The Roomba Saga

I finally got tired of the dog hair around our house, so I decided to purchase a Roomba. I purchased the Roomba 560 as it had a number of features that I liked and with the 20% off coupon at Linens N Things, it was $280. At the same time, they had the Scooba 5800 on sale for $250 and with the 20% off coupon, it was $200. I was pleased that we had a chance at clean floors; nether my wife nor I like to clean, but like to have the house clean which creates a problem.The Roomba started making funny noises and the Scooba stopped charging, so I took them back and exchanged them. The next set worked better, but I soon learned that the virtual walls of the Roomba 560 were not compatible with the Scooba, so I'd have to buy extra walls for BOTH devices as we have a large area that I need to clean in sections. Even if cost were not an object (extra virtual walls are about $30 a piece), having 2 sets was not realistic.So, I returned the Roomba and ordered the Roomba 416 direct from iRobot as it was $200 + tax with free shipping (Linens N Things had it for $200 - 20%). iRobot had a special where I'd get a free accessory kit that included 6 replacement filters, a set of replacement brushes, a remote control and another virtual wall. This time, however, the virtual walls of the Roomba and Scooba could be interchanged. The Roomba arrived today and while I didn't get the remote control, I did end up with an extra virtual wall. So, I now have 5 virtual walls that work with both devices. I like the Scooba and it is doing a decent job; the Roomba seemed to do an acceptable job, but unlike the 500 series, it really bangs into walls. I'll keep putting both devices through their paces and hopefully I'll be pleased with my purchase.

When money gets in the way of donations

The mantra of many that want to reduce waste and help the environment is reduce, reuse, recycle and in that order. So today I tried to do the second step of reusing by donating some of my old stuff to Goodwill. I went to Goodwill's Miramar landfill location as it was the closest location to me (less than 10 minutes away). I had a bunch of stuff to donate including a monitor, a sewing machine, an old laptop, old video camera, old cell phones, clothes, etc. The guy at the station informed me that they couldn't accept anything with a plug on it at that location because they had a deal with the "recycling center" next door. Which to me meant that the recycling center wanted the stuff as it charges to recycle things like monitor whereas Goodwill just takes it. It would seem that they don't adhere to the same mantra that I do and want me to skip the reuse step and go right to recycle.

In the end, I had to drive an extra 15 minutes up the road to their Sorrento Valley location to donate the rest of my stuff. This makes no sense to me as Goodwill takes all their stuff and resells it if it is in sellable condition. What a waste of extra time and gas to do the right thing.

What's a Dog/Cat?

I went to purchase some heartworm medication for my dog through 1800PetMeds and when I went to select which pet it was for, I selected Marley (we only have one pet) and the following came up:

I know that I setup Marley as a dog and when I checked his profile, it said he was a dog. I guess the site was a little confused.

Installing SlimServer on an AppleTV

One of the services I needed to move off my server before shutting it down was SlimServer which runs my Squeezeboxes. I had looked at a few small PCs that were ultra quiet and as I was looking at the Shuttle website, it compared one of their boxes to a Mac Mini. Hmmm, I have an extra one of those lying around that I could use and then remembered I have an AppleTV that I'm not using. So, I decided to see if I could install SlimServer on the AppleTV as it is fanless and super quiet. Here's what I did:

1. Download Patchstick
2. Follow the procedure and install Patchstick from a USB thumb drive
3. Download the Mac OS X version of SlimServer
4. Download the XMRadio plugin
5. Edit XROAPI.pm in the plugin by commenting out

   	if ( defined( $self->{activeClient} ) ) {		return [			$client->string('PLUGIN_XMRADIO_ERROR_HEADER'),			$client->string('PLUGIN_XMRADIO_IN_USE') . ' ' . $client->name()		];	}

   So that I can have more than 1 Squeezebox talking to XM at the same time.

6. From the AppleTV, enable AFP in the awakwardTV menu
7. Mount the SlimServer dmg file that was downloaded above
8. From the image, copy Install Files/SlimServer.prefPane/Resources/server to your desktop
9. Place the modified XMRadio plugin in ~/Destkop/server/Plugins
10. Mount the AppleTV volume via AFP
11. Modify ~/Desktop/server/Slim Launcher.app/Contents/Resources/Start Slim Server.sh to add

    HOME=/Users/frontrow; export HOME

    before the ./slimserver.pl line

12. Copy ~/Desktop/server to the AppleTV's AFP volume
13. Create a folder on the Desktop called SlimServer
14. In that folder create 2 files. The first is called StartupParameters.plist and it contains:

    {  Description     = "SlimServer";  Provides        = ("SlimServer");  Requires        = ("Disks");    Uses		= ("mDNSResponder", "Resolver", "DirectoryServices", "NFS", "Network Time");    OrderPreference	= "Last";    Messages =    {	start = "Starting SlimServer";	stop = "Stopping SlimServer";    };}

    The second is called SlimServer and it contains:

    #!/bin/sh. /etc/rc.commonSERVER_RUNNING=`ps -axww | grep "slimp3.pl|slimp3d|slimserver.pl|slimserver" | grep -v grep | cat`StartService() {ConsoleMessage "Starting SlimServer"if [ z"$SERVER_RUNNING" = z ] ; then	pushd "/Users/frontrow/server"    sudo -u frontrow "Slim Launcher.app/Contents/Resources/Start Slim Server.sh"    popdfiif [ z"$#" != z"0" ] ; then    ConsoleMessage -Sfi}StopService() {if [ z"$SERVER_RUNNING" != z ] ; then    kill `echo $SERVER_RUNNING | sed -n 's/^[ ]*([0-9]*)[ ]*.*$/1/p'`fi}RunService "$1"

15. Copy the SlimServer folder to the AppleTV's AFP volume
16. Login via ssh using

    ssh -1 frontrow@appletv.local

    password is frontrow

17. Change the root file system to read/write using

    sudo mount -uw /

18. Move the SlimServer folder using

    sudo mv /Users/frontrow/SlimServer /Library/StartupItems/

19. Make the SlimServer file executable

    sudo chmod +x /Library/StartupItems/SlimServer/SlimServer

20. Change the owner

    sudo chown -R root:wheel /Library/StartupItems/SlimServer

21. Disable auto updating

    sudo bash -c 'echo "127.0.0.1       mesu.apple.com" >> /etc/hosts'

22. Restart the AppleTV

    sudo reboot

23. From Safari goto: http://appletv.local:9000/
24. Change the music directory in the SlimServer prefs to /mnt/Media/Media Files

The only problem so far is that it creates multiple Albums for each album due to how the AppleTV stores the music.