Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eurasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Winston suddenly became aware of another person beside him. Had his face showed sign of what he was thinking? Julia sat down to join him. A swift gesture across the face of the telescreen made it go blank, the narrative in his earpiece stopped. "You're playing that game again, love?" asked Julia. "Yes, you know how good it is" he replied. Julia looked unimpressed. "It sends me to sleep, stops my brain working." she responded dismissively. "But it's so clever" Winston defended. "it's a view of what this world could have become!" His eyes gleaming, Winston pulled a small book out of his bag. The inscription on the title-page ran:

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

by Emmanuel Goldstein

Winston began reading:

Chapter I

Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...

Julia's eyes had glazed over, they always did when he talked to her about the tenets behind Big Brother, the massively multi-player game sweeping the world. He stopped reading but it was several seconds before Julia noticed he had stopped. "It just doesn't grab me, sorry" she apologised.

The waiter arrived, smiled and exchanged pleasantaries. "Sloe today Julia?" he asked. "Yes, please" she replied. The cafe was famous for its clove gin, but the sloe gin was also excellent. In total they had more than 70 flavoured gins and many other drinks besides. When not drinking the gin Winston would often try one of the ever-changing supply of world beers that flowed through the cafe, carefully savouring each one and keeping notes in his online review diary.

"Oh, but look at this", Julia's face lit up as she remembered why she had come to find him. It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone. "It's from Mr Charrington's," Julia went on, "he said I could bring it round to show you. I want to find out all about it."

She handed the glass to Winston who waved it across the small camera on the telescreen in front of him. The screen lit up as it took the code from the bottom of the glass and matched it with several photos of the object and a description. It was a paperweight, manufactured in Italy sometime in the early 1930s. The strange pink shape was Coral, not rare, but beautiful none the less.

The telescreen was changing, new pictures were arriving and more information appearing alongside the initial description as Goldstein (Winston had named his search agent after one of the Game's main characters) trawled the semweb for more references. Within minutes he had a near complete history of the paperweight's manufacture, who had owned it over the years and how it related to other more or less rare collections. It wasn't really worth anything, semi-antiques like these were plentiful and Mr Charrington had a shop full of them, but it was just the kind of pretty thing that Julia loved to decorate their studio with. Winston smiled at her. "I love you. Go and buy it." he said.

As Julia left the cafe Winston heard the usual weekend commotion of the Thought Police returning. They were out-of-step now, not marching and there was a great deal of whooping and laughter. He sat back, glass in hand, to hear what had happened. In this mood they were bound to invade the cafe. He was right, around a dozen of them bounced up to the bar. Not one of them could have been more than 25 he thought to himself. Winston vaguely remembered a time in his childhood when people weren't that interested in politics, but not now. Groups of Thought Police, young activists holding politicians and large corporations to account were a common sight. The group laughed and joked, congratulating each other on the day's work.

Winston pieced together the lively fragments of chatter to conclude they had managed to secure yet another resignation of a corrupt politician. He didn't catch the name or which of the many parties the poor chap had been part of. What he couldn't understand was how any politician thought they could do anything but serve their constituents when the Thought Police, like everyone else, could query every vote, business partnership, gift and expense claim.

A broad smile broke across his face - maybe they thought it was all just a game.

Busy. Colourful. Bright. Neon. Starbucks. KFC. McDonalds.

This wasn't what I expected of the vast sprawling city of Beijing. I don't know what I did expect. The grey stone and imposing buildings of Tiananmen Square, Mao's Tomb and the Great Hall of the People perhaps. Or maybe the flocks of bicycles. A view built mostly on UK coverage of the Tiananmen Square uprising of nearly twenty years ago.

We see these short tableaux of places in times of crisis and they sit, static, in our minds while the place itself moves. Always having been so much more than what we saw anyway. The Beijing we met was busy all the time, streets full of people into the early hours. Not revelers and police, though there is some of that, but lots of men and women just going about their business.

