Author: Scott Gruby

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Review: Dyson DC44 – An expensive vacuum that really sucks

When we were picking what to put in our house, we decided to go with an engineered hardwood floor as it would look nice and wouldn’t trap allergens like the carpets we had in the past did. We had a Shark vacuum that we brought to our new house and found that we were using it a few times a week because one thing that you don’t realize with a dog is just how much it can shed! Our dark hardwood was constantly covered with dog hair (he’s a light colored dog), so it started driving me crazy. The corded Shark sucked up a lot of hair, but the cord didn’t make it convenient to use.

One day when I went to Costco (it is now my job to goto Costco as we’re literally 2 minutes away from one and my wife hates going), I was browsing the aisles and saw the Dyson DC44. It was quite expensive, but I was willing to give it a try. When I got home, I told my wife that if we didn’t like it or thought it wasn’t worth the cost, it would go back. The Dyson’s main selling point for me was that it was cordless; while there was another cordless on display at Costco, the Dyson looked more powerful.

I hung up the charger in the garage (this is absolutely key to using it as it makes it very convenient to grab). My son loved it and wanted to vacuum. We started vacuuming about every other day as there was tons of dog hair. Was the amount we were vacuumming just because it was a novelty to use a cordless vacuum or would we keep it up? Our house isn’t that big (just over 1600 square feet), so vacuuming the entire house can basically be done on one charge (it gets about 20 minutes on a charge). About a month after I bought it, I knew it was a keeper as my wife offered our Shark to her parents. Yeah!

Now that we’re 4 months into having it, I still vacuum a few times a week and sometimes just grab it when I see a large clump of hair around (we can never completely eliminate the hair). It’s easy to use, but a little on the heavy side for my son. The canister is far too small for having a dog as I have to empty it 3-4 times when I do the entire house; it is adequate for quick cleanups, but a pain for the full cleaning.

Pros

  • It is easy to use.
  • Cordless makes it very convenient.
  • Charging base is well designed and makes it easy to grab the vacuum out of it.
  • Has enough power to pick up dog hair.
  • Lots of attachments; we tend to use the attachment that spins like a vacuum and a pointed one.
  • Battery is big enough for our use; using it on carpets or a bigger house, it would be too small.

Cons

  • Charger cord is too short. The base has to be mounted very close to the outlet which won’t work for everyone and barely works for us.
  • The canister for the debris is too small for a family with a pet.
  • Very expensive.

Summary

So far, this is proving to be a good investment. We are vacuuming regularly and don’t just put it off to a bi-weekly task like we’ve done in the past. I believe that this will help us live in a cleaner house (not sure how clean a house can be with a dog in it). I would like to see it have a larger canister to hold debris and a larger battery wouldn’t be bad, either.

Overall, I have no regrets about buying this. Without this vacuum, I imagine that we’d have dog hair around all the time and make our house look dirty. Cordless vacuums have come a long way and I’m not sure I’d go back to a corded one even if it offered me more power. The cost is the biggest hurdle in me recommending this product to others, but if you have some spare change, this is well worth a look.

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Another trip, another lesson (or more) learned

While I don’t travel all that often, I do travel between 6 and 12 times a year. I have my routines down pat and usually get through the airport unscathed. On my most recent trip to Portland, disaster almost ensued. I arrived at the airport very early as there are limited flights to San Diego and had nothing left to do downtown; this turned out to be a great thing. Security line was long and I made it to the porno scanner. As I always do, I opted out of the scan. I was doing my best to watch my bags as I waited for a screener to come over, but it is pretty hard to do so. After 10-15 minutes, they finally found a screener for me to do my rub down, I mean pat down. This kind of delay is pretty routine when I go through Portland; I find this unacceptable. Also, I find it interesting that every family that was traveling with a child, the TSA officer let all members of the family go through the metal detector and not one of them had to go to the millimeter wave detector.

When asked what items were mine, I pointed to a bin and my backpack and told the screener that my suitcase was missing. Depending on the day, I shove my phone, watch and wallet in my backpack or my suitcase. This trip, I put my phone and watch in my backpack and my wallet in the bin with my shoes. I did, however, but my belt in my suitcase. This must have been an “oh sh*t” moment for them as they didn’t seem to know what to do. The head person said that they’d review the video footage and try to locate the person that took my bag. I had my screening with a very nice officer who skipped over some of the baloney speech as he knew I’d been through it before. After the screening, they saw that a bag was left behind and searched it as I indicated it is likely that someone took the wrong bag. One officer found a pill bottle with a name on it, which allowed them to page the person and hope that the person would come back to the screening area.

