Basuragomi's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
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mooretrees
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by mooretrees »

Whoa, 2022 is right around the corner! That's exciting news. Also, what a bummer to find out you have an egg intolerance. But maybe it was getting uncomfortable after eating? Looking forward to hearing your efficient exit strategy.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

Yeah, I think what tipped me over was a combination of:
- getting back into the creative habit, helped by the pandemic easing up here, which bolstered the flee-to motivation
- work getting more tedious
- charitable giving driving savings rate to a crawl - this was an intentional anti-golden-handcuffs strategy, it seems to work
- the current ~2.3% withdrawal rate finally feeling "real" to my subconscious

Now I feel like I can't leave soon enough!

The egg thing is compounded by my wife having problems with eggs as well. I was the "eater of last resort" and now that food will just be going to waste whenever we eat outside the home. I will try to ERE my way out of this with the power of lentils and science, though.

2Birds1Stone
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by 2Birds1Stone »

Excellent update. Your journal is one of those that I feel like I have followed closely but didn't want to clutter with my ramblings. Really enjoyed following your progress up to this point and can't wait to see how you approach the transition. We continue on similar paths wrt finances and our WR% are also within .1% of each other.

When you first started posting in here, you also indicated that your DW was close to 4% WR at the time. Does she also plan on pulling the plug soon? How do you think this decision could change your relationship dynamic?

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

She's farther ahead than myself, though I was catching up! She doesn't plan on quitting for at least 5 years, though lately it's been more of a "one bad manager away from retirement" kind of thing.

I don't think the dynamic will change very much. We keep separate finances and neither of us are planning extensive travel, so I don't think there will be much of a mismatch there. There might be some resentment especially if she goes back to full-time at the office, but right now with both of us working from home it feels like a comfortable preview of the future dynamic.

ETA: I do follow all of the "millennial cohort" journals on this forum pretty closely. It's fascinating to read about the different paths everyone is taking. My friend group is pretty homogeneously white collar professional types so it's a much needed dose of perspective.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

How to make malkmallows

I'm posting this because 1) the word "malkmallow" has zero results on Google and Bing - so now it will have exactly one result, and 2) I wanted candy and had a handful of disparate expired ingredients to use up.

Image
(it's not the most appetizing in appearance and this was a particularly bad photo... photography is on the future skill list)

Ingredients:
1 cup water
0.5 cups leftover ovaltine (the malt)
0.5 cups leftover powdered skim milk (the malk)
21 g gelatin (the mallow)
1 tablet lactase enzyme, crushed into the milk powder (makes it sweeter by converting lactose to simple sugars)
0.25 cups granulated sugar
1 cup corn syrup
1/4 tsp salt

Directions:
1) Combine gelatin with 1/2 cup cold water, let it sit. This isn't nearly enough water to dissolve everything, but just give it a rough mix and deal with it looking like crumbling gel.
2) Combine everything else. Cook it on medium while stirring until it reaches 240F, 20-30 minutes depending on pot size.
3) Pour hot syrup into a big mixing bowl. Wear an apron.
4) Gradually spoon gelatin into the syrup while mixing the above-boiling syrup on high. Hope you wore the apron!
5) Mix until mixture is about 40C and looks like... melted marshmallow.
6) Spoon into silicone moulds, powdered with cornstarch.
7) Let cool overnight, peel out of the moulds and powder remaining sides. Contemplate their squishiness.
8) Enjoy your malkmallows!

They're really delicious. It's like drinking a warm mug of butterscotch hot cocoa. The malt turns into caramel, gives it some serious depth of flavour, and the milk powder+gelatin makes it very rich while not being as sweet as a regular marshmallow. I'm going to try pumpkin spice, earl grey and coffee milkmallows next time.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

@2Birds1Stone: You must be some kind of augur, DW submitted her resignation this morning! Her team lead is being transferred to another unit, leaving the nominally 6-person unit with just her. After that it went something like this with the boss:

"Who will be replacing the team lead?"
"Nobody."
"Who will handle the giant, years-overdue, snafu project that team lead was un-fucking?"
"You. Under my supervision."
"Then I resign. Here's my two weeks' notice."

