Roomba - 6 months in…
Posted by admin on June 16th, 2008 filed in TechnologyComment now »
Wow… less and less impressed as time goes by.
Roomba has been broken for two months. It worked for three months before it broke and still no parts for it.
One more month goes by without a repair and I’ll have had a broken unit just as a long as a functional one.
Roomba 560 - 5 months in…
Posted by admin on May 30th, 2008 filed in TechnologyComment now »
Well… my initial reviews were enthusiastic. However, April 25th (just over a month ago) Roomba broke. I phoned their customer support - and I must say it was the best customer support call I’d ever had. Bottom line was it needed a replacement part, which would be covered under warranty.
However, It’s been over a month and the part hasn’t arrived. Irobot.com told me was out of stock at the time - and a followup email today confirmed it is still out of stock and they do not know when it is coming in. So, this has soured my experience a little.
It’s quite obvious how clean Roomba kept my place being without it.
Rogers High Speed Internet - monthly limits suck.
Posted by admin on April 15th, 2008 filed in Technology2 Comments »
For those of you unfortunate enough to get your Internet through Rogers…
Now that Rogers has changed the amount of Bandwidth you get and the charges associated with them be warned…
If you were to download at the full speed of the line, how many hours would you be able to do so before Rogers started charging you extra fees?
Service
Download (Mbps)
Monthly Limit (GB)
Hours to Run out
Extreme Plus
18
95
12.01
Extreme
10
95
21.62
Express
7
60
19.50
Lite
1
25
56.89
Ultra-Lite
0.5
2
9.1
As you can see, most of Rogers MONTHLY plans can easily be run out within a day of downloading (this assumes no uploading bandwidth, which is of course needed during downloads)
Most shocking of all, the ultra-light plan has a $5 per gig charge when you run over that huge 2 GB monthly limit.
Why are we getting the shaft in Canada for our internet speeds and pricing.
Take a look at this article regarding Internet over the power lines in Indonesia.
224Mbps for $1.58 per month. (That’s right… more than 10 times the speed of Rogers fastest connection for 2% of Rogers price)
Anyone want to invest in a Canadian startup of this to flatten our ISPs here?
With the photos and videos and remote backups today - we need more realistic plans to reflect today’s demands.
National Car Rental
Posted by admin on March 18th, 2008 filed in UncategorizedComment now »
National Car Rental — Don’t bother using their online rental service or you might end up with a similar experience.
Reserved a car online 3 days in advance. I show up at the rental place. No vehicle. Apparently they need to phone you to confirm the online rental. And they didn’t. Neither the location or the head office confirms the rental. The advice given to me at counter (besides the rude treatment) was ‘you should have phoned to reserve a vehicle’
So that’s my advice if you plan on using National Car Rental - don’t use their online service. What’s the point of reserving online if you need to phone (or rely on them calling back)
I contact both the head office and the rental location and send a letter outlining my experience with them. No response. Nice customer service!
Roomba 560 - 6 weeks in!
Posted by admin on March 16th, 2008 filed in TechnologyComment now »
6 weeks in with the Roomba 560 - Do I still think it’s great?
I’ve scheduled Roomba for 3 day a week cleaning. It automatically starts, does its work in the three zones, and returns to its dock.
Overall - still impressed. As a parrot owner (currently going through a moult) tiny feathers go everywhere. Roomba scoops them up well.
Most of the area Roomba does is hardwood, which goes well. The other section is new carpet, which kicks off a LOT of carpet fibres. I’ve done serious cleanings on Roomba several times. Overall it’s easy to take apart and clean.
Any problems so far? Here’s what I’ve discovered so far. You should dump the dust bin after each use. For me, once the carpet fibres fill up, it doesn’t scoop up things well.
Twice it has been unable to dock itself, going around aimlessly, even pushing the dock around. Stopping Roomba and hitting the dock button - still no success. I had to unplug the dock and plug the dock back in to get Roomba to find it.
Do I use the regular vaccuum? Yes, when its time for a big clean I use it. However its not nearly as often, and many people often comment on the nice floors. (Note: I’ve never complimented someone on their floor, it seems an odd thing to say).
Overall, still impressed!
GetFriday.com posts letter explaining bad service…
Posted by admin on March 13th, 2008 filed in Advice1 Comment »
The Book the 4 hour work week talks about a site called GetFriday.com as an assistant site. I’m sure you’ve read my previous posts about my experience with them.
They content that their problems were mainly growing pains associated with the popularity experienced as a result of being in the book. Who knows? Maybe they are better, maybe they aren’t.
Read the post at the 4 hour work week site.
Hard Drive Failures…
Posted by admin on March 3rd, 2008 filed in UncategorizedComment now »
I purchased two Seagate 500 gig drives for a new server of mine - set them up as a striped RAID, installed Ubuntu. Within two weeks, in the middle of the night, it sounded like a bandsaw coming from the server. One of the drives died. I had to take it out of that machine and try to check it out. The drive just clunked… I went online with Seagate Tech support to ask a few questions in the live chat. I asked about 4 questions and the tech support guy disconnected me - rude!… Long story short, I had to do the RMA and now I have a refurbished drive for the price of a new one.