I asked if they could use the passenger manifests and find out what flight the person was on and get the airline to grab the bag before the person boarded. I was told that they didn’t have access to that information. This, of course, is completely false as the TSA can’t do its job with the no fly list without knowing who is on what flight. A passenger search is a simple task as there are many a few thousand people in the airport and searching a database of that size takes maybe a few seconds at most. This is what really annoyed me (besides waiting for my screening) as they have enough information to locate my bag (unless the person left the sterile area).

Luckily they found my bag as it appears that the passenger heard the message over the intercom. The passenger was very apologetic and it was an honest mistake (OK, his bag really didn’t look like mine, except that it was black).

I’ve learned a few things about this experience. First, I need a big piece of brightly colored duct tape on my bag. Second, I need to grab a Bluetooth LE beacon such as StickNFind or Tile and shove it in my bag. Even though the range isn’t great, it could give me half a chance of finding my bag running up and down the terminal or setting up an alert when the bag leaves the area of my phone (this assumes that my phone isn’t in the bag and isn’t taken at the same time). Third, I really need to get into the TSA PreCheck program. I have no problems spending the $85 and submitting my fingerprints, but there isn’t a facility close to me right now to process my application. Portland, however, has one so I’ll try to set that up for my next trip up there if it works out. And the last thing is to speak up and get one of the officers to pull my bags off the conveyer belt right after it goes through the scanner.

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Replacement for Google Reader

Google Reader has been dead for awhile and I’ve been trying out different options as a replacement. I had been using http://netnewswireapp.com on my Mac and found it to be a decent app. However, it didn’t sync with anything and I didn’t have a reader on my iPad or iPhone. While there are several paid sync services, I didn’t want to go that route as who knows when they’ll pull the plug and I’ll be stuck again; also, I just didn’t want a subscription.

I stumbled upon [http://tt-rss.org](Tiny Tiny RSS) and installed it on my virtual server. The web interface was good enough for me to get by and the iOS clients worked (not pretty, but worked). I made due, but just got an iPad mini and missed http://reederapp.com on my devices.

Today I again investigated what to do and found that Reeder and a Mac App called http://readkitapp.com supported a system called http://feedafever.com/. Fever looks interesting and is a $30 one time fee (I’d rather pay one time fees than subscriptions; it is a mental thing and really doesn’t always make financial sense). However, after a bit of digging, it appears that Fever may not be actively developed, so I kept searching. As luck would have it, I found [https://github.com/dasmurphy/tinytinyrss-fever-plugin](a plugin) to Tiny Tiny RSS that mimicked the Fever API. I quickly installed the plugin, purchased Reeder and ReadKit, and was back in business syncing my RSS feeds.

Reading RSS on my iPad is great and while this solution isn’t for the faint of heart (that seems to be my mantra…come up with solutions that work for me, but likely won’t work for others…must be the reason I don’t have any of my own products any more!), I’m hopefully this is going to work for me.

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Fun with automation

Just over 6 months ago, I wrote that we started making our house a home. I haven’t blogged in awhile as I’ve been consumed with the remodel project. While our project is not yet complete, we have finally moved into our castle (OK, it isn’t a castle and isn’t all that large, but it is our home). One of the things that I’ve been planning for is automating many things in the house. I’ve always had a fascination with home automation, but retrofitting a house wasn’t all that attractive to me and I didn’t budget for it. I’ve budgeted for it and made sure all the pieces were in place while the house was being remodeled. My use of automation is 3 fold:

  • Security – turn on lights at night when motion is detected
  • Forgetfulness – turn off lights after leaving a room
  • Convenience or laziness – have 1 button to turn on the heat from any room in the house or 1 button to turn off all the lights in the house

There are several different systems on the market for doing automation and I chose a Z-Wave based system called VeraLite. I went with Z-Wave over Zigbee because there is more variety in types of devices and liked that there were more manufacturers of devices than with Insteon. VeraLite is kind of a hacker’s box for automation. It runs Linux, has an active community, and allows people to create plugins in Lua.