Driving in Beijing appears to be a more or less constant game of lane-change chicken. Everything is done in close proximity, with cars maneuvering on the three-lane ring roads (of which there are seven or eight) within inches of each other. Horns beep constantly, but not in the aggressive way they are used in the UK, but as a constant "I'm here", "That's my space" kind of way that no-one seems to take offence to.

The city is, of course, rushing headlong towards the August deadline of the 2008 Summer Olympics. We saw nowhere that wasn't undergoing some work. New paving here, a new road there, replacing the tiles on hotel frontages. There was also much more substantial construction work happening with new tower block going up in many places around the center. The center, that's an interesting aside - Beijing doesn't really seem to have a center. Sure there are ring roads that go around an area, but the city is so large, so spread out that it really has no distinct point - apart from Tiananmen Square, of course.

Tiananmen forms a nice point from which to discuss the some of tourist sights, with the Forbidden City adjoining it to the North (?) and the Temple of Heaven just a short taxi ride (costs about 180RMB) to the south. We were also driven out to the Great Wall at Badaling by a friend of a friend and spent a couple of hours walking a short section there, Badaling is about an hour's drive from Beijing in a car (or two on a tour bus). And of course, also a little way out of the city is the Summer Palace.

Our time in Beijing was short, seven days in Beijing, five days were taken up with the WWW2008 conference (and a bit of hotel shuffling). A further day on each end of the trip to travel. So with restaurants to try every evening and just two days to see things we had to make our time count.

Food was important, with a fantastic Chinese community here in Birmingham providing amazing food it seemed like a good idea to try equivalents in Beijing as well as looking for things we can't get at home. Something we had not seen at home is the Hot pot, or Chinese Fondue, which involves a central pot with stock or oil, heated from below, in which you cook your own meat, fish and veggies. Really great food.

Beijing, formerly known as Peking, is famous for its Duck restaurants, so no trip would be complete without a visit. The duck was great, about a dozen of devoured wood-burning oven-roast ducks with pancakes, hoisin sauce and shredded spring onions and cucumber. What impressed me was not so much the quality of the duck here in Beijing, but bizarrely the quality of the duck we get back here in the UK which comes very close to what we we were served. The most notable difference is that here in the UK I've never seen the head served with the rest of the meat.

Saturday morning we got up early and hit the subway to make our way to Beijing Zoo, we already had the trip to Badaling lined up for the afternoon, so needed something easy to do in the time and we all decided we wanted to see pandas. We got to see the pandas, sleeping in the heat, trying to ignore the crowds with cameras. Beijing zoo's enclosures look small, they're definitely zoo and not safari park. We rushed round a few of the main large animal enclosures and headed back to the hotel.

We weren't at the hotel for long when our host for the weekend, a friend of a friend, arrived to pick us up. He'd very kindly agreed to show us around and our first target was the Great Wall.

Pictures of the wall give you a pretty good idea of the size of it, the wall alone is intimidating. What you don't get a sense of is the geography in which it's built. The wall rides the tops of steep sided ridges, sharp edges with steep slopes either side, a formidable obstacle in their own right.

The most disappointing aspect of the wall was the number of little stalls and wall-walkers attempting to sell you utter tat.

After a couple of hours walking on the wall (following a busy week conferencing as well) we were all more than ready for food. Our kind host had spent a few years here in Birmingham, so was well aware of how good the Chinese food available here is. With this knowledge he wanted to ensure we got food in Beijing that we can't get in Birmingham. We'd already had hot pot and none of us really fancied the frogs on offer so we ended up in a restaurant famous for its crab.

The crabs arrived raw, so we could decide how many we wanted between us, then came back around ten minutes later, cooked and cracked in a spicy paste. Chris and I are not great fans of crab here in the UK, they seem to taste like seaweed to me, but these are fresh water crabs and they taste completely different. The crabs were meaty and very tasty indeed.

Next day we managed to get up early, check out and dump our bags with the concierge ahead of a day exploring then the flight home. We got ourselves over to the Temple of Heaven first. Set in beautiful grounds, surrounded by lawns and paths shaded by cherry blossom trees the temple is visible from some distance. Beautifully tranquil, despite the number of people. The temple is very well maintained, a little too well maintained in some respects, you could almost believe it was new.

