Author: dale

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Neato Robotics SV Signature robotic vacuum

Santa left us one of these for Christmas.  While Lisa was not terribly thrilled, I for one welcomed our new robotic underling.  🙂  And, within a few days Lisa decided maybe “Rosie” wasn’t so bad after all.

Neato XV Signature
Neato XV Signature

The thing does a pretty nice job of keeping the floors swept.  Unlike the Roomba, the Neato robots take an orderly approach to vacuuming a room – they take a lap around the perimeter to map out the room, then use a linear pattern in most places to make sure everything gets covered, but only once or twice.  I like the approach.  I was originally a little concerned about tire tracks, but it just looks freshly vacuumed.

I’ve been amazed at the sheer amount of crud it will suck up from even a recently vacuumed carpet.  It does a decent job on wood and tile as well, but carpeted rooms is where it really shines.  You’ll still need to vacuum occasionally, since it doesn’t get all the way up to the edge – unlike Roomba it doesn’t have an edge brush, but the only time you will notice is if you let it clean up a very dusty wood floor.

It’s smart enough to recharge itself when needed, navigates well, and you can schedule cleanings for whenever you want – there’s also a spot clean mode and manual start, all with just a button push or two.  It’s only gotten stuck a few times.  Shoelaces are a problem, of course, but rugs don’t seem to be.  We do have a couple of pieces of furniture that are at just the “wrong” height.  For instance, one coffee table in the living room — the laser scanner can’t see it, but the robot can’t fit under it.  On the other hand, it gets under another coffee table with no problem and vacuums where the regular vacuum can’t go without moving the furniture around.

It won’t completely replace your regular vacuum, but it does a very nice job of keeping things cleaned up in between regular cleanings.  Costco has the best price I was able to find on them.

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Experiments in media servers

For the past week or two I’ve been doing some work toward some distributed media (audio, video, etc) for various parts of the house. What I’d like to do, ideally, is be able to watch HD TV on any TV in the house without the added monthly expense and hassle of a digital cable receiver from Cox. I’d also like to be able to record the shows we regularly watch, play them back from anywhere in the house, stream music wherever we want it, that sort of thing.

So far Windows Media Center seems to be a really good fit for the DVR portion of the job… unfortunately, it would also require a fairly expensive box be attached to each TV.  It would also mean two remotes per TV, or a universal – and good luck getting one to actually work.  I suppose I could build some Windows boxes fairly cheaply, but we’re still talking about $150-plus per instance, and that’s assuming I re-use any old hardware I have around such as hard drives.

After some reading, including some stuff I quite frankly didn’t really believe, I bought a Raspberry Pi with a wifi adapter to play around with.  Now, admittedly I’m a little late to the Pi community, but it’s really a pretty slick little board.  The Raspberry Pi is a tiny Linux system running on an ARM processor with half a gig of memory, and using an SD card for storage.  There are a couple of Pi-specific XBMC distributions, and they worked great for music and movies.  It was pretty impressive to see a sub-$50 computer the size of a pack of Camel Lights streaming HD video over a wifi link, without a hiccup.  Unfortunately, XBMC doesn’t have native ability to handle a cable tuner like the HD Homerun.

I ordered an HD Homerun Prime-CC and picked up a CableCARD from Cox.  The monthly rental on the CableCARD is not unreasonable at $1.99, although I do think it simply sucks that they are encrypting pretty much everythign other than the local broadcast channels.  They certainly earned their two bucks over the past few days; since Friday of last week I’ve dealt with five or six Cox support people on the phone, and two on-site service calls trying to get the CableCARD setup working.  It seems that all of the problems we encountered were in the initial setup and (mis)configuration of the hardware from the Cox network end.  Once I got a tech who knew how to get a CC set up, it went pretty well… until they shut off our cable receiver, then managed to un-pair the CC again when I called about the receiver. Once we got that straightened out, though, things started really coming together.

Once the HD Homerun and CableCARD are working, you need a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) back-end to feed video to the Pi or anything else running XBMC.  I’m running Windows Media Center on a Win7 machine, with ServerWMC installed.  ServerWMC is a free program that allows remote XBMC systems to connect to WMC and pull video and program guide information.  So the setup here is [Cox cable] –> [HD Homerun Prime with CableCARD] –> [E4200 Wifi router (via gig-Ethernet)] –/(wifi)/–> [Raspberry Pi / OpenELEC XBMC] –> [Insignia 28″ LED TV].  If I were ambitious I’d make a Visio diagram, but I’m lazy…  and no one reads this crap anyway.

As of today I have streaming music, HD video and live TV thorough this system.  I haven’t tried playing back recorded TV, but that may  require transcoding…  I’m not sure if ServerWMC will stream recorded TV files or not, but if not they’re in a format the Pi can’t play, so they’ll need to be converted to something it can play.