I selected Leviton Vizia RF+ components for my switches, controllers, and outlets. I liked the styling of them and they go with the rest of the normal switches in the house. I have a bunch of them and getting everything to work has been a bit of a challenge. The controllers are kind of wacky and I’m still working out the kinks; apparently Z-Wave allows proprietary extensions in the protocol and the Leviton devices do this; VeraLite doesn’t understand all of it. In addition, the mesh network that Z-Wave creates for everything to talk to each other seems to get confused a bit. I’ve gone through the “heal” process more times than I care to count and now everything seems stable. My house is just over 1600 square feet on 3 levels (it is a tri-level), so I’d expect the mesh network to work fine. Each level has a number of devices that act as repeaters and the main controller is located on the bottom level pretty much in the center of the house.

So now that I have it setup, what next? That’s a good question. I’ve setup a few “scenes” that are pretty simple. For instance, I have the front outside lights come on when motion is detected at night (the motion sensors are not Z-Wave sensors, but hooked into a security system as I thought it would be more reliable and didn’t require batteries for every sensor) and then they turn off after a few minutes. I have another scene setup that turns off the bathroom lights after 15 minutes if there is no motion; my wife has a bad habit of leaving the lights on which drives me crazy. I have a couple of other scenes for turning equipment off at night to reduce power consumption. I know I’ve only scratched the surface, but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

Since I’m not content to leave well enough alone, today I worked on a plugin for Vera (I based it on someone else’s work, but stripped a lot of it as my needs were different) that talks to my audio control units. So now, I can turn music on in any room of the house from Vera’s web interface without having to get up and push the button on the wall. Some may think I’m quite lazy (OK, maybe I am), but this is going to be useful when we want to turn on music outside as my (somewhat) poor planning put the audio controls in awkward places for the outside.

I know that many companies are trying to bring home automation to the masses. I’ll be watching to see how they do in the market. The concept is great, but it is really hard to make a one size fits all system that is extremely flexible. Without the flexibility, I think automation systems will be hampered. If I wasn’t a geek and a developer, I don’t think I’d touch automation at all; it just isn’t ready for the average consumer.

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Money hungry cable company

As most tech people have heard, Time Warner Cable has raised its modem lease fees from $4 per month to $6 per month. While I think that is steep, I don’t really have a problem with it as it doesn’t affect me. When they started charging the modem lease, I spent $25 for a used cable modem (I have a standard Internet package, so a DOCIS 2.0 modem works fine). My father has been paying the lease fee and asked me about it now that it is going up. The difference with him is that he has telephone service through Time Warner as well. Instead of a standard cable modem, he has an MTA which handles both phone and Internet in one box.

Time Warner doesn’t charge a lease fee for the phone part of the box, but charges a fee for the Internet part of the box. Yes, you read that correctly; my dad is only leasing part of the box and the other part is free. If he doesn’t want to pay the lease fee for the Internet part, he has to buy a separate cable modem (currently around $17 used on eBay), put in a splitter and hook it up. He does NOT return any equipment to Time Warner Cable. So if he does that, he would own his own Internet cable modem, and have a free telephone cable modem, but only use half of it.

This is absolutely insane; someone in corporate said that they must charge a lease fee for all Internet customers that use Time Warner Cable equipment. This makes sense except for telephone customers that don’t have a choice, but to use the TWC supplied MTA. It is quite unfortunate that there is such a monopoly on high speed Internet; AT&T U-verse is an option, but their speeds and prices don’t compare well to cable. We don’t have FIOS in our area, so we’re pretty stuck.

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Paranoia trumps common sense

Today my family and I went to the San Diego County Fair and with most events these days, were prepared for the additional security and screening. While they allowed in backpacks and food, they didn’t allow in water bottles (unless they were for children for fears that they would contain alcohol or explosives, I guess). There were numerous signs at the entrance saying that weapons including pocket knives were not allowed and should be left in cars. This wasn’t a surprise, but the metal detectors surprised me (my wife had already been this year, so she went through it before). Stuff that didn’t go through the metal detectors (backpacks, cell phones, etc.) were just pushed alongside the metal detectors.