From there we cut across through Tiananmen Square passed Mao's Mausoleum and into the park around the forbidden city. It was getting hot by now, the sun very bright, so the shade of the woods was very welcome. The sun, and the impending need for some lunch, made u decide not to spend the apparent two hours queuing to get into the Forbidden City. Instead we met up again with our kind host and he took us to a great barbeque place where we had lamb, beef, big green chilies, chicken wings and squid. All served on kebab sticks. Very spicy, very good.

From there we wanted somewhere to unwind a bit, so a trip to the lake at the Summer Palace was perfect. We wandered around for a while (trying to find a loo and cussing the unhelpful signs) and then hired a boat for a trip out on the lake.

Being out on the water was cool and relaxing, Chris' advanced driving skills came in handy controlling the high-powered vessel we had, blasting across the water at just under strolling speed.

The lake (Kunming Lake) is huge and beautiful, so huge that you would never guess that it was man-made. The Emperor had it dug out, combining two previous ponds, to make the current lake.

A short shopping trip later and we were back at the hotel to pick up our bags and off to the airport.

One of the great things about working for Talis is that we take conferences seriously. Having sent five of us half-way around the globe staying an extra couple of days, eating well and being expected by those back at the office to make the most of it is part of having a great work/life balance.

I don't know how many other companies have quite such an enlightened outlook - I guess it's because we're employee owned, so Talis is us.

There's loads more to say, as it starts to unpack in my head, but for now you'll have to make do with a selection of photos from various sessions, meals, drinks and ceremonies. More photos to come as Nad, Chris, Paul, Tom, Liv and I go out to explore a Beijing a little more before heading home.

The photos are on flickr, click to jump over, if you're logged in you can comment and/or tag them - feel free name anyone you know in the tags.

Linked Data on the Web 2008, a workshop attached to WWW2008, was today's main attraction for about 100 of us here in Beijing.

Sir Tim opened the workshop again this year and was popping in at regular intervals throughout the day. His opening included the great soundbyte: "Linked Data is the Semantic Web done right, and the Web done right".

What he means by that is that the linked open data project is the closest we have to his original vision of a web of knowledge.

A number of new RDF browsers were on show this year with Sir Tim showing off version 2 of The Tabulator which provides read/write functionality via HTTP POST or WebDAV. Visual browsers, including relation browser, popped up a few times, including a great session from Uldis Bojars on Browsing Linked Data with Fenfire (standing in for Tuuka Hastrup) which looks like a great tool for playing with small amounts of semweb data. Like The Tabulator v2 Fenfire allows editing of the data - must take a look at that.

The Linked Data map continues to grow, but there were no new announcements today, although I know a few people have stuff lined up but just aren't ready to 'go big' with it just yet. This map featured in every set of slides during the day by my reckoning. In ten years time people will be showing that on slides just after the photo of Sir Tim's first server at CERN!

Kingsley Idehen kept the session real by keeping up the "give us a demo" riff throughout the day - a constant reminder that most of this stuff is practical, real stuff now. Although, being a fairly academic crowd there was plenty of discussion of theory too.

The key theme that I took away from the day was that disambiguation is (one of) the next big problem(s) the Semantic Web has to tackle. Without this having been discussed ahead of time, several people presented discussions or solutions on the problem. I presented on the use of natural keys in URIs as one aspect (a paper written by myself, Nadeem Shabir and Danny Ayers); Humboldt was suggested as a possible candidate by Kingsley Idehen and others and Afraz Jaffri spoke explicitly about URI disambiguation in the Context of Linked Data. Other aspects of disambguation were presented by Alexandre Passant in Meaning Of A Tag: A collaborative approach to bridge the gap between tagging and Linked Data.

Another great sign of this all getting real was the warm reception that Paul's talk on Open Data Licensing got. In the same way that the open-source community matured and embraced licensing and the was that the blogosphere, photo and video sharing sites matured and embraced Creative Commons, we need the Linked Data community to mature and one aspect of that is to embrace licensing - clear statements of the terms under which all of this data is published.