Possibly the coolest part?  I was not expecting this, but the Pi has a CEC adapter built in.  CEC lets you control XBMC from the TV remote.  The TV sends remote button signals through the HDMI interface to the Pi, so only one remote is needed — no IR receiver on the Pi, no need for a universal remote.  Too cool.  That doesn’t even work on the little Windows EEEBox in the other room – I’d need to add an external CEC adapter for that.

I can see using Raspberry Pis for other things as well.  Having an inexpensive Linux machine, powered by a common cell phone charger and equipped with wifi, wherever you happen to need it — pretty nice.  I’m thinking one of them with the add-on dedicated camera (5Mpixel, 720p video) that I could set in a window to catch whoever has been letting their dog crap in the side yard would be nice.  A video doorbell seems like a fun project.  And one of them will make a nice backup for the Asterisk server.

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Sheer heart attack

Queen_Sheer_Heart_AttackSo Wednesday I was headed to the airport, minding my own business, when it became apparent that something was really wrong and I should probably find an ER. I was right – something was wrong. In hindsight, I was wrong to think I needed to drive to an ER, I probably should have just parked and called 911. Anyway, I am now the slightly sheepish owner of a little chunk of metal mesh in one of my coronary arteries.

I’ve made some changes to my diet and exercise plans, of course. Lisa and I had already done a lot over the past couple of years to improve our diet, but of course there is always more to be done. Less cholesterol, less sodium, less fat, more fiber, more exercise. I’d been working on making changes, but apparently not aggressively enough and it caught up with me.

But, now I’m home and doing fine. I came home from the hospital yesterday (Friday). We took Buddy for a walk and I started getting used to taking a small array of pills that I’ll be stuck with for a long time to come — some of them permanently. I’m not complaining; I’m alive and still reasonably healthy and will be improving that. I’ll be around for the grandkids’ high school and college graduations, Lisa will have a husband, I can start seriously nagging her about smoking (grin) and I’ll be able to fly again.

Life’s good.

 

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POA 2013 Gastons Fly-In

Last weekend Lisa and I flew down to Lakeview, AR for the annual fly-in for a bunch of people from the Pilots of America web board.  Naturally we had a stiff headwind both ways, so the trip was more flying than I had counted on.  We had a good time, met some good people, and I gained some valuable experience and learned a few things.  The trip down was uneventful if a bit slow due to the wind, but the real fun was the Gaston’s arrival.  We made a high pass over the runway just for me to get my bearings and figure out how to deal with the terrain on the base and final approach legs.  In the end it was a nice, soft, full-flap soft field landing, no drama.  The trip back was more of a challenge — we took off in the rain, waited on weather at Mountain Home, had a very stiff crosswind when landing to refuel in Lawrence (but still eased it in nicely, if I do say so myself) and made it into Omaha as the ceiling was dropping.  Another 9.4 hours in the log book!

Some of the highlights…

And some shots of the happy couple…

2013-06-09_10-48-42_190 2013060995174130

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Grass can be fun

No, not THAT kind of grass, or even that kind.  Yesterday I did my first flying from a grass runway.  I took an instructor along since I hadn’t done it before.  During primary flight training you get instruction in and have to demonstrate the “soft-field” takeoff and landing techniques, but it’s almost always on pavement.  In fact, the flight schools I trained with specifically prohibited ever landing their rental planes on anything unpaved!  Not so with the flying club.

On the way to Auburn
On the way to Auburn

We flew down to Auburn, NE where there is a 4000′ long turf runway in good condition.  When we arrived we did a low pass — I skimmed along the left edge of the runway maybe 30-40 feet off the ground at most, while Ryan checked out the runway condition and grass length from the right side.  It looked good, so I climbed out and turned back for the downwind leg.  A full-flap approach, carry a little throttle through the flare for a soft touchdown with the nose wheel in the air, and we’re down.  The field had not been mowed recently, so we got plenty of extra drag from thick grass and weeds. You turn a little wider, and there’s plenty of throttle needed about midway through the turn to keep your speed up so you don’t get stuck.  It’s different, but not hard to do.

I turned and taxied back to the end of the runway and did a soft-field takeoff much differently than I have ever done before. On real grass, you need to really get the nose wheel up as soon as possible and lift off well under stall speed, then level off while you’re still in ground effect while you pick up speed.  At 80 MPH I’d begin climbing and raise the flaps.  We did a few touch & gos after that, then headed back to Millard.  I’m glad I had Ryan along — it helped to have his advice trying to stay in ground effect, and a little post-landing coaching on the approach.

 

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Roku: meh.

I spent some time playing around with a new Roku 3 over the past week or two.  From a hardware standpoint, it’s a pretty cool little box.  Wifi, HDMI, remote with accelerometers, all kinds of coolness.  Unfortunately, its use as a streaming media player is limited at best, at least for what I wanted.