Those that are paying attention realize how ridiculous it is to partially screen bags (they poke a stick in bags), but that’s not where this article is going. I thought nothing of the weapons ban or any additional security screening until we sat down for a presentation on Kitchen Craft Cookware (the cookware looks real nice and something like it is on our list to purchase sometime after our house remodel is done). My wife was pretty astute and quickly won a plastic juicer that you shove in a lemon/orange/etc., then a “ninja” spatula by being the first to answer questions. Then the kicker came a few minutes later when she answered another question and won a small paring knife. Yes, you read that correctly. We weren’t allowed to bring a knife into the fair, but there was no problem with us walking out with one. Then I started to notice a number of vendors selling knives that you could take home.

I wonder if the person or people that came up with the no weapons policy gave it a second thought or just forgot that vendors sell knives at the fair every year (we went many years ago before all the extra security and bought a knife). Too bad our society is so paranoid these days that people forget about using common sense when making policies.

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What is security?

I’m sure my loyal readers will think that this article is about computer security as I write a lot about computers and technology, but this article is about physical home security.

With a complete house remodel planned, I’ve been thinking a lot about securing our house. I’ve been reading everything I can, watching videos, and even testing security first hand. There are articles and videos about locks, bumping, picking, and using tools to break locks. There is also information about reinforcing door jams and security systems. With all this information, I really have to ask “what is the purpose of securing a house?”. That question may sound simplistic, but it is relevant. Unless we build our house like Fort Knox with armed guards and basically no windows, there will always be ways to get in.

Let’s start with locks. There are locks in every shape, size, and strength. Does a lock really matter? Well, I’ve seen videos of people kicking in doors and, of course, we’ve all seen TV shows with police using a battering ram to go right through the lock. So, someone determined to get in through the front door will definitely do it. A reasonable quality lock is a decent deterrent. Next let’s look at a security screen door. What is the purpose of it? I managed to break the lock on our security screen door (not on purpose) and with my father’s help, we broke the door in about a minute using a tire iron. So, the security screen door isn’t going to keep someone out, but will keep a solicitor from entering the house while we’re getting a breeze through it.

If we move on to securing the door jam, it seems like a reasonable thing to do as I’ve seen videos of the door being kicked in and it is something to consider; however, as I mentioned above, a determined person will get in. No matter what you do to the front door, there are easier ways to get into a house. Windows (unless they are bullet resistant or very reinforced), are pretty easy to break or cut, so there is another way to get in. Locks on windows aren’t of much use.

Looking at security systems, they only work after the fact when someone has already entered or attempted to enter your house.

So, what is the answer to security? I think it is quite simple, you need to deter anyone from attempting to get into your house and make your house not look like an easy target. If you keep people away from touching your house, none of the physical security above actually matters. There are a number of ways to make your house look less attractive for a criminal, none of these is revolutionary and hasn’t been said before:

  • Use motion sensing lights. This is pretty obvious, but a lot of people don’t have this and sometimes they are a nuisance, so they’re turned off.
  • Install cameras that are visible as well as post signs indicating that the property is being video taped. The recordings, themselves, may not actually help to catch an intruder, but the presence may get someone to think twice about approaching. Also, depending on the type of system, you could trigger alerts of someone approaching.
  • Watch your routines. In our last house, we always parked our cars in the garage, so if someone looked at our house, he wouldn’t know if we were home or not. In our rental, we can’t get our cars in the garage, so the presence of our cars means we’re home and the lack of one or both means we’re not home. When I travel, I take a cab to the airport or get a ride to make it less obvious that I’m not home. In our new house, we’re definitely going to get both cars in the garage.
  • Don’t broadcast your whereabouts on social networks. This is pretty obvious, but have you ever looked at the number of people that checkin somewhere and post on a social network?
  • Lock your back gate.
  • Don’t give people a place to hide around your house; trim back bushes and trees directly adjacent to your house.

I’m going to use a combination of things to secure my house, but am under no illusion that my house will be completely secure, because that just isn’t possible.

Am I an expert on this? No, I’m just a regular home owner that has done some thinking about this problem.