The day's sessions ended on a great discussion of the issues of distributed conversation, statements spread across the web, when we have combined the URI as identifier and the URI as locator of the content. That is, how do you ask http://example.com what it knows about http://foo.com. Or, more importantly, how do you know that you should ask http://example.com in the first place. Given that we want to be able to let anyone say anything about anything else, and that we want to be able to find everything that has been said about something, this is also going to be a key focus.

The need for disambiguation and the need for discovery of statements overlap in what Paolo Bouquet presented - An Entity Name System for Linking Semantic Web Data. Paolo presents an attempt to model a (philosophically) DNS like system, ENS, to address these problems. Controversially he suggests everyone use identifiers within their own internet domains to make statements, then use ENS based identifiers as the single unique reference off which everyone's URIs then hang. Now that got the debate going!

More of my photos are tagged LDOW2008 on Flickr.

I landed in Beijing at 23:00 last night with Chris, Tom, Nad and Paul. We're here for WWW2008 - yep, work sent five of us to Beijing. How cool is that.

It wasn't great to find we had no rooms when we arrived at the hotel - we finally got there at 02:00 this morning - it took us 3 hours taxiing around the airport, through immigration, picking up bags and getting a taxi to the hotel. Having no rooms wasn't fun, but watching how each of us chose to handle ourselves was really fun. 2am problems after 36 hours traveling apparently doesn't bring out the best in everyone! ;-) Nobody lost their rag - which was cool.

The hotel did the honorable thing and quickly got us into another hotel, paid for the cabs, accompanied us there and paid the bill, which was much more than they had to do. They then came over this morning and picked us up to move us into our nice, fresh rooms in the right hotel. Bad mistake, good recovery. The view of the Olympic stadium above was taken from my temporary room.

The next problem then, is how to get to see Planet of the Ood (this week's episode of Doctor Who, the link will expire sometime soon) which was on while I was sat at BHX waiting to board. Problems... I'm in China (known for restrictive networks)... BBC iPlayer doesn't like people outside the UK... BBC iPlayer doesn't allow downloads for OS X users...

So, the solution...

Grab a script that pretends to be an iPhone (iplayer-dl by Paul Battley), thus getting access to the non-DRM MP4 stream. VPN back to the UK, so on a UK network. Find that only specific traffic goes over VPN. Use VPN to SCP iplayer-dl script to a server in the UK. Download Planet of the Ood MP4 to UK Server. Use VPN to SCP Planet of the Ood back to laptop in China.

Getting to talk about Planet of the Ood with my 7 year old, from Beijing? Priceless.

Here's me presenting work on finding relationships in MARC data.

Visit the Code4Lib Conference 2008 schedule for the full conference presentations.

Author JK Rowling is to testify in a New York court this week over plans to publish an unofficial Harry Potter encyclopaedia.

The case centers on the suggestion that the encyclopaedia, composed from material on fan-site The Harry Potter Lexicon and original work by the author, Steve Vander Ark.

The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog has a very fair-use centric piece written by Dan Slater, while others pit their language as "JK Rowling in bid to defend Copyright". And this distinction is at the heart of the matter. To what extent does JK own the notion of Harry Potter and everything in the world she created and to what extent does she only own the books themselves.

The case will be bringing up some interesting arguments about just what Copyright protects.

I wrote last year about a whole host of multi-touch devices that show off the cream of what's currently possible. One of the stand-outs for me was the JazzMutant Lemur, shown here as a music sequencer.

I've been keeping half-an-eye on music companies to see what comes out as keyboards, sequencers and digital DJing gear are all natural applications of specialized interfaces. A few days ago I spotted the Yamaha TENORI-ON. An LED based sequencing interface.

Here it is, in a short product demo

I knew, when I saw it, that I'd seen the idea before. The concept is the same as the Monome devices sold in kit form:

Like Robert Sutton, I am a self-confessed asshole. That is, from time to time, I have the potential to act like an asshole to the people around me.

Also like Robert Sutton I neither want to be considered an asshole nor do I want to work with people I consider to be assholes. So when I read (some time ago) that Bob Sutton had walked away from a publishing deal with Harvard Business School Press because they wouldn't let him use the word 'asshole' in his title I thought "assholes".

