Month: September 2023

Kenmore fridge defrost

I came back from vacation to a fridge that wouldn’t get cold and a freezer that was iced over in the back. I have a bottom-freeze model so I knew the issue – ice was clogging the duct that allows cold air up to the fridge. I’m guessing the defrost cycle didn’t kick in enough to defrost the back so I used some hot air to try and clear the path. That worked but there’s no easy way to trigger a manual defrost from the manual. Until I found this video which worked!

After a couple of cycles everything seems to be working better. I still have a Raspberry Pi monitoring the temperatures so I can keep an eye on it before I do some actual fixing. But so far, so good. See this post for that project: https://chriseaston.com/2023/01/30/fridge-and-freezer-temperature-monitoring/

A little warm after the defrost cycle but more in line…

Another host bites the dust

This site used to be hosted on chunkhost.com for the longest time – it was a decent service for the longest time, and cheap, which made it ideal for a random blog. After a couple of years I had one issue trying to reboot a server that was stuck rebooting since November 2022 and I decided to reach out to support — which was non-existent. I tried to reach out to some folks on twitter and the same issue — then I get an e-mail that they’re finally shutting down after all this time. Well that sucks.

Around a couple of months ago I had moved a couple blogs and an old forum (forums.psx-dude.net) off that host and onto another, cheap, dedicated server at dedihost.com. That was going well until August 31st I get an e-mail they’re shutting down immediately and to move stuff off. Welp, there goes another couple of hours trying to move websites and find a new host. I haven’t done it yet — I did grab backups — that’ll be done shortly as I get one set up.

So here we are, another host bites the dust. This post might go to the ether if I forget to grab the backups or transition to a new host in time. Time will tell, stick around if you randomly stumble here. It’ll be not that interesting 🙂

Ideally I could host from home like I did in the late 90s, but I haven’t looked into doing that with port forwarding, dynamic ips and the like. But worth exploring.