Many people with an aging Samsung DLP television get error messages on the display about the fans, such as “CHECK FAN #1″. Not terribly informative, but here’s what you can do to determine what fan is causing the problem.

Mike L. writes…

Any ideas or how to’s for fan #1? It keeps shutting down my DLP. thanks

Without knowing the model of the television, I cannot get very specific, but the first step is figuring out which fan is causing you a problem.

The most effective way to determine what is happening is to actually watch the fans operate and see if one of the fans doesn’t start up, or starts then stops. I would take off the back cover and tape down the safety switch that prevents the television from starting. Then turn on the television set and watch the fans.

Once you determine which fan is causing you the problems, you can order a replacement from partstore.com or another store that specializes in electronics parts. Fans are relatively inexpensive and easy to replace.

Not all fans are created equal and therefore you do want to make sure you get the exact fan. Some fans are simple fans that do nothing but turn on and off. Others have special features that allow them to activate at certain temperatures or spin at different speeds.

As always, when operating electronics with the cover off, use extreme caution. Don’t touch any electronic components.

I’ll follow up with a post that describes exactly which fan is which in my set.

In the meantime, you can see the procedure for replacing fan #2 on a Samsung DLP which includes a picture of a few of the fans.

Post from: Jangro.com

Samsung DLP Fan #1 Problem

This reader is having some strange behavior with his Samsung HLP5663W DLP.

I own a Samsung DLP model number HLP5663W. This AM I tried to turn the TV on with my remote and got no response. I pressed the circular button on the front of the set and no response. None of the three lights in that button were on. I unplugged the TV, waited for 30 seconds, plugged it back in and there was life again … the red standby light glowed for a few seconds followed by a blinking lamp light and the the picture appeared (even though I did not turn the TV on!). The picture lingered for about 10 seconds and then went black. The audio continued, but no picture! Once again, I was unable to turn the TV off with the remote or manually. I unplugged it again, repeated the procedure … same result. The picture appears for about 10 seconds and then goes black and the only way to turn the TV on/off is to unplug it. The bulb was replaced just one year ago. Any thoughts?? Thank you.

Sometimes when there is a fault in the Samsung DLP TVs, the only way to get them to come back to life is with a hard-reset. That is unplug it and plug it back in again. So that may explain why you need to unplug the set.

It is entirely possible, even probable, that the problem is with the lamp, especially if you don’t hear any sounds (color wheel) or see any other symptoms.

• Do you still have the old lamp? If so, and it was at all functional, give that a try.
• Make sure the fan is running. If the fan is not going, then the lamp may be overheating and shutting down.

I’d hate to suggest buying a new lamp as a test, but it never hurts to have a backup.

Otherwise, if you’re attached to this set, unfortunately it will probably take getting it to someone who can test the electronics.

Post from: Jangro.com

Samsung HLP5663W DLP Picture quits after 10 seconds

I was on a business trip this week where I met with some friends who are always good for learning about new electronics and gadgets.

Do you ever travel with your iPhone and find that you run out of battery just when it comes time to plan dinner or the nighttime events?

I do, and it is always a challenge to make sure I not only have the right cords, but planning ahead so I can make sure I can get a charge in sometime so my phone.

Here’s a secret for you. This year I upgraded my iPhone 3G to a 3GS. I did that so I could get the faster phone, better camera and video recording. I love the upgrade. But what about my old phone? Did it go to waste? No way!

I keep it charged and synced and bring it with me on business trips. When my primary phone needs a recharge, I simply take out the SIMM card and put it in the older phone and instantly I have a fresh phone with my same phone number. Then I leave my primary phone charging in the hotel room.

What, you don’t have a second iPhone?

You can pick up a used iphone 3G on ebay for about $300 these days, or get an extender.

One friend I met with was using an iPhone battery extender with which he could use his iPhone for days without a charge. Here’s what it does:

• Gives 24 hours of talk time, and weeks of standby and audio.
• Charges your phone
• Charges a second device via USB port
• Built-in flash for nightime camera use

This thing was pretty amazing. We went out for dinner and he was taking some pictures in the dark. The LED flash was like a spotlight.

The one he was using was made by FastMac. There’s an Amazon link to the right.

Post from: Jangro.com

An iPhone as an iPhone Battery Extender

This question comes from Laura…

First, I want to thank you for the great instructions on how to buy and replace our color wheel. We installed it in May and it worked like a charm.

