Mom and Dad came to visit this past week. It was a really great time with family and Iris loved the attention. Iris has called my dad “Papa” since she was 8 months or so, and my Mom reserved the name “Oma” (German for grandmother).
While they were here, Oma attacked the kitchen and cleaned both our sink and my lunch cooler. They are both cleaner than I’ve ever seen them!
Thanks for making the trip out to see us, Oma & Papa!
Iris took her first gymnastics class today. Next stop: African Games of 2028.
Check out how much fun this kid is having!
Is your Dyson Animal vacuum cleaner sucking, like mine was? There’s a good chance you can fix it cheaply.
In my case, the vacuum head — in Dyson speak, it’s the “soleplate” — was not seating down fully on the floor.
Because the soleplate wasn’t fully flush with the contact surface, the suction was greatly reduced. Here’s the sad thing: I knew this for some time. Like years. And I never got around to doing anything about it. I was just vacuuming in mediocrity. Well, I finally did something about it today.
It’s tricky to describe where to apply the rubber band, so the pictures below will help you visualize. But in words, the basic problem was that the intake hose (first two photos below) was making the soleplate assembly tilt up, away from the floor. I didn’t see any abnormal wear signs of the hose, or any other reasons to believe that this was something that happened with age. It makes me seriously wonder if this was a design flaw (gasp!) — a little hard to believe since Dyson’s legendary design esthetics resemble Apple’s. Regardless, a simple apparatus to force the assembly back down toward the floor was really all that was needed.
The results? I kid you not, this thing has never — NEVER — cleaned this good. I was seriously astonished. My rugs are finally spotless; with three fur-bound pets in this house, I see a lot of deposited hair, and the rugs were totally clean. To quantify, a small family living room of about 15′ x 20’ used to equate to about a half full dirt chamber. Post-rubber-band-fix? The chamber was more full than I’d ever gotten before in that same room. Amazing!
So I finally got around to updating my iMac from Lion to Mountain Lion last night. Wow, I am pleasantly surprised!
For the past year, this was a regular occurrence: systemic memory rot.
Wow, what in the world is up with #FireFox on OS X? Here's a screenshot of it chewing up 0.8GB! iPhoto cant load at all pic.twitter.com/77AXjmAI
— Rob Lund (@ElectroLund) July 7, 2012
It was ridiculous. I felt like I was using a Windows machine. No offense, 95% of the world. But seriously, it was crazy bad.
And now after the Mountain Lion update, it’s like a new machine. And all for $20.
There’s an article at The Good Men Project worth reading called “Not a Joke: Why Do Our Boys Keep Up the Mass Shootings?” in light of the mass murder this morning in Colorado. I left a comment there that I wanted to explore some more here.
This is a risky comment, because it is perhaps too early to theorize. For starters, I live in Colorado and I’m stunned. I also love the Batman movies for the same reasons lots of other boys and men love them. I get a rise out of violence in my entertainment, gun-related or otherwise, and I’m not sure yet what that says about me or my conception of masculinity.
At the risk of being too politically charged, I would like to offer this idea: gun/violence culture. Not guns and violence themselves; the world has had both for eons. I’m talking about the culture thereof, which I believe is different.
I work for a military-tech company. We design products that integrate into soldier systems and weaponry. One of our employees was touring his kid through the plant recently and the kid’s eyes went wide when he saw one of the assault rifles sitting on an engineer’s desk. We were conducting testing on a new design, and the kid was ecstatic. I didn’t know (and can’t remember) the model of the gun; he knew it cold and could tell me how many rounds per second it fired. I asked the kid how he knew so much about it (you know where this is going): Modern Warfare 7 (or whatever version we have now).
Again, I am not talking about the video games themselves, or the guns themselves. We have always had these with us. I’m merely talking about the culture that has arisen around that stuff that I think matters more. The culture celebrates weaponry and violence to a level never seen before, where the protagonist hero can rampage without any consequence — in fact, he is rewarded for doing so.
Just some scrambled thoughts on an emotionally cloudy Friday morning.
A few weeks ago, the worst fire in Colorado’s history broke out. In my town. It was like Armageddon raining fire down upon us. A bunch of people lost their homes, a few people died. It was definitely a scary few days.
After the very professional firefighters and city government folks began to gain control, some levity was in order. I got on Twitter and joked that I wasn’t going to shave until this end-of-the-world stuff quieted down. And a local report named Barrett Tryon joined in. The following is the Tweet stream.
DUDES.. TAKE THE CHALLENGE! #FireBeard! NO shaving until #WaldoCanyonFire is over! MT @ElectroLund: @tryonb Before pic. http://t.co/p4gnbudh
— Barrett Tryon (@btryn) June 29, 2012
@tryonb here we go. Before pic. pic.twitter.com/SFh0j5SA
— Rob Lund (@ElectroLund) June 29, 2012
@tryonb #firebeard http://t.co/dQ35ZvP4
— Jimmy B #SmokeNation (@Jimmy_SHR14) June 29, 2012
@tryonb @ortiviz Wanna see who else (besides yours truly) is sporting a #firebeard in the COS? pic.twitter.com/c3lnYzTL
— Kevin Johnson (@kaydubj) June 29, 2012
#FireBeard photo update. 1 week in. #WaldoCanyonFire pic.twitter.com/8KIEoCe0
— Rob Lund (@ElectroLund) June 30, 2012
Day 7 check-in #FireBeard @coyote4til7 @the_jay_co @jimmy_shr14 @kaydubj @danielu @jarydwilson @tryonb pic.twitter.com/TMS3e7aQ
— Rob Lund (@ElectroLund) July 6, 2012
Is this a mashup made in heaven? I think it was.