Leaving the unit effectively dissolved and me as the unexpected trailing spouse.

Things are getting interesting!

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

October 2021 update

No graphs this time, but it wasn't particularly interesting - spending the usual amounts and got reimbursed for all the work expenses.

Net worth passed $800,000, which means that I will start donating all of my employment income to charity. Previously I was at ~30%. With my plans of quitting in 2022, I should be just able to match my goals of one year's salary donated & tax return exceeding expenses.

As previously mentioned, my wife quit her job with no plans for a new one. She is effectively FIRE'd now, which puts me in the trailing position. She's suffering from some severe burnout, so I'm not exactly expecting much beyond decompression for the next few months.

I spent some time this month clearing backlogged maintenance/DIY tasks. Starting with overhauling our vacuum cleaner which had three sub-projects:

1) The hose tip was worn out from years of being dragged around corners. I 3D-printed a new one. I changed the design so the tab would be more easily removeable in the future, which was a major flaw of the OEM part.
Image

2) The power switch had partially melted (!). As I was at one of our local electronics component stores looking for a replacement and fidgeting with the removed power switch, it started working again! I must have worn through whatever physical interference was caused by the button melting. So I simply swapped it with the identical brushroll switch and got a higher-rated button as backup. The brushroll is lower power so shouldn't suffer as much heating from inrushing current.

Image
(failed switch is on the left)

3) The crevice tool was too fat to fit between our radiator fins. So I made a new one out of a 3D-printed base and an old yogurt tub (my favourite material). I used some heat to relax the plastic into a conical frustum:

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Then I shoved it into the base, laced it together with fishing line, and sealed it all with some packing tape.

Image

Works great! I should have added some stringers along the outside to stiffen the base though, as it is a bit too thin/flexible for comfort.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

Here's an interesting project: The Metabolizer, a solar-and-biomass powered plastic recycling system. Video of the first half in operation. Nothing about the individual components is novel, but putting it all together in an engineered system is. Despite the main output being a 3d printer and intent for self-replication, I think the only major plastic component of the system is the wood gas storage tank. It has about 2% efficiency, not including the efficiency of plant photosynthesis.

How much land would be needed per capita if the average person relied on this to make all the crap in their life? At a biomass growth rate of 3t/ha/year, 2% efficiency, and 19 MJ/kg, that's 317 kWh/ha/year into the printer and shredder. The shredder produces 1.2 kg/kWh, and the printer deposits about 47 kg/kWh. That's about 0.85 kg/kWh printed, so 271 kg/ha/year assuming the plastic is free. No idea what to do with all the creosote.

Canadians consume about 100 kg of plastic per capita per year, so the answer is that each person would need about a half-hectare (including the solar panels). That's 200,000 square km of forest to prune from for Canada, or 30 Algonquin Parks.

I was expecting a much more demanding result, to be honest. Even at this trash-tier efficiency a "circular" economy built on this system is probably viable.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

My wife had her last day. A lot of people reached out privately to express how envious they are. They wish they could also quit due to burnout, but the defined-benefit pensions are their "golden handcuffs." A standard public service pension replaces 70% of income, with the federal pension in theory replacing the remaining 30% at 65.

What's crazy to me is that the value of the DB pension is equivalent to about a 16% savings rate - less than the standard 18% tax-deferred account contribution rate. People would rather live miserably stressed-out rather than reduce spending by 1/6th of their income. Is this just a lack of awareness? Or is the cultural gulf between spenders and savers just that large, i.e. with respect to engaging with investments and money? Money is such a taboo subject that it's so hard for me to tell what is normal in the general population. I'm guessing that this is by design.

jacob
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by jacob »

basuragomi wrote:
Thu Nov 11, 2021 9:59 am
What's crazy to me is that the value of the DB pension is equivalent to about a 16% savings rate - less than the standard 18% tax-deferred account contribution rate. People would rather live miserably stressed-out rather than reduce spending by 1/6th of their income. Is this just a lack of awareness? Or is the cultural gulf between spenders and savers just that large, i.e. with respect to engaging with investments and money? Money is such a taboo subject that it's so hard for me to tell what is normal in the general population. I'm guessing that this is by design.
30% of the US population and 23% of Canadians have no operational understanding of what "16%" or "1/6" means.

