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For a couple months my Roomba has been acting a tad bit funny by pretty much not working. Anytime I would attempt to get my Roomba running, it would immediately start producing a clicking noise and then cease cleaning. The following error would be announced “Error 2. Open Roomba’s brush cage and clean brushes.” Now, my Roomba was fairly new and I know people tend to have lots of problems with them, so I started to think I had a dud and just resumed using my regular, old-school vacuum. I did attempt cleaning the brushes a few times, but to know avail. Finally, today I decided to look for an answer and found it here. The trick was removing the brush bearings, which I was unaware of them being able to be removed. Finally, my Roomba is back in order and I hope this helps anybody else who may be experiencing a similar problem

I have been delegated the task of scanning the family photos and I picked up an Epson Perfection V500 to perform these duties, since I could not find any real options with a feeder. I’ve used it off and on for the past few months without a problem and have found it to be quite useful, fast, flexible, and convenient; however, today in the midst of scanning some negatives I lost the option to select Film as a ‘Document Type.’ To recover from this problem I turned off my scanner, and unplugged everything in the back for a few seconds and then reversed the process. Click here to get more information on this problem.

If you are looking for an interesting desert to make and love Oreos, I strongly recommend making the Oreo Cookie Cake with the recipe from Kraft. I have made it three times over the years and it is quite delicious. It is visually interesting, delicious tasting, and is not very difficult to make. My recommendations are to add a couple more Oreos into the filling, make sure the chocolate sauce is sufficiently cool, and that the two 9 inch cakes are completely cool. You’ll end up with more Oreo flavor and more chocolate on top of the cake than falling off the sides. Following is an image of the one I just made yesterday.

Today I was interested in getting some personal copies of some pictures from a friend’s facebook album. Before going down the mundane and tedious task of downloading each one individual, I asked myself what anyone who likes to solve problems should ask–”Is there a better way to achieve this end goal?”  Therefore, I decide to google “how to download a facebook album” and low and behold, the first hit does exactly what I want. All you need to do is have Firefox and install the plugin. FacePAD is pretty simple to use. I didn’t find instructions readily available, so I just tinkered around and had it figured out in a couple minutes. Once you have it installed, simply go to the list of albums of one of your friends in Facebook and right click on the album’s link you want to download and you should see an option for “Download Album with FacePAD.” Now, a little trial and error was needed to discover this method will only download the first page of photos. The better option I found was to go to the first page and right click on each page number at the upper right of the photos. Hope this helps someone’s life better!

I am a huge fan of both Apple hardware and software, but I could not be more disappointed with the 10.5.7 update from back in May. It has easily been the worst update I have ever had to deal with from Apple. My computer has not been running in tip top shape, ever since I decided to use it as a web server last year for about a week, but I feel Apple really dropped the ball with this update. Knowing I have had issues for a while, I decided to wait a month or so before performing the update in hopes of early adopters identifying any major issues and Apple fixing them accordingly. Wow…that did not quite go as planned. I got a blue screen of death (can’t Apple at least change the color!?) and even had a music cd, and later an install disc stuck in the slot loader. After countless attempts at remedies I gave in and was able to restore the operating system (keeping personal files). Even this was without a lack of problems, most notably having my account removed from the list of system administrators. Finally, after many hours of pain, I got things back up and running and upgraded to 10.5.6 and stayed there till today.

Lately, I have been trying to read up on how to program for the iPhone and needed to update to 10.5.7 (Apple, was it really necessary?) to install the iPhone 3.0 SDK. From previous experiences, I decided to download the 10.5.7 combo update and install the update this way instead of during the restart, which is rumored to be less problematic. After the lengthy download finished, the installation managed to still have problems. Apparently, it didnt’ play nicely with Time Machine (noted by an error along the lines of “Importer start failed for 89″). I simply disconnected my external drive used by Time Machine and restarted (it decided to restart a couple times automatically, once less than the reported three times when performing a restart update). This experienced has taught me to make sure I have a spare computer or iPhone lying around to help trouble shoot problems with updates from Apple, that I will wait a bit longer before installing the next update, and that booting your Mac in verbose mode is very helpful!

This past Sunday, I managed to drive all the way to Cleveland to catch one of my favorite bands of all time–VNV Nation. They are on tour supporting their latest effort titled “Of Faith, Power and Glory.” I personally like this album, but it does have a different tone then past albums and at the same time does not seem to be quite up to par. With that said, I still enjoy listening to it and I think it will grow on me, it just seems I like a couple songs way more than the rest of the album. Regardless of my thoughts of the latest album, I have seen VNV Nation once before and was in no way going to miss this tour. Due to some prior arrangements, I had to drive a bit further than I probably would have had to for a closer city, but the trip was fun and worth every moment.

If you have never seen VNV Nation live before, and even remotely enjoy their music, you will be nothing less than pleased by their performance. Watching the jolly Ronan Harris perform the music for which he is every bit as passionate about as his fans is simply unforgettable. He exclaimed, during their set, that they will be touring again late this year and you should make a concerted effort to attend. The shows are small (not stadium filling), but are intimate.

