Well at least our power outage today didn't compare with the fiasco that hit San Francisco yesterday. I feel blessed. We had a scheduled interruption for about four hours to finish up the job they were doing three weeks back.

One of the workers came by to check on the breaker, so we asked what it was they were doing to the lines. Turns out that when they put up the telephone pole across the street, they encroached on our neighbor's property by about 18 inches. It was a simple mistake. There's a big drainage ditch and common sense says to put up the telephone pole on the edge of the drainage ditch rather than in the middle. But he complained to the council, and they complained to the power company. So here they were, rewiring the entire block to move the pole over 18 inches into the center of the drainage ditch.

Part of me applauds this action. Government doing the right thing by its citizens is a noble virtue. But now they've stuck an electric pole that supplies a quarter of the town smack dab in the middle of a drainage ditch. I've seen this ditch when the monsoon rains hit. Sure hope the pole doesn't get swept away in the next big rain.

I'm starting to get the electricity under control. Have managed to pick up most of the wall-wart transformers I need. Incidentally, for the benefit of anybody that may have to follow these footsteps, forget about Tandy and Dick Smith as electronics suppliers. You'll go broke. There's a little place in Bowral called 'Leading Edge Electronics' that has much better transformers for about half the price. They've also got a better selection.

I also have pretty much given up the process of converting most of the wall-cord equipment. Some of it can be rewired, but it's a very painful and time consuming process. So instead, we've set aside one room of the house with 'Yankee Power'. I've got the familiar U.S. power strips and line cords everywhere; all feeding off of a 2kw transformer that I picked up at Fry's for $150 USD. If you attempt this, get that transformer (or three). The biggest they've got on this side of the pond is 1kw for about $300 AUD. Big difference. You'll still have to change the power cord because the Fry's transformer is set up with a UK plug, and you don't want to pump a couple kilowatts through a little plastic Aussie travel plug adapter (which you also want to pick up a few dozen of at Fry's for $1.50 USD each - you can't find 'em here at all because nobody here needs Aussie travel converters). The power strips I'm using are the super heavy duty metal Home Depot power strips with about ten plugs and a fifteen foot cord. They're about $50 USD each. I've got six or seven of 'em from my music shoppe days. The only problem is the built-in surge suppressor. If you turn on the 2kw transformer, it will send a surge and throw the house circuit breaker every time. I took some clippers and clipped out the surge suppression circuitry on a couple of these boxes as I got tired of walking outdoors in the cold to reset the breaker. I've converted over enough stuff that I probably won't need the other power strips, so I'll probably sell them for $100 AUD each (or whatever the market will bear) on ebay.com.au. Yankee power strips sell at a premium here, usually along with a transformer and some kind of home theater device that somebody tried to save money on by buying overseas - and then spent a fortune trying to get working on 220v50hz. And mine are the premium power strips, not the $4.95 USD economy strips that sell here for $50 AUD.

In the Yankee room is my recording equipment, but also such things as region 1 DVD's,  NTSC television stuff,  and any other foreign formatted thingies.  It's starting to feel like home, so I draped a couple of US flags in the windows. Well we still need blinds and they're the only pieces of cloth I could find that are near the correct size. We used the extra sheets for the other windows. I've also got about 600w of 60hz power available, but luckily most of my stuff runs off of the transformer and I haven't yet had to build a container for a few 12v batteries and charging equipment to supply the sine wave generator. We'll probably need it for Amanda's and Isabella's sewing machines - so there might be yet another Yankee room dedicated to sewing.

UPDATE: Looks like the sewing machines will also work just fine on 50hz. Yay! Thanks to Chinese manufacturing and global markets. Ten years ago this wouldn't have been the case. This means that so far we haven't found a single thing that absolutely needs 60hz to run.  Of course the big reason for that is because we sold all the stuff that we knew positively would be a problem...

Have you ever encountered a 'stuck' video/audio/data tape - one of those where the tape gets swallowed inside the machine in question? I have. More times than I can count. Oh, and the nearest authorized repair facility is halfway around the world (or worse, gone out of business)? I have - more times than I can count.

So what do you do?

You open up the darn thing and figure out how to extract the tape cartridge, that's what you do. I've also done this - more times than I can count. Usually it involves:

• disassembly of the drive mechanics, which resemble the inside of a Swiss (mechanical) watch - except the gears are plastic
• destruction of the tape cartridge, to get the pieces out of the way so that the mechanics can be further disassembled
• all of the above

Faced with this task yet again, I finally came up with a more clever way to accomplish the task. You see, the drive mechanics are operated by motors, which load and unload the cartridges. In order to operate the mechanism in the absence of motor power (which has obviously failed for some as yet unknown reason or you probably wouldn't be reading this), you usually need to take it completely apart. You can't just spin the plastic gears by hand, because they're all intertwingled and won't budge unless you physically remove the motor and then spin the first gear in the chain.

But what if you didn't need to take it completely apart? Taking Swiss watches apart and putting them back together again (without messing them up completely) is no fun. Trust me on this.

So how can we convince the motor to perform the unload task? There are two of them. One spreads the tape around the spinning head assembly. The other drives the actual tape swallower assembly. Both are usually simple DC motors. And therein lies the solution. We just need a little DC. Take a 9V battery and a few inches of speaker wire. Hold or tape the leads on one end of the speaker wire to the battery. Turn the power off on the device in question. We're going to bypass the built in power (and logic circuitry). That's what got us into this mess.

Now touch the other ends to the leads of the spreader motor. Didn't do anything? That's OK, you've got a 50/50 chance here. Swap the leads around the other way. Voila, the tape spreader starts the unload sequence. Keep them connected until the spreader has done its job and it hits the end - at which point it will stop. That's also why we use a 9V battery. It doesn't have enough torque to over spin the thing since the normal limit switches aren't able to limit us from damage. Don't hold the leads very long or you really could damage something.

Now move the leads over to the swallower motor and touch them there. Again, swap the leads if you get it backward the first time and nothing happens. Yippee! Here comes the tape! Right out the drive door and into your hand. Yay!

Can't figure out which motor is the spreader, and which is the swallower? That's OK too. Just start touching motor leads (briefly) and see what moves. You'll find them soon enough. 

Now you've probably still got to figure out why the tape was stuck, but in the meantime you've got your tape back - intact; and the mechanism is unloaded and still in one piece. Chances are pretty high that something about the tape itself or how it was loaded is what made it stuck and things will just start magically working again. If not, oh well. I don't have all the answers. But if you're ever crazy enough or desperate enough to need to do this, you're probably capable of figuring out what to do next.