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When letters to companies work

Sometime last year, my wife and I went to Road Runner Sports to get new shoes. They’ve always had a decent selection and with their VIP club, we can wear the shoes for awhile and return them if they don’t work out. This is extremely important to me as I run a bit and if the shoes aren’t comfortable, I need to find a replacement. When we went, they were advertising an extra 10% off (VIP members get 10% off already). After we left the store, I realized that their advertised 20% off (10% off for VIP + 10% off for the sale) was not actually 20%. They took the 10% off first and then from the new price, took another 10% off. So for a $100 purchase, 20% off makes the cost $80. However, they were charging $81 (10% off $100 = $90 and the 10% off that make $81). This is not a huge deal taken in isolation, but irked me enough that I sent a letter to the company CEO.

I got a call from the CEO and he refunded me a few bucks and said that he’d look into it. I figured he was just trying to placate me as they’d have to fix their computer systems to correctly apply the discount across the board. Today we were in the store to purchase new shoes and they were advertising 20% off (10% VIP + 10%) and I was expecting to put up a fight for the correct 20% off. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they took 20% off the original price with no funny business.

This was an excellent move by Road Runner Sports to correct something that most people would not have noticed. I’m not sure if originally they intended to incorrectly advertise the 20% off or it was just a mistake that no one caught. However, I am happy that they did the right thing.

Now I just hope my new shoes are comfortable as I don’t want to have to find different ones!

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Review: SecuritySpy

In our last house, I considered adding security cameras as my wife was a teacher in the area and some of the students knew where she lived. We all know that not every student is perfect and we wouldn’t be surprised if a student toilet papered our house. This, luckily never happened. However, neighborhood kids did toilet paper our house once and someone (or a group of individuals) graffitied a number of houses including ours with anti-Semitic words and symbols. I never got around to installing cameras and it is probably best that I didn’t as the technology has gotten so much better, that the quality of cameras and systems from just a few years ago doesn’t compare with what we have today.

Some people may think I’m a bit paranoid, but I think that knowing who is around my property while it is being remodeling as well as down the line knowing if solicitors come to the door or a package gets dropped off is invaluable.

When I started investigating camera systems, the reviews on full featured systems were so mixed that I didn’t know what to believe and what not to believe. The most common theme among reviews on systems was that the fans in the DVRs was noisy and that the boxes were power hogs. That quickly changed my thinking and I decided that since my Mac Mini that acts as my media center runs most of the time (6 am to 11 pm), I was probably better off having it run 24 hours a day and have it handle the recording. The latest Mac Minis use about 85 W and are super quiet. With that decision made, I had to go with networked, IP cameras. I’ll cover the Q-See cameras I got in another review. So the last decision to be made was the software to handle the recordings. Unfortunately, there aren’t many options for the Mac.

After playing with the 2 leading candidates, I decided that SecuritySpy was the only option. The other candidate crashed while I was testing it, which made it unreliable for a 24/7 system.

SecuritySpy grew out of a product called BTV which I had played with a number of years ago when I first started experimenting with video on the Mac at about the time I wrote a program called PhotoCapture, if I recall correctly. (As an interesting side note, PhotoCapture was effectively a security program for capturing still images, but was either triggered on a timer or when someone hit a web page.)

SecuritySpy has a few main functions that I have used; the first is time lapse recording that gives you a new recording every day for each camera. The second is to do something when it detects motion. For the first week that I used SecuritySpy, I had time lapse recording turned on and it recorded lots and lots of video. I had the cameras set to output H.264 video at 15 fps. For each camera, SecuritySpy was recording over 30 GB of data per data. With four cameras, this amounted to about 120 GB of video a day. SecuritySpy will remove old video or keep a certain amount of free space, so space was only a slight issue (my test Mac Mini is a Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz machine with a 500 GB drive; when I eventually move, my main Mac Mini will take over the duties). The big question really is, what will I do with so much video?

The second main feature of SecuritySpy is the motion detection triggers. I’ve set it up to record 15 seconds of video before and after an event as well as capture still images once a second during that time and email me the images. This feature is where the power of SecuritySpy lies. Quickly I realized that I had to mask off some areas of the image to ignore as the shimmering of the pool kept triggering the motion. I’ve been receiving images all week long of the mailman coming to the door, a contractor pulling into the driveway, as well as my smiling face when I’ve approached the front door! I still need to tweak my settings, but now I know who is approaching the house (I also have cameras in the back as well).