I immediately formatted it and put a folder on the root level of the drive ‘REFURB DRIVE - NO IMPORTANT DATA’
I’d like to say I would add it to the 6 other refurbished drives I have - SIX. But I can’t… because EVERY single refurb drive I have has died on me. So I’m not holding my breath on this one.
Are hard drives getting worse? They are getting cheaper. But I feel as though I really need to have regular backups… Are drives made as well as they used to be? My old 40 gig drives show FEWER errors in the SMART status than many of my 250, and 500 gig drives… is this simply because there is more data or information on these drives?
Read this article on the failure of external hard drives..
Maxtor One Touch 4 750GB USB Drive - on Mac and Linux - a review
Posted by admin on March 2nd, 2008 filed in Uncategorized3 Comments »
As always, I needed more drive space, so I took a look at what was available and it seems like the best price per gig is now the 750GB drive. I thought I’d just buy a SATA drive and drop it in my Linux box and share it to the network. Prices were pretty similar on all the internals, but the Maxtor one touch stood out - it was a drive in the case at the same price as the internal drives. I thought ‘What the hell’ and ordered it.
Initial impressions - small enough, kind of ugly. Has a button on the front with an indicator LED. The LED is WAY TOO BRIGHT. It would be really annoying on your desk. I’d cover it up with tape, but it might interfere with the button (although with time machine, I won’t use the button).
I thought I’d plug it into the USB port on my Airport Extreme base station and use it as a network backup for Time Machine. The drive arrived and I connected it to my iMac… it mounted fine.. I plugged it into the base station and no go. The NTFS file format wasn’t supported. So I connect it to the Mac and pop up disk utility to make it Mac format… no go. Format failed. Original partition now gone.
So I format as FAT 32… plug it into Airport Extreme. It seems to work… for about 10 minutes. For some reason the airport and or the drive seem to disappear randomly.
So I installed the mac software the drive came with (having copied it off earlier) but the Maxtor software can’t find the drive.
So back to my iMac and Vmware fusion. I format the drive as NTFS again, install the software and from Windows I can see the drive in the maxtor software and change things like the energy saver settings. But its still NTFS, and I don’t want to install MacFuse to get it working.
Over to my Linux machine. I plug the drive into my Ubuntu Box. NTFS not writable again. I format as FAT32. Seems to work fine. I copy a 4.5 Gig file over to the drive…. Damn… the 4 gig limit of FAT32. Ubuntu didnt’ even mention it, it just seemed to copy.
So, I go into the terminal, format it as ext3, put a line in the fstab to mount on the desktop. Reboot…. 30 minutes later the computer restarts… I could ping it, but I couldn’t SSH in, nothing on the screen so I’m not sure what it is doing. Drive LED goes into what looks like the sleep pattern on the MacBookPro… screen still blank. Is it doing fsck? WTF? So after about 40 minutes I reboot… machine doesn’t come back up. I unplug drive and reboot. Damn… no reboot!
So I try to format as HFS for mac… oh, drive utility doesn’t allow this… Have to go into terminal and do it… not too fun.
Overall, its very noisy, but it works so far for Time machine
pfSense as a firewall solution
Posted by admin on February 5th, 2008 filed in TechnologyComment now »
it’s hard to pick a good firewall for a person working from home who has a lot on a go… let me describe my network.
1. VOIP lines for personal and toll free voip for business. Calls need to reach me anywhere in the house and out on my cell phone. Call quality needs to be as good as a phone line.
2. Incoming BitTorrent for downloading… whatever I happen to be downloading.
3. Outgoing Backup solution for offsite backup - I use duplicity to create secure, offsite gpg backups of my photo library.
4. Gaming in the evening - I like to unwind with the PS3
5. A download that backs up my online web and email server every night
5. A wife who doesn’t like it when I bog down the line. She likes to surf and have the web be responsive. She doesn’t care that I’m saving the world online.
I have a standard DSL line with unlimited traffic. When I bought a new TV, I also received 3 months free cable internet (60 gig monthly cap). So now I have two high speed lines.
Problems in the past
Phone calls were choppy.
Internet was sluggish.
Big downloads slowed things down.
Routers would burn out - yes, I burnt out a cheap SMC wireless router after a year. I burnt out a NetGear router after 1 month. Lots of bittorrent made these things run hot!
Obviously traffic shaping - or quality of service - was needed.
I’d never been too happy with some of the ‘big’ solutions.
Astaro - it was OK at the time, didn’t do the quality of service
IPCop - with traffic shaping extension, worked reasonably well
Clark Connect - couldn’t get this working effectively.
iptables - didn’t understand
But PFSense gave me what I need. It automatically prioritizes traffic when traffic shaping is on.