You’re very welcome!

But I’m afraid your luck is running out…

Now, we have horizontal lines on the Samsung 43″ DLP and we are wondering what it would take to do it ourselves.

Any luck with these problems?

Unfortunately, I’m afraid this is very likely a faulty DMD board, which is essentially a computer board that the brains inside your television. It’s an expensive thing to replace. You can get refurbished boards for a few hundred dollars. New ones cost several hundreds of dollars.

While it is very possible to replace it yourself, most people opt to cut bait at this point and just shop for a new television.

I’ve got a Samsung DLP in my basement that was given to me and is waiting for me to test out the procedure on, but I can’t bring myself to spend the money. Someday…

Post from: Jangro.com

Horizontal lines on my Samsung 43″ DLP

We have a question from a reader about his Samsung HLN617WX DLP Television making a strange sound.

I have read the posts concerning the color wheel and fan #2, however, I think I have a different problem. The TV works perfectly for about an hour, then abruptly turns off and at that very moment begins making a sound similar to the siren on an old fire engine. RRRRRRRRRRRRRR. This will continue for about a minute, with the pitch rising and falling randomly, then the TV shuts down like normal (chime sound) and the lamp fan continues to run for a minute like normal before turning off. Not a very high-pitched sound like the color wheel, and not while the picture is on. After this happens, if I turn it back on it will not stay on very long, leading me to believe it is overheating. I have listened at the back of the TV and it does not appear to be coming from the lamp fan, more like further into the TV. What could this be? Fan #1? I can’t find any fan #1 replacements, unless it is the same as fan #2.

There simply aren’t that many things in a Samsung DLP Television that can make these sounds.

And while there are a few fans inside this television, I have to believe that it is the color wheel. Here’s my theory.

The problem with the color wheels is the bearings. These are essentially ball bearings that allow the wheel to spin very fast, not much different than the bearings in a skateboard wheel. (Remember those?)

The bearings go bad and create friction. This noise is that friction as the wheel still tries to spin at several thousand RPM. In your case, I’m guessing that the friction is causing heat to the point of malfunction and therefore the shutdown.

I’d remove the color wheel to see if can spin freely, and if it gives any resistance

Post from: Jangro.com

Samsung HLN617WX DLP TV Color Wheel Noise

This was a fun thing to do, in a sad sort of way. I’m embarrassed that I’ve missed out on the entire middle half of our country.

visited 28 states (56%)

Go here to Create your own visited map of The United States.

Post from: Jangro.com

Where I’ve Been

I’ve been wrestling with this issue for a few years now, but I think it’s finally time to split off the affiliate marketing talk from Jangro.com to a new blog.

I was having lunch with a friend who’s in the online world like myself and when I brought this up, he said (paraphrasing), “Why? What’s in it for you? Won’t this just take up your time?”

He’s right, there’s nothing material in it for me. And it will take up my time. But the thing is, I cannot imagine not writing and commenting on the affiliate marketing industry, doing my small part to move it forward. I owe am where I am today to affiliate marketing — working for myself with my own company. Most of the opportunity and revenue that I enjoy would not be possible without this industry.

That’s a pretty amazing thing, and I want to talk about it.

Jangro.com, however, has evolved and morphed into something that I did not intend. Look over there in the sidebar. → See all the Samsung and DLP television searches? I can’t help that. That’s Google’s fault. I get a ton of traffic for a few blog posts that I wrote a few years ago on repairing my Samsung DLP television. The thing is, I make money on those through (you guessed it) affiliate marketing. So I’m going to do a judo move and let the momentum take us in that direction and turn this into more of a personal/tech/gadget/geek site.

And in a Sam-Harrelson-esque move, I’m launching a new affiliate marketing blog. I hope that the new turf will enable and inspire me to deliver much more of the content and information that I have swimming around in my head without colliding with televisions and chinposes.

So, if you’re interested in Affilate Marketing stuff, thanks for sticking with me through the TV stuff. The pain is now over.

Head on over to AffBook.com. Subscribe to the RSS and the newsletter.

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Jangro.com Spin-off, AffBook.com

Recently, Google Affiliate Network rolled out a transition of their payment processing to Google Adsense. Through an easy process, you link your GAN account to an Adsense account (existing or new) and your GAN payments will be processed through Adsense.

From a personal standpoint, I’m mostly ambivalent on the matter. As long as we get paid, I don’t really care how. We get paid every month from Google Adsense, so fine with me.