It's taken the best part of eighteen months for The No Asshole Rule to filter to the top of the pile of books next to my bed, so last week I finally read it. I should have read it eighteen months ago, when I found it :-(

The book covers a great amount of research into asshole statistics as well as anecdotal stories of assholedom. Sutton gives simple, highly loaded, tests to self-assess your own asshole score (I scored only moderately) and describes techniques to help you survive asshole encounters. The thrust throughout all the chapters of the book, though, is that nobody should have to put up with assholes, not at home, not at work, not anywhere. And I agree.

He quotes a good few people, Lars Dalgaard CEO of SuccessFactors amongst them:

respect for the individual, no assholes - it's okay to have one, just don't be one ... because ... assholes stifle performance

Sutton even includes a chapter on the virtues of being an asshole, albeit with a significant bias as he shows that the virtues are perceived rather than actual. He wraps that chapter up with:

[life is] too short and too precious to spend our days surrounded by jerks. And despite my failures in this regard, I feel obligated to avoid inflicting my inner jerk on others. I wonder why so many assholes completely miss the fact that all we have on this earth are the days of our lives ... We all die in the end, and despite whatever 'rational' virtues assholes may enjoy, I prefer to avoid spending my days working with mean-spirited jerks and will continue to question why so many of us tolerate, justify, and glorify so much demeaning behaviour from so many people.

Now that's a sentiment I can get behind.

Fortunately, working at Talis, we have a very good culture overall. People are supportive of each other and enjoy sharing knowledge, learning and getting better at what we do, together. In particular we have people in leadership positions who are (almost) never jerks let alone assholes. And that's a great example to set.

So, to all those who have tolerated me when I have not kept my inner-jerk under control, thank you.

I recently bought a pair of Shure SE210 earphones. I've known about Shure for years - in the 90s I had a pair of Shure personal monitors loaned to me for an evening and they just sound amazing. I'd given up all hope of ever owning a pair of anything like that due to to the cost.

The SE210s, though, come in at a (comparatively) reasonable £65 online (or a hundred quid if you go to the Apple store!).

To say I'm impressed with them would be an understatement. As they're noise isolating, they seal into your ear canal. At first that is pretty weird and it took me a few wearings to settle on the rubber tips I currently have fitted. Now I find I can pop them in easily and they're comfortable for a few hours at a time.

The sound, though, is why you'd spend more than a tenner on a pair of earphones - if you aren't interested in the sound then stick with whatever came with your iPod!

Listening to Girl I'm Gonna Miss You, Milli Vanilli, the detailed bass line that is such a major part of the overall sound, the SE210s manage to render the bass line clearly and keep it completely separate from the drum below it. Very nice.

Bass again listening to Ready Or Not by The Course, a dance track based on samples from The Fugees track of the same name. Clear vocals, dynamic synth and deep, rich, clear bass give this track new life after listening to the muddy noise it makes on cheap earphones.

Switching to Classical, a recording of the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana performed by the Orchestre de Paris sounds wonderful with the violins rising and falling as they play out the emotion. This is one of the aspects in which the noise isolation really excels - the removal of the background noise of the office allows the earphones to convey a greater range of volumes without the quiet portions becoming washed out. For amazing piano, try these with the 2nd Movement of Chopin's Piano Concerto No.1 in E Minor.

Putting all that bullshit about dynamics aside, what these headphones mean is a rediscovery of music in my collection that was just unlistenable in the office, train or plane using cheap earphones. That's worth the money.

My first thought on seeing it was that it would be great for them to make this available as a PDF for people to download and make their own - after all the ALA is all about making sure everyone has work to do ;-)

The content is licensed under a CC license, but I can't see from the photos which one - does anyone know?

My second thought after finding the instant gratification of a download was not a option was that maybe the format was a little stuffy - I'd much prefer to see an element of fun in the decision  making process. Maybe this form factor would be better:

The Cootie Catcher by glueslabs, on Flickr. Licensed under CC-BY-NC