house – Page 3 – frans goes blog

New faucets

27.11.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

This is probably the least sexy topic for techno-blogging like, ever, but here we go. Our old faucets were having rather bad leaks over the tables and over the floors, I was getting water to my head from the shower while trying to fill a bucket with water from the faucet underneath, and so on. It was definitely time to move on. After some deliberation and consideration, we ended up ordering the installation of Oras Vega (the new eco-button model) to the upstairs wash basin, the slightly more fancy Oras Vienda faucet to the parade side basin in the first floor, and two Oras Optima thermostatic bath and shower faucets to the bathroom in the cellar. There are all sorts of nice engineering details in the valves etc., but I really liked the overall functionality of design and the feeling of workmanship. Using the shower faucet is now a small, everyday pleasure: the control movements feel natural, and mechanisms react with pleasing, muted ‘clicks’ and ‘snaps’. Donald Norman has written about “emotional design”, and this is exactly it. Oh, and we bought a new toilet seat also. IDO Seven D Image model. It has something called Siflon on its inner surfaces (no need for detergents, I am told). Dunno. But it looks cool and feels good…

Bird table in the night

Lumiyö / Night with snow, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

These days you can find pretty nice bird tables, like this little house we have now in our front yard. It was originally designed to be hung from a string, but it was pretty easy to hack into a suitable stick. So, now we have a regular show going on, with five pheasant, a flock of small birds and a squirrel fighting over the nuts and seeds.

Quiet at the night time, though. The photo was taken at the point when the snowfall had turned into light rain (of water), using my trusty old Canon EOS 350D (exposure time 3,2 seconds, I was using a Manfrotto stand), and I admit a serious graving of 7D with its environmental sealing and advanced autofocus point selection system… (More here: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos7d/ )

Windows 7 Ultimate & WD 1,5 TB disks

The weekend was too busy for this upgrade effort really, but at least I made a decent start:

getting rid of the old hard disks in my old workstation (they were getting too small for all this data)
making full transition to the official version of Windows 7 (I bought a boxed set of the Ultimate version)
migrating all my data to the new, 1,5 TB main disk (Western Digital Caviar Green, I bought two of these)
setting up an identical disk to my Windows Server 2008 system (the unet.fi main machine)
setting up some kind of mirroring or synchronization scheme to make data in the workstation and server identical.

The two last steps are the ones I did not have time to do this weekend. Maybe this is a good thing, I need to do further research on the Windows 7 backup and synchronization options. I would really wish for a LAN sync version of Dropbox, but I think that version is not out of beta yet. Any tips for keeping really big data piles backed up & in sync at your home network?

Moccamaster

Moccamaster, 17.10.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

I am gradually realising that best tools are often specialized. Take coffee machines, for example. I have tested various combo systems with espresso, regular coffee, cappuchino, whatever, and regularly they fail in some, often in all fronts. It is better to do one thing, well. In the picture we have our new Moccamaster KBG 741 AO. It makes coffee. The light-roasted variety at least tasted rather good. Continuing the tests.

Delayed deliveries

I have been having bad luck before with various companies, but this is now getting epidemic — are all of these delays explained by the economic recession, of some other such factor? For example, I pre-ordered my iPhone 3GS from Sonera (the exclusive carrier in Finland) already late June, I think — and was promised a delivery in July 31st. Then I received a call from Sonera telling that it will arrive in 5th of August instead. Then nothing happened. I have been calling Sonera and Verkkokauppa.com where I should be getting the phone delivered, but no-one have been able to give any sort of estimate for when the phones could really become available.

The delay was particularly nasty for me, as I had ordered my previous mobile subscription to be closed at July 31st, and then needed to get to Sonera to have a new subscription opened, without the phone yet available. I had also scheduled some work with analysing iPhone apps for August, but now it seems that I need to get my hands on an iPod Touch in order to be able to do that work. Damn, such delays are irritating in an already too busy schedule.

On another front, we are still waiting for two armchairs we ordered from Asko more than four weeks ago (the delivery promise was 2-4 weeks). No contact to the customer, no explanation. Is Finland just the country of bad customer service, or is this universal?