From the perspective of my former role as an affiliate network product manager, it is a no-brainer move on Google’s part. It gives GAN an opportunity to improve their payment process, pay in dozens of currencies, cost savings through efficiencies, improved reporting, and many other benefits.

For these reasons, surely the old Doubleclick/Performics platform has a death sentence while the entire platform is migrated over to Google technology.

But finally, from my care-about-the-industry-and-the-publishers-in-it perspective, there are some very serious issues that come out of this change.

1. Payment from GAN goes back to monthly from bi-monthly. Surely many publishers enjoyed the more frequent payments that Performics offered.
2. Some publishers seem to not want to join Adsense. A Google rep has stated publicly on ABW, and a Googler reiterated to me personally this morning (see below) that there’s no requirement to actually USE Adsense. Just an account is required to receive payment. I’m unclear where the reluctance remains. Maybe it’s that giving in more to the Google is anathema to some people.
3. The biggest sticking point is that there are some publishers active in Google Affiliate Network who have been banned from Adsense. These publishers may not be able to get an Adsense account. Period. This means that they will not be able to operate in Google Affiliate Network either. If you’re one of those publishers, that’s a tough pill to swallow.

To get to the bottom of some of these issues, I got on the phone with Larry Adams from Google. Larry is a product manager for Google Affiliate Network.

Larry did confirm that these issues are real. He did assure me that GAN will work with any publisher to try and resolve any issues keeping them from getting access to Google Adsense. In some cases they will succeed, but the reality is that it will not be possible in all cases. If the Adsense team won’t budge on a ban, the publisher is out of luck and won’t be able to continue in Google Affiliate Network.

Does this suck? Definitely. I hate that even one good publisher can be impacted in the pocketbook or even possibly be put out of business.

But when you think about this from Google’s business perspective, it’s not hard to see how it came to this.

Is it a good business for Google to consolidate payment processing for a company they acquired? Yes.

Are there other good reasons for Google to want to pay GAN publishers through Adsense? Yes, they’ve got a well established process and can pay in 40 some-odd currencies. That alone is a good reason.

Are there publishers who will be lost because they will not be allowed in (or back in) to Adsense? Certainly, but if you look at this at a high level, there very likely isn’t a very big revenue impact to that decision. And there probably isn’t even a huge number of publishers that will be impacted. From a sheer numbers perspective, it’s probably negligible.

Only when you look at it on a case-by-case basis do you see that individual people are getting hurt by this. And that’s what sucks. While most probably got banned from Adsense for a good reason, I’m sure many of these people feel that they were unfairly removed from Adsense.

If I was one of those people, and I truly felt that I was wrongly banned from Adsense, I’d be screaming at anyone who will listen.

The fact of the matter is that for one reason or another ALL of those impacted publishers are not wanted in the Adsense network. As far as Google is concerned they have their reasons. If these publishers are not wanted in the Adsense network, it stands to reason that they wouldn’t want them in the affiliate network either. (I do feel that Google’s policy of issuing lifetime bans from Adsense is quite harsh, but that’s a different discussion.)

This event likely would have happened at some point as Google integrates the Affiliate Network further into their Publisher platform. It just so happens that the payment integration is the breaking point.

Unfortunately, there are no grandfather clauses in company acquisitions. And as one of my high school social studies teachers loved to say, and he said it often, life isn’t fair.

If you find yourself in this situation, start working with the GAN support team now to try and get the issue with the Adsense team resolved. They will try to help.

But I wouldn’t count on getting special consideration from the infamously stubborn Adsense team. Start looking at what other networks you can promote your merchants through. Talk to the merchant. Many will have programs in CJ or in-house. And perhaps be prepared to explain why Google doesn’t want you.

As if we haven’t learned this a hundred times before, it doesn’t pay to piss off Google.

For further information, opinions, and discussions on this, see this thread at ABW.

Update: There’s a good discussion going on at the copy of this blog post on my Facebook account.

Post from: Jangro.com

Pissing Off Google Doesn’t Pay

I’ll be arriving at Affiliate Summit East 2009 in NYC on Friday August 7th and leaving on the following Wednesday.

Affiliate Summit always has plenty of time available for meetings, both during the day and after-hours.

If you’d like to meet with me any time during summit, please give me a call: 617-910-0055.

I’ll also be at a number of these parties. I think I’ve got 5 to hit on Monday night.