See https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf

Let that sink in for a moment.

At best they'll be auto-enrolled in their pension plans upon hiring. If they're "lucky" they'll have heard a slogan like "get the match" and ask for that without really understanding what it means or does. The more I've investigated these matters, the more I've realized and reluctantly been forced to admit that a material fraction of humanity really is rather much much dumber (ignorant) than naively assumed. There's a reason why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_S ... game_show) was a thing---a quarter of all adults really aren't.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by mountainFrugal »

Surprising and scary.
As a funny aside from that wiki link:
"Two people have won the $1 million prize: Kathy Cox, superintendent of public schools for the U.S. state of Georgia; and George Smoot, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics"
When all other academic prizes are achieved going toe to toe with a 5th grader is a prize worth pursuing.

2Birds1Stone
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by 2Birds1Stone »

Congrats to your DW on the decompression phase, and to you on crossing $800k. It's very admirable that you plan on donating your entire income now that this milestone has been reached. Are you expanding to new causes now that you're donating more, or doing more to the ones you've been donating the 30% to?

I feel like this is something important to research with portfolio reaching runaway SWR levels.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

@jacob, thanks for the link. I read an excerpt from it a long time ago about the technology testing part - someone arguing that just being able to read this message puts you in the top 1% in computer skills. I didn't realize that the distribution of numeracy was almost identical! It's easier for me to accept that people don't understand computing than grade 3 math, I guess. I know some former bank tellers from before information was super compartmentalized in that role - I'll try to pick their brains, I'm sure they have some amazing innumeracy stories.

@2Birds1Stone: I've split things up to new charities, since if I donate everything to the food bank I would be ~10% of their operating budget and future cessation would cause some major shocks.

As of now I'm giving (monthly) $3k to a local food bank, $2k to a women's reproductive health centre, and $1k to the public library. Each operates by moving large quantities of free-but-high-utility stuff around, so hopefully their coefficient of performance is high.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

Lentil protein concentrate - towards lentofu

What is Lentofu?
So I've been concentrating on the topic of home-accessible lentil-based meat alternatives - lentofu. I found it really hard to get soybeans here, so focused on lentils. My issue with many plant-based meat alternatives is that their protein content is rather low. E.g. mushrooms have basically no nutritional value, and bean burgers and tofu are pretty high in carbs. Not to mention lentils themselves which can have an offputting texture. Someone looking for the vegetarian equivalent of plain eggs doesn't have many options that don't involved highly processed funky tasting powders.

The issue with simply making tofu out of lentils is that while most of the proteins in soy are soluble in tap water, most of the proteins in lentils are not. The typical soy production process doesn't work on lentils. But I know that cooking the protein should be able to set a gel (based on earlier research when I was trying to make pectin gels to process waste fruit peels), and looked up a lot of literature on extracting lentil proteins. I found that these proteins can make a strong foam and gel, which is what I'm targeting for a lentil-based protein food product.

Why lentils?
1) They're cheap,
2) Canada is the world's largest producer so the supply is reasonably secure (This is the implicit Confederation deal: the east provides the market, skilled labour, supplies and infrastructure; the west grows the dryland crops. If this deal collapses I've probably already died),
3) they are so high in protein that the residue is equivalent in macronutrient profile to plain wheat flour, which fits great into the rest of my diet for minimal waste, and
4) bonus ERE points for anything lentil related.