If all you need is a player for Netflix/Hulu Plus/Amazon and similar paid services, it’s fine.  If you’re the type who loves video game blogs, old movies no one has ever heard of and similar stuff, I guess it would be grand. In general, though, the free content that’s available is worth exactly what it costs (if you don’t count the cost of the Roku), and I’m not looking for more places to send money every month.

My intent was to use it to play movies, recorded TV and live TV streamed from a MythTV backend.  The success rate ranged from great to zero, depending on what I was trying to do.  The Roku would have me transcoding every single video recording I have (no thanks, really).  The Plex and MythTV frontends I found were pretty buggy.  The “Brightscript” language used to build content channels is not something trivial to pick up, and I’m really not looking for a second career as a programmer.  I finally decided that if I do build a whole-house TV/movie/music/DVR system, I’ll probably have to use little dedicated boxes running either XBMC or Mythtv, and talking to a dedicated MythTV backend.

Fortunately, Roku has a pretty good return policy.  This one’s going back.  It doesn’t seem to be a bad little box for what it does, it just doesn’t do what I need.

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Thanks, Microsoft! (really!)

So today I looked at some new laptops.  For various reasons I won’t go into, I really need to set up a new (well, another) Windows machine.  Wine (the Linux program that lets you run Windows software) has made a lot of headway over the past few years, but some apps that I depend on just don’t act right.  So, we stopped in at Best Buy to see what was up.

What’s up is Windows 8.  For some reason, the stupidity in Redmond has reached a level where they can no longer distinguish the difference between a cell phone and a laptop or desktop computer.  Hint, guys — what works great on Droid phone doesn’t make sense on a laptop.  It’s cute, and I’m sure they’re selling a shitload of new laptops with Windows 8, but I’m baffled at how anyone could actually use one for anything productive.

So, really, guys — thanks.  You saved me from wasting $750 or so on a new machine.  Instead I’ll re-purpose a desktop I have here and load it with Win7, for which I think I may still have a spare OEM license.  Or something.  All I know is, Apple should be sending you guys flowers and candy.  Windows 8 is enough to make even OSX look good.

 

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Weirdness, and good timing

Yesterday morning, for reasons we haven’t been able to figure out, both my wifi router and what has to have been the most disappointing phone base unit ever created suddenly and simultaneously went to that big recycle bin in the sky.  Our Internet connectivity went away as I was trying to send out a meeting invitation for work, and when I went down to reboot the router I saw the phone base was dark too.  After ruling out any common power issues and verifying that the two wall warts were indeed working, I had to conclude that both boxes were dead.  How very odd.  The only common thing between them is that there was a direct Ethernet connection, but nothing else on the network took a hit.  The Gigaset box had a phone line plugged into it, but that phone line passes through the A400 VOIP card in the server — neither of which were damaged.

Anyway.  I happened to have a spare non-IP base for the phones, so I connected that and had phone service back an hour or so after the loss.  The wifi router, though, was another matter.  In a very strange twist of timing, my new E4200 Linksys was on the UPS delivery truck – all I had to do was wait for it.

I’m not completely thrilled with the E4200V2.  Its performance seems to be excellent, and the signal strength reported by my cell phone and the Roku are substantially higher.  I wish to hell it ran DD-WRT; I really missed some of that firmware’s troubleshooting and logging capability.  I doubt I’ll return it, though.  Swapping out the router is disruptive enough, and while DD-WRT is great, I was mostly using it to overcome some real deficiencies in the old hardware.  It’s not a perfect solution, but the price was attractive and it will do.

What I learned from this is that I need better disaster plans, and need to test them more thoroughly.  I had a backup of the router configuration — but it’s a binary file.  Of course it’s completely useless on a different router, and I didn’t have all of the port forwarding and other rules written down anywhere.  My Asterisk backup plan failed miserably, I have to fix that.  I really need a seamless, fault tolerant VOIP setup with failover that actually works.  I’ve got some work to do on that stuff to avoid the headaches the next time something unexpectedly goes TU.

 

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It pays to shop around…

I need to upgrade the wifi router in the house.  The old Linksys WRT54G has been working for years, but it just can’t handle HD video streams.  So, I went shopping for a new Linksys E4200 V2, which is supposed to be the baddest, fastest one out there.  Dual band, 900 MBPS and all that.

Best Buy has the E4500, but I don’t want that one — it requires a constant connection to Cisco.  WTF?  Newegg was the same, only the E4500.  No thanks.  So I looked on eBay and Amazon.  It seems that they go for $125 and up new, and around $80 or so on up used.  I’m not in the mood to screw with someone else’s used router, so I was looking only at new and factory-refurbed.

Then I find the Linksys on line store…  factory refurb, 30 day warranty, $79.99 with free shipping.   Sold.  Anyone want a nice, current generation WRT54G already loaded with DD-WRT?  I have one for sale cheap.  🙂