Category: Fixing Stuff

I had been struggling to find any documentation on how to fix an error on my kenwood Bluetooth car stereo.  Every time I tried to pair my phone the stereo screen would just flash “device full”.  The solution to this is to delete the current stored devices from the stereo.  Apparently you can only have 5 devices connected at a time, and if you ever “re-pair” your phone it stores as another device so I guess I had used up all 5 devices.

 

It was rather hard to figure out how to delete a device, since there were not any great or easy to understand instructions so I wrote down the steps below. If you have been banging your head on your steering wheel trying to get your phone to pair with your radio you are in luck, follow the 6 steps below and you will be have your phone paired to your stereo in no time!.

1.)    Hit the phone icon button on the radio (its right to the left of the volume knob and it has a picture of a phone icon on it)

2.)    Scroll the volume knob till “settings” shows on the screen, then push the volume knob in to select device settings

3.)    Scroll the volume knob to find “paring” then once “paring” is showing on the screen push the volume knob in again to select it

4.)    Scroll till you find “DVC Delete” then push the volume knob in to enter the DVC device list

5.)    Find the device to delete, push volume knob, then scroll to yes and push in knob in to confirm deletion.

6.)    Repeat until unit is free of devices

 

That’s the steps it took to remove a device from my model radio which is a kdc-bt555u.  Hopefully that helped you fix an annoying problem.

A while back I decided that I wanted to tackle leveling the floor in my home, or at the very least level the dining room floor so our games of Foosball would have a more even playing surface.  At the same time as leveling the floor I also really wanted to install joist hangers to add some rigidity as well as help stop the slow rotation the floorboards were making over time.  You see back in the 1930’s when the house was built they did not realized that they needed to secure the boards to keep them from twisting. In all fairness they did realize they needed to do this, but all the builders did was put 2 small trusses in the middle of each board, which was helpful but still allowed the ends of the board to rotate freely… which over the past 80 years they have done and in the process have become significantly un-level…. To get a feel for the gaps that we were trying to correct see the image below:

 

Now I wanted to touch on a couple very helpful tips and equipment to use:

1.) You can hammer the nails in for the joist hangers, but each hanger requires up to 8 nails… and your have to swing the hammer in a super small space… so in lew of that I opted for a palm nail hammer.

2.) To operate the nail hammer you need an air compressor, nothing fancy something like the one shown below will do the trick:

 

3.) To check your work you will want at least a 4 foot level & for jacking purposes I borrowed an engine/transmission jack from my Dad which worked perfect.

 

Now onto some helpful tips:

1.) Get a large piece of wood (2X12 is ideal) and place it under the jack to spread the force across a wider area.  This will mitigate the risk of cracking the basement floor

2.) Don’t  be afraid of the sound of cracking wood, its going to pop and crack a little. But what you do want to do is jack slowly. No more than 1-2 turns per minute.  Remember the house has taken a long time to sink, we don’t need to rush jacking it back up.

3.) Once you get each board leveled, go ahead and put your joist hanger in place before moving on.  This will help keep the boards from settling back down.

4.) Take time between ever one or 2 boards to walk up to the level above where you are jacking to check the walls for signs of cracking/shifting.  You don’t want to end up cracking old plaster walls and making more work for yourself.

 

That pretty well covers how to level the old floors in your house. Hopefully you find these ideas/tips helpful and if you decide to tackle a project like this on your own feel free to drop us a comment below or leave a screenshot of your newly level floor:

 

I starting replying as a comment to the great article Julia wrote about affirmative action, if you haven’t read it you can find it here . Julia has such a great perspective on life, and I loved her article. I also love the ending line (sharing a strong opinion is liberating). 

Seeing as I am neither black, nor grew up in a poor family with only 1 parental figure I am confident that I’m woefully unqualified to pass judgment on affirmative action, however I feel that both affirmative action & the bit on female rights that Julia touched on fall under the bigger umbrella of “fairness” which I would like to share my perspective on.

Julia touches on a very sensitive subject with her paragraph on female sexual abuse. I agree with her 100% that blaming the victim is the exact opposite way to go. Women should feel comfortable wearing whatever clothing they want too, and no one should ever make a sexual comment or advance towards a women that is unwanted.  That being said I would like to see women (and men) everywhere take their personal protection into their own hands. This is one of the biggest reasons that if I ever have a daughter I will be teaching her martial arts.  The world is a hard, unfair place.  People everywhere will take advantage of you if you let them. Women especially need to empower themselves to defend themselves if/when necessary.  This does not nessisaraly mean physical conflict, but the confidence to assert yourself verbally starts with the knowledge that you can physically defend yourself.  The best way I can explain my point is to use the words of my Kempo instructor in.

“You need to define your personal line of comfort for all social interactions.  The line is completely your choice. It does not have to be related to the law, or any external view point what so ever. Its your line, and your line alone.  If your line is someone putting their hands on you without your consent, then when that line is crossed you execute your game plan and that’s all there is too it. No hesitations, no guess work. No should I do x,y,z. Your line is crossed, and there is a consequence for whoever crossed it.  Which brings us to the next point, you have a simple “go to” game plan for any situation where your line has been crossed.  Again there is no guess work on what you will do, you have a simple plan, you execute it and the conflict is brought to a conclusion.  But the biggest thing I want to stress is that our own personal safety is OUR RESPONSIBILITY, no one else’s.  Of course we strive to live in a society where bad things like female sexual harassment don’t happen.  But the facts of life are you control whether someone takes advantage of you.  If you don’t stand up for yourself, no one else can.

 

Affirmative action for college entrance is an extremely complicated situation.  Ultimately I think something needs to be done to help even “the playing field of life” for kids.  Many people are born into basically impossible situations. 1 or no parent, no social support system or extended family, not enough money to live adequately. For someone like that to prosper they need to have some advantages pointed their way.  In lew of college entrance I think we would be a lot better served a society if we tried to help kids sooner. I think once they hit college age that its too late. I’d love to see something done much earlier, but again I’m not sure what this would be exactly…. I think I will give it more thought and maybe discuss with Julia to try and form an idea for something better than the current system we have in place.