Producing the lentil protein concentrate
I spent the last week extracting protein from lentils. I followed the method from Jarpa (2015) in particular for this experiment.

Start with 500g of hulled split red lentils.
Image

I blended them in a food processor with 1 L tap water. I didn't blend them as finely as I would've liked, should have split it into two batches and sieved it. I then added an additional 4 L tap water and 0.7g sodium carbonate (the proper amount would be around 0.4-0.5g but I'm not sure how strong mine was as it was old). Legumin dissolves in basic solutions but not neutral or acidic. An alternate route is to make a strong brine, but without a centrifuge I didn't want to try it and risk ruining the edibility.
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I stirred it at 22 C for an hour to dissolve the legumin proteins. I should've used hot tap water at 30 C instead for higher extraction. Getting the water too hot might denature the proteins and prevent concentration, so I recommend not heating it on a stove. After stirring, I let the mixture settle, and drained off the loaded solution. I added 50 grams of 5% white vinegar to the loaded solution. Immediately a very fine (felt like ~400 mesh/37 micron) beige precipitate fell out of solution, leaving behind a yellowish whey. The vinegar makes it smell a bit unpleasant so I would recommend using citric acid next time.
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I allowed this to settle for 24 hours. It was so fine that the precipitate either clogged or passed through everything I could use to filter it. I instead just removed the whey as it settled. This produced a roughly 5.4% solids concentrate. I dried it for 12 hours at 40 C and it reduced to about 27% solids. I froze the rest. It turned salmon/red as it dried.
Image

Using the whey and pulp
I had saved all the whey because the water-soluble fraction of the proteins (albumin) should be dissolved in it. I boiled it to denature and crash out the albumin, which duly coagulated into white ~2 mm flakes. I put this all through a coffee filter to concentrate the albumin. After cooking and filtering the remaining liquid was very clear and colourless. I discarded the liquid and ate the albumin, it tasted like flaky egg whites. I'm looking for a way to concentrate the albumin without cooking or vacuum evaporation, as it would be really useful to improve the lentofu heat resistance.

I noted that the remaining pulp is nutritionally equivalent to wheat flour. I added lemon juice to neutralize it, some salt and baking soda. I made pancakes with this pulp and ate it through the week with some peanut butter and jam. With the reduced protein and pureeing it had a texture kind of like bread pudding. It was much easier to eat than soy pulp/okara which tends to be pretty dry and messy. So nothing went to waste!

Results
I finished with a total of about 75g of concentrate and 25g of albumin from 500g lentils. This is equivalent to about 270g of chicken breast so is about 1/3rd the cost per gram of protein. Assuming the concentrate is 84% crude protein, I achieved 43% recovery of protein to the concentrate, and 10% recovery to the whey albumin. This is a 53% overall protein recovery. In the paper they achieved 54% to concentrate and ~67% overall, but they had grinding mills and centrifuges.

Vegan lentil muffins
I created a 5% solids concentrate to test the protein as an egg replacement, again following Jarpa's recipe:

200g flour
260g sugar
3g baking powder
47g cocoa
330g 5% lentil protein concentrate
160g oil
Bake at 175C for 30 minutes

This made about 14 muffins:
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Internal texture:
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The muffins tasted great and were pretty much indistinguishable from a regular muffin, though I think I would reduce cooking time by 2-3 minutes. I'm going to try other applications of this concentrate as an egg replacement in the future. I was excited to get on with the lentofu part of this experiment.

