The torchiere floor lamp in the sewing room suffered a catastrophic failure:
Contrary to what you might think from seeing the shattered plastic base, we didn’t use the lamp as a club or battering ram. Apparently the designer expected the thin plastic surrounding the hole to withstand all the torque produced by the long pole against the cheap concrete / mortar / grout / whatever lump in the base. As we can recall, this lamp came to us from either a yard sale or a roadside debris harvest, so I suppose the hardware outlasted any reasonable expectation.
The Basement Laboratory Warehouse disgorged the pole and base from a similar lamp, albeit sporting black paint and a smaller rod connecting its pole to its somewhat larger weight. Not being too fussy about decor, I embiggened the hole in the black base to fit the white lamp’s threaded rod:
The dust on the base shows why you shouldn’t stand motionless in the Basement Laboratory for very long.
The alert reader will have noted the cord passing through a strain relief grommet in the white base. Rather than dismantle the entire lamp, I just cut the cord, ran it through the new base weight, reinstalled the washer + nut, then crimped on a pair of solderless connectors:
The new base doesn’t offer much in the way of attachment points, so I added a cable tie to keep the strain off the connectors:
A strip of genuine 3M duct tape with double-thick adhesive now traps the cord inside that small channel and, given that the lamps spends most of its time standing quietly in a corner, the cord should be fine for long enough.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Better to be rebased than debased.
I had the same failure. I ended up just putting a big mass of that expanding gorilla glue to hold everything together. Still working :-)
You’re having better luck than I am. Our 2000 vintage DVD player now is in immediate-close mode when the changer tray opens, so it’s in the shop awaiting disposition.
Apparently, the latest and greatest* HDCP “protection” spec isn’t compatible with what was built into our 2011 vintage TV. The manual says the player might not work with all TVs because of this. Arggh. Wiki alluded to various issues on HDCP; another not-so-great idea from Intel.
A DVD player with an analog output is on order, and I plan to stick the Blu-ray in storage pending the TV going toes up eventually.
(*) There was apparently a major change from 1.x to 2.x and compatibility wasn’t a major priority. Thanks guys.
Oh, the culprit is a Blu-ray player from LG. Only an HDMI output to the TV.
I had the same problem with my older TV. I ended up buying an “HDCP stripper”, which fixed it. Yet again, badly thought out “anti-piracy” measures cause me, an honest citizen, to buy piracy hardware.
Noted. Thanks!
The Wiki article mentioned that the V2.x specification didn’t include compatibility with V1.x equipment. Some of the gadgets will take V2.x data and transform it to V1.4. Whether these or the full strippers are “legal” is moot; they’re available.
Thoughts of a back-alley design review come to mind.