Configuration of SecuritySpy, however, is a bit cumbersome. In my case, my 4 cameras are identical with the exception of the IP address and I want the same motion capture settings. For the setup, I have to add each camera individually, select the camera from a list and set a few settings. After that setup is done, you have to navigate to each camera individually and set it up; there is an option to copy all the settings from another camera which helps, but there is likely an easier way to configure all cameras at once.

Another neat feature is that it has a built in web server so that you can view from anywhere. With a change to port forwarding on your router and the built in dynamic DNS for SecuritySpy, it is easy to access your machine remotely. However, if you want to use HTTPS to securely access it, the process is a bit cumbersome as it requires setting up the web server built into OS X (in Mountain Lion and maybe Lion, there is no longer a checkbox to turn on the web server in System Preferences), setting up a rewrite rule and installing a certificate. I would have preferred to have this built into SecuritySpy with the ability to either have it generate a self-signed certificate or allow the user to select his own (I use StartSSL for free certificates that work with a wide variety of operating systems; I’m not sure I’d use them for anything other than my personal use, however). The web interface for SecuritySpy feels quite dated and reminds me of the kinds of things I setup in 1994 when working with my PhotoCapture program. It definitely could use an overhaul, but it is quite functional.

SecuritySpy 20130501

Like the web interface, the entire user interface feels quite dated. The dialogs, windows, etc. look very Carbon like and show the roots of the program dating back almost 20 years. While I am definitely not a user interface designer, basic Cocoa apps look a lot fresher than SecuritySpy. I know it is quite hard to transition a UI and if you’re a one man shop, you may not have the resources to revamp the UI.

Screenshot of Finder

2Screenshot of Finder

1Screenshot of Finder

On my Core 2 Duo Mac Mini, SecuritySpy has had no problems keeping up with 15 fps video on 4 cameras. It uses somewhere between 40 and 60% of the CPU (total between both cores) which is what I expected. When I switch it over to my quad core i7 Mac Mini, the Mini should have no problems acting as my regular DVR and security setup. This was on version 3.0.2; I am still testing the latest 3.0.4 version, but preliminary testing shows an issue indicating that there are network errors and the machine may not be able to keep up with the 15 fps.

Pros

  • Works with a variety of cameras.
  • Very robust.
  • Motion capture works well.
  • Full suite of actions on motion.
  • Built in web server works well for remote access.

Cons

  • User interface feels dated.
  • Web interface feels dated.
  • Configuration could be a little easier.
  • HTTPS isn’t built into the web server.

Summary

SecuritySpy is an excellent alternative to standalone surveillance systems. The website has estimates on hardware requirements and those should be looked at closely so that you’re not disappointed with performance. The price for the 4 cameras is about $120 which I consider quite reasonable as I compared it to a standalone system (incremental cost since I already had a Mac Mini; some standalone systems cost maybe $100 more when bundled with 4 cameras). Setting up a video system is not for the faint of heart; adding a Mac Mini to the equation makes it even more complicated. However, I believe that SecuritySpy and using a Mac Mini was a wise choice for me. I did contact support about compatibility with a camera I tried out before the Q-See ones and got a very prompt response about it; so if you run into problems, help is out there.

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Making our house a home

Over a year ago, my wife and I decided to sell our house and move closer to the water. We expected to be in a rental for maybe 6 months before finding a house. We were fully prepared to wait and wanted a fixer. Unfortunately, the real estate market here in San Diego started heating up again and finding a house was not an easy task. We had a few requirements for a house, but looking back, we were actually flexible on some of those requirements.

11 months and offers on 6 houses later, we finally found the house that we’ll eventually call home. I say eventually because we have a very large remodeling project. While a lot of the remodeling is interior and cosmetic, we are filling in a pool (yes, people think we’re crazy, but having had a pool for 8 years where it was warmer than where are are now and not using it much, we’ve decided that it isn’t worth keeping), removing a fireplace (switching to a gas appliance fireplace), rearranging some rooms a little, adding some closets, and fixing up the kitchen. This project is going to take awhile and while we’re very anxious to get moved in, I’m sure the time will start flying by as the process gets underway. Of course we want it done right the first time, so we’re not going to rush it.

I’m not quite sure how most people go about remodeling a house as there seem to be lots of hurdles and pitfalls. Luckily, I have a construction expert (my father), who has offered to oversee the work and guide me.

Let the fun begin!