Sarah and Iris and I all went to this concert a few weeks ago titled, “The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass” with text by Marisha Chamberlain and music by Carol Barnett. The Colorado Springs Chorale’s Chamber Singers performed the piece 1.
The idea is so pure and revelatory: a unique combination of bluegrass rhythms with sacred choral arrangement is just surprising and wonderful. Here are some thoughts I had on some of the movements.
This is a simple tune, haunting and mournful.
Row on, we’re crossing River Jordan. And no one goes alone. I do believe a resting place awaits us… we’ll toss our coats, throw off our hats and take the seat of ease. It’s not the seat of riches and it’s not the seat of power.
It’s got a nice bluegrass banjo off-beat. The choral arrangement is built on a swaying syncopation.
It’s full of wonderful minors.
This is almost a chant. The pitch control of the singers was magnificent. The resolve at the end of the piece, “dona nobis pacem,” was simply miraculous.
This was solely female voiced. Curiously — perhaps boldly — the writer chose to use the female gender as well in the text. For instance:
They say God loved the world so dear
She set aside Her crown
And cloaked Herself in human shape;
They say that She came down,
And dwelt awhile among us here.
She came on down.
It was a fantastic concert. You owe it to yourself to watch this excellent recording on YouTube (not the C/S Chamber Singers):
I ran across this most excellent xkcd comic the other day:
It’s just so funny on so many levels, if you’re a EE. Let’s just go clockwise around the page, starting at the top left.
Insider parodies like these really crack me up. I’m reminding of the Death Waltz musical score, also comically brilliant in its absurd complexity. My wife reminded me of some music that her choir performed by ” PDQ Bach” 1. Here’s a delightful such performance:
In the professional world, it’s always good to have a sense of humor with regard to your work, whether it be circuit design or classical music.
As my wife can attest, I’ve been lost in the world of code again. It‘s happened before. This time, I was working on a big project for an NPO for which I do part-time admin work. The project involved updating their WordPress theme. I had not selected the previous theme they were using; it was roughly 4-6 years old, so showing its age in a lot of ways.
The effort was very much a “start from scratch” job. Since web dev is not my day job, my skill set is somewhat limited in the world of PHP and CSS. So I knew that I had to start with a good foundation. In this case, I settled on the amazingly excellent Thematic Framework. The learning curve is non-trivial, but the rewards are huge. I’ve learned a lot about PHP filtering, action hooking, and good design principles in general.
The requirements for the project were really twofold:
So after about a month of work, I launched this morning… or should I say late, late, late last night? I’m very pleased and hope the authors and readers enjoy the new playground. I sure had fun rebuilding it.
My good friend James contacted me with an electronics problem. Seems his daughter’s cell phone was on the fritz. So I agreed to take a look.
She has a Pantech P7000 flip phone, but it stopped charging. I asked a few questions first to understand the nature of the problem. For instance:
James gave me some great info, so I knew what I was in for. My guess was that the charging connector on the phone was going bad. I’ve seen it before. James sent it to me to have a look:
The first thing I did was have a look at the charger, just to test out the verbal info I gathered from James. With a set of helping hands, I probed out the power and ground pins:
I saw a nice steady +5V, so the charger was good. Although its plastic shell was a bit wobbly, it seemed to be functional still. Now, onto tearing apart the phone.
I couldn’t find a tear-down guide online, so I had to figure it out for myself. There’s one obvious screw above the battery compartment:
But I had a hard time finding the other hidden screws. Turns out, there are four hiding underneath a bezel surrounding the keyboard:
Once those are gone, the assembly comes apart rather easily:
Now the back shell can be removed. When I did, the charging connector tumbled right out. So it was no longer even attached to the PCB:
Here is a closeup of the connector:
You can even make out the copper pads still attached to the pins, which have ripped off of the PCB. That’s never a good thing! This type of damage is actually quite common in consumer electronics. This interface isn’t always well designed on most cheaply produced gizmos. And yet, it’s an area that is very high-traffic; in other words, the mating cycles of the charger or serial cable to the phone is always quite high. As a designer, I would prefer these interfaces to be more robust. But then, I’m more interested in lifespan of my electronics, whereas most electronics companies would prefer you buy new products every 6 months. I digress.
At this point, I wasn’t yet sure I could repair this. There was significant damage to the PCB pads (some pads entirely gone!), so I first cleaned off the remaining pads by re-tinning 1:
Next, I cleaned off the pins of the connector. Then I re-placed the connector down on the board and soldered it back on. I got maybe 80% coverage of pins to pads. The number of pins on this connector is maybe 10-12; obviously only 2-4 of which are used for the power charger. So all that was strictly necessary were those sets of pins. As luck would have it, those power pins were still intact. The phone is back to life!
