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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.

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!

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.

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.

Well I have managed to neglect another website for an extended period of time. This time I have a website with user interaction and have now realized it will need to monitored more frequently. I knew spam would be a problem, but apparently it is much more prevalent than I would thought for even a blog as small as this one. I had well over 2,000 spam comments here. This clearly does not add to the credibility of the site, is a detractor for visitor to post comments and contribute, and clutters the site.  So, I decided I needed to thwart some of this activity and did a quick google search. WordPress comes with a plugin called Askimet designed to prevent a lot of spam, I just never activited. The directions for activating could be made a little more clearer for people hosting their own blog, like I am. You will need to go to WordPress and register for an account, apparently any will do. This will provide you with an API key, which is required for installation. The options are limited for eliminating already accumulated spam comments, which I found a bit dissapointing. For instance, pretty much the only option was to delete spam older than one month. No eliminate immediately!

Though, the word on the net sounds promising for this plugin and it does come with stats to monitor its actions. It does add a button on the Comments page called “Check for Spam,” but I could not get it to do anything? Not sure what I was doing wrong there. Therefore, I had to find a way to eliminate my current comment spam. Sadly or lamely, WordPress’s Comments page only has one option for monitoring comments–20 at a time. Luckily, I found a comment on another page explaining how to show more comments by modifying the php. This tip was quite useful and turned a chore that I feared would take hours, into one that took minutes.

I have learned my lesson and will monitor this situation more frequently. Hopefully, this convinces others starting blogs to install the Askimet plugin immediately.

Not too long ago I was watching some YouTube videos and was wondering how to get the sound track from them. Doing some Google searching will yield tons of results, but I discovered many them were klunky to follow. Many were even obsolete, because apparently this is a problem YouTube is actively combating. This documents the way I prefer to do this on a Mac (should work on Linux as well). Though I am sure many similarly well suited options are available for Windows.

The first thing you will need is a plugin for Firefox called DownloadHelper. I believe this should work on all platforms; however, to be clear, this explanation is with Firefox 3.0.8 for Mac OS X. This will add a toolbar to your Firefox installation that can be used to rip media content from many well known websites. Of interest to us, is its ability to rip flash videos from YouTube (ie, .flv files). Simply install the plugin and visit a video you are interested in ripping on YouTube. You should see the DownloadHelper logo starting to spin next to the address bar. This indicates, as far as I can tell, that it is trying to find media that it can tap into. For best results, you will need to let your video fully load and may need to watch it in its entirety before saving off the .flv file. Once it is ready, click on the DownloadHelper logo and one of the things in the menu that shows up should be a file named after the title of the current YouTube page. Select that file and choose somewhere to save it. It is suggested to save this on a mac in a directory that has a file path that contains no special characters (ie, spaces). This will help not to complicate things later on.

The second part of this operation involves software needed to encode/decode audio and video files. The software of choice for this process is ffmpegX. This is freeware for Mac OS X that is relatively popular and very robust. Please follow the installation instructions ffmpegX 0.0.9y. From my lessons learned, this is where you should make sure to install this tool in a file path that has no special characters (ie, spaces). In order for this software to comply with some licensing, you will also need to download the mpeg2enc binary, mplayer and mencoder binaries. Please make sure to install these in a no special character file path as well. Once the binaries have been linked to with ffmpegX, you will no longer needs these files as the application should be in your Application directory and have made local copies of the binaries.

Now simply start up ffmpegX and drag and drop the .flv file downloaded earlier to the left hand side of the app. Next, choose a format to encode it with. If you want the soundtrack, simply choose “movie audio to mp3″ for the target format on the right hand side. Then, click the Encode button and an mp3 should be generated. One problem I kept encountering at first was files seemed to be completing their conversions immediately. It turns out they were and generated 0Kb files. After looking for a solution for a while it turns out that sometimes the audio and video tracks are encoded differently, causing them to be in a different order (this may be done on purpose by YouTube). If this occurs, select the “Audio” tab and select “Invert Mapping,” and try again. If this still does not work, select the blue “i” next to the suspect problem for a log of the conversion process. Use the information provided to do a Google search and try to find a solution.

ffmpegX proves to be a very useful tool and one that has many other uses. I enjoy using this to convert .flv files into mp3s and videos that I can play on my iPhone, but there are many other formats to convert audio/video files to and from. Please provide any feedback or corrections you have and I will try to address them as best as I can.

For my first blog here I would like to mention something about installing WordPress. I was following  the well documented easy steps for installing WordPress via Fantastico De Luxe. Soon, enough everything was done after filling out a few bits of information, I thought I was ready to get started. According to http://codex.wordpress.org/First_Steps_With_WordPress, I should have been able to click on the <– visit site next to the top left hand title of your domain in wp-admin in order to see what my blog looked like. Once I clicked on this link I was instead directed to a directory listing of where WordPress was installed. I was pretty sure a simple .htaccess file in my blog directory would solve the problem, which was reiterated in several forums (ie. http://wordpress.org/support/topic/181297). This did not prove to be the only problem though.  After, trying numerous other suggestions discovered on the web for fixing the directory listing problem, I threw in the towel and sent my hosting company’s customer service an inquiry about the problem.  It turns out that since I use a hosting company meant for java (ie., jsp, servlets, etc.) Tomcat trumps Apache .htaccess files. Simple solution is to ask them to unmap a directory. In my case, I asked them to unmap the blog directory where I have installed the php based WordPress. Now everything works fine, so I wanted to share this solution for anybody else who may encounter this problem.