With that said, on to my review! The event was held at Peabody’s Downunder, a venue I have never been at before, but it was an above average place to hold a show. It had a large open bar, a couple stages, two levels, and I would estimate enough room to hold maybe a thousand people. Much better than Club Zoo in Pittsburgh for comparison.  The only things that could have made the place better in my opinion were higher ceilings and a lot more AC. Now that the what and where have been answered, how about the who?

Three bands were to play this night and I will have to admit, I got a little lazy and did not even bother trying to look up who was opening for VNV Nation. The supporting acts were Ayria and War Tapes. I actually am sort of happy I did not though, because they turned out to be surprisingly good. Ayria was of a similar genre/style of music as VNV Nation and was first up. The singer, Jennifer Parkin, is quite beautiful and played into my like of female fronted bands. I thought her voice was stunning and the music easy to get into. It took me next to no time to enjoy their performance and by the end I was sold, I ended up buying Ayria’s limited edition box of their latest album “Hearts for Bullets.” Since, then I have listened to it several times and am planning on buying some of their back catalog.

Next, up was War Tapes, a actual band with no everyone playing traditional instruments. It was clear from the get got they were of a different style and did not completely fit the mold of the other two bands they were on tour with. Even so, I enjoyed their music and certainly appreciated the singers passion. War Tapes reminded me of Evaline and AFI; my friend accompanying me said his voice reminded him of the singer of the Cult. I was not completely sold on them, but will deffinetly check them out some more. Also, after the show we got to talk to the singer for a bit and could not believe the tyraid he was going on. Lets just say, you either will love or hate War Tapes and they will without a doubt become a success.

Lastly, VNV Nation came on and they did not disappoint. They played about two hours of glorious music. Last time I seen them, I was a bit dissapointed they did not play “Joy,” but to my surprise they opened with this song. From the moment I heard the beginning of this song I knew the crowd was going to get a good show. It was at this moment, that a fan handed off his giant inflatable sword to Ronan and got things going. They played many of my favorites including: “Illusion,” “Chrome,” “The Farthest Star,” “Fearless,” “The Great Divide,” “Lastlight,” “Legion,” “Perpetual,” “Sentinel,” and “Standing.” Due to height limitations in the venue, they played a longer show, played a much different set than from the previous shows on the tour, including older songs, and ended the night with a blast from the past. I was simply exhausted and a sweaty mess by the end of this show and would have it no different if done again. I was pleased to meet the bands and will have to say this show ranks up there with the best ones out of the hundred plus I have seen.

Facebook has been yelling at me lately to get this Adobe Flash 10 Plug-in update. So, today I decided to update and wow its nice to see Adobe forget how to be friendly to the OS that it probably should be most thankful for. After downloading, unpacking and mounting the disk image, I double click to install the update. Stepping through the wizard eventually led to an error about having to quit the DashboardClient. Seriously, I have never seen this as a requirement to install anything, let alone a lousy plug-in. Quitting and Force Quitting via the Finder –> Go –> Utilities –> Activity Monitor did not seem to help, nor did killing the application via the terminal. Eventually, I decided to just log out and back in and immediately go through the installation process again, before starting anything else up. This seemed to work, but is a little ridiculous to have to go through. The following support page has some pointers if you are having similar difficulties.

This past weekend was Independence Day and I just thought I would share some footage from a couple of the shows I went to. The first show was the Tappan Lake show in Ohio on July 3rd.

This show was filmed almost in entirety and is split into two parts due to YouTube limitations. The second show, was filmed at the point in Pittsburgh, Pa on July 4th.

I was not able to film this entire show, but I do have a source with the entire show filmed and I will try to get the finale posted at the least.

At the beginning of this week I was tweaking my screensaver and sleep settings to try to save some energy. I ended up discovering the “Schedule” option of the Energy Saver preference pane in the Mac OS X System Preferences. Here I discovered that you can schedule your computer to shutdown at a certain time and day, as well as the time for it start back up. Typically, I am pretty energy conscience in regards to most things; however, when it comes to my computer I have been known to leave it on for months. Of course that is with sleep turned on and requiring no crashes. It is not a favorite task of mine to get my applications and windows all set up after powering back on, but I decided if I can automate the process why not give it a shot. Therefore, I decided to schedule my iMac to shutdown every night, at a point when I am typically off of it, and then start back up at the time I would be back from work at the earliest, on weekdays. I have woke up a couple mornings thus far this week and decided to check something quickly on my computer, and have noticed it is shutdown. So, it appears to be working and is sort of nice to know I am not powering the thing all night, though there is something still consuming some power I am sure, as it knows when to turn back on. I was going to stay up late enough last night to see if it would shutdown while I am still using it, but missed that deadline by about 10 minutes. All in all, this is a nifty little way to save some power and it is automated. It probably has some other benefits, such as not leaving your computer available for hacking attempts all night. I will continue using this function, so long as I do not find it to have any annoyance beyond having to reopen some applications after it powers back on.

Today and for the past month or so, I have been attempting to cook a few meals that I an enjoy eating at restaurants, but have never attempted to make myself. Check out my latest post on this topic.