Lentofu - attempt 1

I read from other papers investigating lentil gels that 12% concentrate would produce a pretty strong gel. I read from Jarpa that adding guar gum in some unknown amount would make it even stronger. So I made a 12% lentil protein concentrate, 5% guar gum solution. I put it in a covered metal bowl and cooked it in a water bath at 90C for 20 minutes. After this it was very runny, but as it cooled it became a very thick gel, with texture similar to cheddar cheese. I marinated it in garlic, sugar and soy sauce for a day in the fridge. It actually absorbed some of the sauce and discoloured!
Image

I cut it up and fried it. Unfortunately it melted a bit on the bottom until the bottom skin dehydrated enough to hold everything together. I would recommend frying in a very hot pan or deep frying. I am going to add cornstarch in the next iteration to see if that improves high-temperature resistance.
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I ate it! The texture is kind of grainy, and because it softens at high temperatures, when served warm it's comparable to a grainy cream sauce. A bit cooler and it's like soft mechanically separated chicken. It's a really unique kind of food. It was fairly moreish and got an "it's not meat, but it's okay, I'll eat more if you make it" rating which is a pretty good Wife Acceptance Factor.
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I know ERE has moved beyond saving the world with lentils to saving the world with pastel rainbows, but I think there's still a lot of mileage yet for the lentil part!

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

November 2021 update

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I've started donating basically everything I don't spend to charity. It is a big shock to have money in equal money out for the first time in my life. It's like I'm wading into the lake of FIRE and my nuts just touched the cold water.

I bought some gold. After literally years of ruminating on the topic, I've concluded that the likely way (through various pathways) to resolve the housing bubble is serious depreciation of the dollar. In hedging against sequence of returns risk, future CAD cash flows are not preferable in this scenario. So I am seeing the value of having some cash-equivalent assets that offer some currency hedging power, as a kind of "catastrophic failure nest egg." I am happy with about 4x expenses in gold for now.

My spouse is continuing to decompress and recover from the prior high-stress job. She does basically the exact same stuff as she did before, except without working. I'm hearing the classic "I have no idea how I ever had time to work!" which is probably a good sign for when we're both done full-time work.

I keep having a recurring daydream about kitting out a fat-tired bike with big pontoon saddlebags and going on some massive bikepacking trip through the bush. I hate bushwhacking. I think this means I'm craving escape.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

The Lentufo is cool. I’ve been bummed out lately about the fact that I can no longer eat lentils, but I bet lentofu would be more easily digestible.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

Lentofu is by definition made of water-soluble ingredients, so I think it would be very digestible. You would need a plan for the residual lentil pulp, though.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I could feed it to the meat rabbits that I feed to the dogs that I harness to the turnstile on days with no wind. (If I actually had such a set up.)

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

December 2021 update and year in review

Monthly update
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I've let my employer know that I will be leaving in 2022. No date fixed yet, but probably around June. Kind of ironic that I ended 2020 loving my job, because 2021 ended with all the fun parts dried up and only the drudgery remaining. At least now I have both freedom-from and freedom-to.

I worked on Lentofu v2, which incorporates 5% cornstarch to stop it from melting at high temperatures. It allowed it to fry up very nicely, but still lacks bite and cornstarch is a pure carb. WAF is 2x higher than v1.

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I have three new avenues of exploration on this project:

1) Alginate gel.
Pros: Doesn't melt at high temps, no additional residues, very strong gel if desired, easy to prepare.
Cons: Highly processed, not available locally.

2) Suspend in soy milk, coagulate to tofu and press.
Pros: Local ingredients, residue has good macronutrient profiles, these would be literal soylent steaks to fulfill your most dystopian dreams, forget that weird silicon valley cheerio milkshake junk. Soylent Pink?
Cons: Not as much chew, tofu is a pain to make, more residue to deal with, lots of carbs.

3) Suspend in wheat gluten/seitan.
Pros: Lots of chew, can give it a fibrous grain, locally grown, pure protein.
Cons: I don't have a freeze-dryer so can't extract my own gluten/lentil protein into powder form so it's expensive, residue would otherwise have poor macros, can't easily set in brick moulds, not gluten-free.

Year in review
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Excluding charity, I spent $17,531 (~1.6 JAFI) this year which is a 1.0% increase over last year.

Less spending on groceries now that I've taken over the majority of grocery shopping, and we've learned the art of the 1x a month grocery run.

Next year I should have lower expenses since our joint finances will be moved closer to a 50-50 split. Of course, employment income will go to nil.

