Beat the Hell Outta Fans Week

A couple of pointless stories this week. Not that I often have a point.

A few nights ago my computer begins whining, as though perhaps a disk is failing. That would make the second one in as many months. I unplug it and the next morning try to track down the noise via process of elimination. Unplug a disk, turn it on … whine persists. Turn it off, plug it back in, unplug another one, turn it on … whine persists. Repeat.

Some glorious day we will all have hotplug.

In a few minutes, it's clearly not a disk causing the problem. That's good, because I recently bought one and I don't want to replace another. I try the CD-ROM too, just be paranoid … whine persists.

So it must be a fan. It's not the case fan; that has a handy little switch to play with the speed, and twiddling the switch doesn't change the noise.

I have to dismantle the innards to get to the CPU fan. This bizarre case has plastic vent hood held in by three thumbscrews, plus one not-thumb screw you have to remove and one more you only have to loosen. Who came up with this? And why did I buy it? Unplug the processor fan, turn it on … whine persists.

What's left? The power supply fan. Can't unplug it and test it at the same time. It doesn't even appear to be spinning. The next day I'm off to Fry's for a new one. Same vendor to maximize the chance it'll fit in the old case (hadn't bothered to measure). Kinda pricey, but supposedly it's all green and stuff. Unplug everything. Out with the old; in with the new; fits perfectly. Plug it in, turn it on …

Whine persists. Now I'm whining along with it.

A little more digging turns up a stupid little SATA enclosure with a tiny, whiny fan. The thing doesn't even have a disk in it, so I hadn't bothered to unplug it. Next time, no extraneous moving parts (and no need for a screwdriver just to install a disk).

Now … page two. Or three, since I don't care if you buy this crap. At some point I might upload this as a review on Amazon where it could do some good.

For ultimately no good reason I ordered an air purifier. It works, I suppose. But when I turned it on, the fan was lopsided and caused the entire enclosure to rattle. At high speed, the wobble mostly averaged itself out, but the air rushing made lots of noise. At low speed, the air was quiet, but the wobble worsened and made the rattle loud and quite annoying. Noise is pollution too. And one of the selling points of this thing was "peace and tranquility."

As with the Roomba, I had two choices: Send it back, at significant cost and inconvenience; or take the screwdriver to it.

My first attempt was an outright failure. I took off the back cover and fiddled with the fan motor a little. By the time I was done, the fan was hideously scraping against the case. I stewed for a while and tried again the next day.

The designers of this contraption were exceptionally considerate (or perhaps exceptionally unimaginative, exceptionally lazy, or some exceptional combination thereof), because all of the screws are identical, so I don't need to remember which goes where. (The three that attach the floor stand are probably different, but they don't need to be taken off.) All of the electronic components sit on a single plastic frame, and it and the fan cleanly detach from the input power with excitingly chunky headers. The headers are even keyed so I can't put them back on the wrong way.

A couple of spare washers on the spindle added enough clearance to keep the fan from scraping, and tightening the nut kept it from wobbling. Good as (or better than) new.

Beat the Hell Outta TiVo Ads Week

Play. Clear. Play. Pause. Down. Select. Play. Select. Pause. Select.

Beat the Hell Outta Yahoo Week

Rant on. Do not buy domain name hosting from the fraudulent asshats at Yahoo. Or if you do, use a throwaway number. Google may be evil in some vague moral sense, but in my experience only Yahoo has committed credit card fraud. Again.

Rant off. If you need an alternative, try pairNIC. They're good enough for CPAN and PerlMonks, so they're good enough for me.

Beat the Hell Outta Termites Week

Kill zem. Kill zem all.

Beat the Hell Outta Breakfast at Tiffany's Week

Last week was spent mostly at work, none of which qualifies as interesting here. All I've got to show for it is a song stuck in my head after hearing it in a strange dream along with somebody I haven't met. And as I recall, I think, we both kinda liked it.

Beat the Hell Outta Blue Smoke Week

Somehow or other the magic blue smoke escaped from my laptop. Time to look for another. Meanwhile I've propped up an old ThinkPad 600E with a piece-of-garbage SMC2632W V.3 wireless card.

Beat the Hell Outta New Year's Resolutions Week

Ten years, ten weeks, and ten days ago was the first day of Beat the Hell Outta Violence Week. The week after, naturally, was Beat the Hell Outta Profanity Week. The Beat the Hell Weeks continued as something of a minimalistic proto-blog. Over time, I began neglecting this smallest of chores, and many recorded weeks' memories are hazy or lost.

So here I vow — not for the first time, likely not the last — to resume the Weeks in this new-fangled blog doohickey, with maybe a little more detail. The difficult part, as always, is having at least one mildly interesting thing happen every seven days this year. Fortunately, this counts as the first.

Remember the Reason for the Season

Winter solstice is Sunday 21 December here in the States. So raise your glass to Dionysus, and have a Merry Shabe Chelle and of course a Happy Festivus.

Review: iRobot Roomba

Got an iRobot Roomba a few months ago from Fry's. I don't recall which model it is, but it doesn't matter because they've since come out with a new generation.

At first, Roomba only worked in fits and starts. After running for a while, it would bump into something that appeared to knock it silly. It would spin backwards in a circle for a minute or two until it gave up, confused. Amusing though it was, it really made the whole thing pointless since you couldn't leave it unattended. iRobot customer service turned out to be a joke. I was about to take it back to Fry's, but out of nerdiness and ultimately stubbornness, I decided to tinker.

First, I found the Roomba diagnostics that some poor guy apparently reverse-engineered. Kudos to the Roomba engineers for putting in the testing routines, and shame on the writers for not including the instructions in the manual. Double shame on the web guys for not posting it on their website.

Armed with this information, it was soon apparent that the cliff sensors weren't seeing the ground. Roomba thought it was perpetually about to fall off a cliff. I tried the usual (for Roomba owners) sensor tricks with tape, aluminum foil, even mirrors, but to no avail. With a digital camera CCD and an infrared remote I proved that the sensors themselves were working. Eventually I deduced that the sensors, located on the bumper, had a loose connection that the bumping would aggravate.

Now, it was time to put my college degree to use. I located the sensor that was most troublesome, and I repeatedly applied rapid, blunt force to that part of the bumper. That is, I hit it. I hit it over and over until it worked. Not only was it an effective repair, but it was quite satisfying.

The only other problem I had with it was the battery, which took quite a while to break in. I think the trick was to run it on "max" mode a few times to deplete the battery, and let it charge long after the LED says it's done. I can't be sure, though, since I tried a lot of things; draining the battery is a routine fix for rechargeables. Nowadays I almost always run it into the red, either in one shot or across multiple rooms.

I haven't had any troubles from Roomba since. Occasionally I clean it. More often I don't, and it keeps on trucking anyway. Bottom line: If you want one, get one, but buy it at a place where you can take it back for a refund, not just a replacement.

Still Open

For my next unfinished project, I present www.still-open.com. Basically it's supposed to tell you what restaurants would still be open by the time you got there. I've successfully deployed version 0.01, which is an empty error page. Coming soon: version 0.02, which is a single entry for "Denny's."