Did someone say something about a 10K Affiliate Summit Run on Tuesday at 5:30am? Srsly?

Post from: Jangro.com

Meet Me at Affiliate Summit #ASE09

Whether you follow GTD practices or your own to do list formatting, to me that there are two basic requirements.

1. Dead simple interface
2. Easy capture of todos.

If these things don’t exist, it fails.

I’ve been a todo management software junky, trying out just about any desktop app or web-based tool that I can get my hands on. To name a few I’ve put Remember The Milk, Toodledo, OmniFocus, Things, Evernote, and GMail Tasks, through the paces. All these tools work, and to many, work well. I don’t even want to calculate how much I’ve spent on this habit.

The problem is that it seems that I keep trying these things out, buying new solutions thinking that the next one will fix my game, like buying a new set of golf clubs. It simply doesn’t work if you don’t already have the skills.

In the end, what it comes down to for me is that these specialized applications fall short because they all have interfaces.

Huh? Of course they have interfaces. A specialized interface provides features, menus, folders, editing, management, reminders, etc. But this is precisely what causes me to fail. They get in the way. They’re someone else’s idea of what works well as a task management system. Further, they’re yet another separate application or website that I must remember to access and use. They’re complex. And for tasks, todos, and getting things done, complex is the kiss of death.

I need something that is simple to use, free-form, and always available, even in the tools that I already use — a text editor. Just like we always seem to fall back on good old pencil and paper, just give me a simple text editor.

Todo.txt CLI

I’ve always thought that Gina Trapani was on to something big with her todo.txt command line interface for task management. But for me, the command line interface relies too heavily on having a terminal window and the command line as the primary interface. See, this is why we evolved from using command line editors like SED and EDLIN to vi, emacs, Notepad, TextMate, etc.

I will say that it’s about as close as I’ve seen to perfect because it doesn’t impose a method on you, and it does create a text file that’s human-readable that can be accessed and opened anywhere.

But to me, the todo.txt format just needs a little bit of formatting, and a little bit of functionality for organization that is cumbersome to get from a CLI. Though in the end, with some effort and customization, I strongly believe that I could make todo.txt work better than any of the OS X or web apps that I’ve tried so far.

That is until now.

Enter TaskPaper

TaskPaper is the best of both worlds. It uses a simple text file format as the data storage. You can edit this text file with any editor you want or even scripts (like todo.txt). This enables people to create powerful apple scripts to automate a lot of the common tasks. This text file format is well structured with projects as section headers.

The TaskPaper desktop interface itself is little more than a text editor. You can freely type in and edit your todo items. Simple formatting allows you to break things down into Projects, Tasks, Notes, and Tags. It is designed to be very “get the hell out of the way”, but when you need to narrow your focus, you can search for tags, projects or keywords. Mouse actions or keyboard commands are available to move things around and mark items as complete. You can fully implement GTD or whatever method you use for your own task management.

You can customize the look and feel. It comes with several themes, you can download more, or even make your own.

Here’s my favorite as it stands out from the rest of the apps on my desktop:

And if you want, you can open up your file with any text editor. TextMate has a special TaskPaper bundle that gives your file a little bit of the formatting that you can get using the desktop app. Here’s the same file opened up simultaneously in TextMate:

I’ll never back off from the premise that a text editor interface is the best interface there is, especially if it can be your own favorite editor. The TaskPaper editor, however, does have a few features to organize and capture. You can search and filter using some simple and powerful commands. in the search box. For example, the stuff that I’ve tagged to do today:

There’s a hot-key accessible quick-capture dialog available as well. By typing a configurable hotkey, you can bring up this for quick todo capture.

And beyond that, there’s a community of users providing their own themes and applescripts to automate actions, like capturing todos via email.

Todo List in the Cloud

But the magic of this is that by storing your todo text file in a shared location in the “cloud” you can access and edit.

I’ll be experimenting with storing my file in dropbox so I can get to it from the web, my iphone, as well as the multiple computers that I use.

The minute that dropbox comes out with an iPhone app that allows viewing/editing of files, this becomes a killer app, well, I think it already is.

Give TaskPaper a try. Or if you’re not (yet) a Mac user, try out Gina’s Todo.txt as it will work on any platform.

It took me 5 minutes to plunk down the $30 for TaskPaper. Actually, $25. Watch the screencast for a bonus coupon code.

Post from: Jangro.com

Back to Task Management Basics: todo.txt and TaskPaper