Plugged-in coffee

I attached a mobile DVB-T television reveiver to the top of my coffee maker couple of days ago. The idea is that I need not switch on my big screen TV in the living room in order to see the morning news while getting my mocha. Nice, but there is no built-in antenna plug anywhere in our kitchen, and I had to “hide” a terrestial digital television antenna also to the coffee corner. Decorative mistake, I was told… (Maximum TV-710 CX receiver: was 99 euros in the local Kodin Ykkönen store.)

Dropboxing

I have been using now for some time software called Dropbox to keep my various workstations, servers and laptops in sync, and to share some content with colleagues. The system works surprisingly well, and is totally silent and quick, just doing the file synchronization job fast and invisibly in the background.

The free account has 2GB limit, so this is only for keeping the files from the most recent projects up to date. Some materials still need to be backed up manually. Most importantly, this is not yet the tool I need for keeping my music as well as the photo and video albums backed up. There must be a reliable, fast and quiet real-time synchronizing tool somewhere, I just have not yet found it.

One of the benefits of Dropbox service is that they support different OSes, so I can finally have my Linux laptop all the time synced with my Windows boxes. For the photo and video file masses I do not need such cross-OS compatibility, I only need to keep Vista, Win7 and Windows Server 2008 in sync there.

Klippo Excellent S GCV

Couple of years ago I wrote about our first lawnmower, a Stiga Collector model. In couple of summers I have managed to break the thing several times (I always run it against stones), until it felt not worth paying for repairs any more. Also, it had become apparent that the collector part was not really necessary for us — bio-clipping is really enough (like Eki then already commented). Our new model is hopefully simple and durable machine: a Klippo Excellent S GCV model. It has a solid aluminium base and motor built by Honda. To be ready for those stones, I asked it to be installed with a Blade Plate system: six small blades that cut the grass at different levels and which are hopefully more resistant against stones (or, more likely, breaking in a manner that makes repairs a bit cheaper). Lets see. The ultimate goal is to have a smaller lawn in any case.

Canon LBP5050n driver problems

As a part of this summer’s transition to a new home server environment, I upgraded my printer to a colour laser one. The print quality of Canon i-SENSYS LBP5050n was the ṕrimary reason for choosing that one. I was originally going to buy an USB model and use my home server as the print server, but it soon appeared that Windows Server 2008 as the Web Server edition does not allow printer sharing. MS strikes againg – they have actually disabled all printer sharing functionalities so that they can sell more expensive versions of Server 2008 for those who need more than only the web server stuff. In this (as probably in many other accounts) it makes much more sense to use Ubuntu Server Edition or something similar rather than MS products if you want to have a cheap, yet efficient general purpose server of your own.

Persisting against the odds, I went ahead and picked the 5050n model instead, since it includes its own ethernet connector and print server built in, so that you can print to it from anywhere in your home. Except for the printer driver. Rather than a regular Postscript printer, this Canon printer is a CAPT printer, meaning that it uses Canon’s own proprietary printer language. They have tried to develop driver versions for many operating systems, but according to my experiences, the development of 5050n drivers is still not yet finished. I at least hope they will release better versions in the future.

Luckily, two of my most important OSes are supported and working fine: Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. Funny thing is, that neither have a dedicated driver version — you can install a Vista version and it works. But as I tried to install the driver to my two Vista systems, the driver did not produce test prints, and the status window actually completely stalled the computer/UI. I had to remove the driver. Also, trying to install the Mac version of driver to my Mac Mini (a OS X Tiger system) did not produce any working results.

See: http://software.canon-europe.com/products/0010663.asp

Since I am also using Ubuntu with my workstation and Acer Aspire One netbooks, I was interested to see whether I could finally print anything from there. No success. A Linux package of CAPT printer drivers also exists:

http://software.canon-europe.com/software/0028622.asp

But I tried to follow the instructions and tweak my systems, but it appears that there is not yet a printer profile file for 5050 models. I tried install using LPB5000 profile file, but it did not work out.

Thus: out of the five tested OSes that we are using, only two managed to print to this new, home/small office network printer. Not a very good result to my estimation (even while I am happy with the printer itself). Hopefully Canon will produce more and updated printer software for this printer in the future.

Building media room ventilation

This is probably the ugliest cooler casing ever, but when finished and properly installed, it should help with the fresh air flow to my media room in cellar. (Built around SilverStone FM121 cooler fan, some wooden and aluminium parts added, fitted together with liberal use of Super Epoxy…)