1. My servers and my bit torrent machine can download up to 250K of my 500K line shared amongst them. This leaves the rest free for me. If my servers aren’t using it, I get it all. If I want to use that bandwidth, I get it first!
2. If a request comes in for a web page from any machine, it gets higher priority than other items and is handled first.
3. Instant messaging, email, all low priority.
4. VOIP is top priority. When calls come in my downloads slow right down. No jitter, no distortion.
pfSense comes with a traffic shaping wizard that actually sets things up really well. Normally I avoid ‘wizards’ like the plague, but this is very quick and sets up priorities for a number of different protocols for you very rapidly. It has a fairly good setup wizard for the general setup as well.
Overall, pfSense is a good firewall solution. It requires that you use a ‘real computer’ to run it (although I want to add it to my VMWare system) and you need at least two network cards (one for your LAN, one for your WAN).
But it has Several VPN options with it, excellent security, and the ability to schedule rules (no MSN messenger after 10 PM!)
It’s open source, and it’s available at pfsense.com. It comes as a LiveCD so you have the ability to try it first without having to wipe out your current machine, with settings stored on a USB keychain.
If you are looking for a firewall solution that will help you with your VOIP problems and give you quality of service and is easy to use, give pfSense a try.
What’s also great are the graphing options - I can see my bandwidth, who is using it, and what they are using it for.
Requirements are pretty minimal… 128 meg of RAM, 2 gig hard drive… certainly you have a machine that fits like this lying around?
Don’t let words like ‘Linux’ (actually FreeBSD) scare you. It works, it’s solid. I’ve been running it for 12 months so far and it works great. And no, I’m not affiliated with them in any way!
Bonuses with pfSense that I’ve just set up.
I have my two outgoing lines set up with ‘load balancing‘ That means when I load a web page up, every other request goes through the alternate line… For example, if there is a page with 10 photos on it, it loads the first photo on Cable, the second on DSL, third on cable, fourth on dsl, etc. Most pages come up lightning fast now.
Failover - pfsense is set that if one of the lines fails, it switches over to the other line automatically.
Captive Portal - If you run a little cafe, and want to offer wireless, but don’t want to let people sit in their cars, you can set it up so that people connecting to your wireless point go to a web page of yours prompted for username and password - just like a real wireless hot spot. Set these folks up on a different interface, give them a small slice of your bandwidth, and sell them some drinks!
Roomba 560 - 4 days of ownership… a brief review
Posted by admin on January 31st, 2008 filed in TechnologyComment now »
Well, I have had the Roomba 560 robotic vacuum by iRobot for 4 days now. Here is my initial review of the product.
Originally, I had thought of this as a luxury item. We have a regular vacuum and this was just something we thought would be ‘cool.’
We’ve just moved into a new condo building. Three new buildings are being built nearby and the net result is a lot of dust. The floors in here are hardwood, with carpet in two bedrooms. Every day we were sweeping up just to keep up with the dust and dirt. Top that off with a pet cockatoo who creates a lot of dust and is a virtual feather factory and you end up with a fair bit of dirt on the floors.
Started off with Roomba in the main living area. Pressed clean and off it went, moving around in a chaotic random fashion. But it seemed to do well, circling around on any areas it found particularly dusty. Very cool.
So now I thought we would try the scheduler. Programming it was easy. Press Schedule, choose the day and the time. Done. That was quick. The Roomba 560 comes with two ‘lighthouses’ that will keep Roomba in one room until it is clean and then let it move into the next room. This allowed me to set up three areas (kitchen/foyer, living room/dining room, master bedroom).
So far, I’m impressed. So is my wife. The cleaning so far has been fairly easy, but this unit does get pretty dirty. However, it’s easy enough to disassemble and cleanup is reasonably quick.
My concern is: Will it continue to clean effectively as it ages, or will a general level of ‘dirt and buildup’ cause it to slow down. How about when the batteries deplete enough that it can’t get to all three rooms anymore?
Until that time, it’s nice to come home to clean hardwood floors and carpets with little random vacuum tracks on them. Sure, it takes over an hour, but it’s an hour that I can do other work with (although it is fascinating to watch the robot at work).
My wife thinks its a great device too. It gets under the bed and the furniture in most places and does a fine job. When it is done, it goes back to its base and recharges itself. We hid the base underneath a bench at the front door, so with the exception of the little lighthouses, there is no evidence that we even have a roomba.
I’ve also heard that the spinning side brushes break easily. I hope not, as it seems very important to the process!
If you are making a decision between a regular vacuum and a roomba, get a regular vacuum. You can vacuum much faster and do furniture as well. However, for day to day maintenance, the roomba is a great choice.
Next question… should I get the Scooba - the floor scrubbing version? I’ll wait and see.
I’m also interested in writing another review of the Roomba in a few months time. We’ll see if I’m still impressed and what sort of problems I’ve encountered in that time.
Want to see some videos of it in action… Well, the visitors to YouTube have a pile of them on there. Click here to search for Roomba 560 Videos.