Net worth ticked upwards to about $0.84M (vs. $0.6M last year), which puts me at a 2.1% WR excluding charitable contributions. In other terms, 48 years of expenses versus 48 years of actuarial life expectancy. I have some more defensive assets now to hedge against SORR going into FIRE, but even with a 50% drop things wouldn't be too bad.

I'm wholly fulfilling the promise from 2020 to donate my employment income. By the time I expect to quit, I'll have donated a year's worth of income to charity. I'll also be able to shape a tax refund equal to a year's expenses!

Things started in 2021 that I have turned into a habit
- I managed to claw back some time for projects by cutting down more on media consumption. I view it as better setting up my habits so as to not be throwing time down the drain in "retirement."
- It's a bad habit, but using car-shares. I took 6 trips by car this year, and it's honestly quite nice. Cheaper than transit too when going to the exurbs.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

Broken monitor witchcraft

My 12-year-old monitor refused to power on, right before I had to write my grad school application. Everything is over and I don't know why, so I'll share my baffling journey with you. I'm not going to put it in the fix-it thread because nothing was fixed and nothing was learned.

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It didn't power on at all, not even the indicator LED. So I assumed it was a plug issue.

- Jiggle the plug. Nothing. Swap the plugs with my secondary monitor. Nothing. Swap outlets. Nothing, and the secondary works fine throughout.
- I figure at this point it's a bad power supply, and probably high up in the circuit, since it's a complete power failure. Guess I have to open it up. Online instructions say "pull straight up" but the screen is apparently too small for its own weight to unstick the clips. Twist the centre of the bezel away from the screen until it pops out. An old credit card and guitar pick slowly jimmies everything else out:

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This frees up the internals, and I lift the case away. Here's the layout:

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- A few interesting things to note: The electronics are not fixed in place with anything beyond tape. The whole LCD assembly (LC layer, backlight, diffuser, etc.) is a single riveted unit. So if the backlight fails it is extremely difficult to replace. Luckily it's just a power supply issue so I only need to take that out.
- Disconnect the ribbon cables and flip over the shield. These have advanced since the last time I opened up a monitor, and consist of a flat ribbon with exposed conductors at the end and a two-piece clamp that squishes it against a receptacle. Easy to lose the wedging piece.
- Here's the power supply board. The whole right side was unpopulated but looked like it was meant to power something very finicky.

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- I checked for any scorch marks on the board, and there was nothing. No "magic smoke" smell either.
- The prime culprit was the fuse between the AC input and the primary transformers. It's in perfect condition.
- The next culprit were the electrolytic capacitors which fail after a while. All of them were in great visual condition with no bulging or leakage. At this point I'm wondering what is even wrong.
- I start testing all the caps and they're fine and on-spec. I'm starting to develop a sense of dread.
- At this point I have to figure out how the damn thing even works. There's two sets of transformers to step down the AC input, and two sets of rectifiers to convert it to DC. One uses high-power diodes ("rectifier"), and the other uses switching transistors and Zener diodes ("voltage regulators"). I guess the diode one runs the backlight efficiently, while the Zeners run the speakers and LCs?
- Armed with enough knowledge to be dangerous, I check all the diodes. They're all working properly.
- Everything seems fine, but I can't test the transformers. It would make sense if they burned out since that would kill the whole thing. However, there's no smoke or scorching. The only way forward is to power things up and see which output is broken, but I refuse to probe a live AC circuit. I also don't have a signal generator, power supply or oscilloscope.
- I've done all I could and give up. Having replaced no components, I reassemble everything and ask around for surplus monitors.
- I plug it in for one last hurrah. The monitor fires up.

My best guess is that the button ribbon cable had loosened or oxidized, and detaching/attaching it fixed that and let the monitor start up. But I have no idea at all. I feel like I performed a cargo cult repair ritual and it just magically summoned the tech fairies' blessing. I'll take the win, but am left no wiser than before.

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