I have a 10 year old Phantom that has worked great for all of these years, but its a little old and it can’t get in small places. The roomba works awesome in picking up dust, hair, etc, but I knew I was missing the deep dirt.
So I ordered an ElextroLux EL 7055A”>ElectroLux EL 7055A from Amazon. I had bought one of these for my mother for xmas and she loves it - Lightweight, great cleaning, self cleaning filters, easy to use.
It arrives yesterday, I put it together in under 5 minutes and vacuum the living room. The powered head takes off and you have to work to pull it back, because it is so strong.
The canister is half full of powered dust. Yes, I had roombaed that morning. The stuff the Electrolux got was exactly what I was looking for - the deep, well ground in stuff. No hair, etc - The Roomba had done its job.
Due to the canister/head design, I can easily use the Electrolux on the stairs. 5 stairs, half canister of dirt. Yuck.
if you need to stand it up, just turn the handle 90 degrees to the left and the hose won’t pull it over. In the middle of a clean and want to use the duster? No problem - press the off button on the handle, detach the handle from the wand/head, attach the duster (its right on the handle) and off you go.
The upholstery tool shed from the first use and the red fabric is falling apart - I will contact the company about a replacement. However it got most of the hair off the couch (little white cat hair) except those stubbornly woven into the fabric.
Now to see how long this little wonder-vac functions, but for now, wow, its nice knowing that an entire grocery bag of fine dust is no longer in this house.
I’ve used SoniCare and Oral B’s for awhile, both effective and pricey. I’ve also used 99 cent toothbrushes, changing once a month for cleanliness.
I used to toss my old toothbrushes away but now I have seen the light.
I have nine old toothbrushes under the sink. Don’t use these if you ever visit.
Why am I keeping my old disposables?
Clean the SoniCare - The SoniCare can get gross down inside the base unit. An old toothbrush is the perfect tool for getting in there and cleaning it out.
Clean the couch - Did you or your child spill chocolate candy bar on your couch and smoosh it in? No need for chemicals, break out an old toothbrush, wash it, add a little water and the bristles will lift the candy out with a little swirling action.
Clean the sink - Ever had that grime build up around the basin where the grout is missing? A toothbrush will pull that out just fine.
Clean the faucet! The same goes for the base around the faucet. Or how about those cheap plastic handles with the inserts to hide the mounting screw? The toothbrush will get all of that gunk out.
Clean the soap dispenser - Do you have a refillable liquid soap dispenser? Know how the soap dries and gums up around the actuator, under the pump head etc? Again, your friendly neighborhood toothbrush will clean that right up.
Speaking of SoniCare, Kathryn gave me a great tip - Remove the hood from the head and put both the hood and the head (ok that sounds perverted) into the dishwasher. Not only will your SoniCare toothbrush be super clean, it’ll be disinfected by the boiling water. Just don’t put the base unit in the dishwasher
Since I had gotten some nice comments from random people whom I didn’t know, I decided to post my rebuttal on the iTunes scuttle to digg.com.
After several hours, there were about 20 diggs. That is what I expected. Elizabeth and I then went out to Gresham to look at the Honda Fit and when I got home, I had many more comments to approve and over 1,000 diggs!
I even got an email from my ISP saying they had blocked my domain because the Wordpress PHP was killing the server. Ooops.
I want to say thanks to all for both the comments here and on the digg.com article. There are many I agree with, many I don’t and that’s just how it should be.
Thank you all for responding and discussing this delicate issue!
USC makes me fill out this interactive PDF for expenses. Preview does not handle these, and the damned PDF has 0s in place, so I can’t really edit it unless I buy PDFPen and put blanks over the 0s.
So I download Acrobat Reader. Excuse me, I download the Acrobat Reader Downloader. Install that. That then downloads Acrobat Reader. Install that.
Open this form. It warns me that I cannot save my changes and I must print to paper and file it. So I make my changes, choose Print and using the PDF menu in the print dialog, choose “Save as PDF”
Now to preface, this works in any, any, any OS X application that supports printing.
Until today.
Adobe patched that nice little button and put up a dialog that said “You can’t save this way -> use File menu save”
Of course they had already told me that won’t work.
So John Warnock’s paperless office is forcing me to print to paper. Yes, thats right. I receive an electronic form, fill it out electronically, which updates the subtotals and totals electronically, then to email back I have to print to paper and scan
How ironic.
How crappy.
I’ll just take a screen shot. Thanks, Adobe.
Update: Barry told me to send this to Adobe, so I filed a bug against Reader:
The set has been on for about 5 hours and we can hear the fans now. Am not sure we should be hearing the fans in a 71 degree room after 5 hours of use. Am going to check into it.
Its a low to medium hum and it colors the audio from my center speaker.
Wow. The set arrived on time from Video Only today. The delivery guys were quick, made sure it worked and took off.
I immediately adjusted the basic settings to get rid of the sharpness and overbright out of the box settings and it looks incredible, even without ISF calibration.
I watched some ESPN and noticed the “ticker tape noise” but its not a big deal.
I played Elebits, Rayman and Madden on the Wii. All look great and I did not notice any game lag. I used the Rayman Dance game as a test of that.
I watched some of The Incredibles with my Samnsung upscaling DVD player and it looks fantastic.
I took some photos and a comparison photo with the old set: Look
Well I took the plunge and bought a Mitsubishi 57732 today. Its a 57″ DLP rear projection set which will take up the same space as my current set, but is shorter, which is nice for viewing, but will make playing the Wii more interesting (depending on viewing angle)
I am concerned about RBE (Rainbow Effect) so I got Video Only to give me a 5 day refund policy (30 day in store credit) which was nice of them.
It comes tomorrow and is replacing my TW56X81 which has been a workhorse for 7 years but the power supply is going (has to re-power it on almost every time I turn it off now) and it got reset poorly years ago, so its time.
I wanted to hold out for SED because of RBE and gaming issues, but with the 5 day trial and 1 year no payments/interest, I think its a safe bet.
The floor model looked good - not great, but they split the component signal 800 ways and of course not calibrated.
I’m thinking of skipping ISF and getting myself a Spyder TV so I can tune friend’s sets as well. Comments welcome.
Roxio rejected my $20 Toast Titanium rebate for my DOWNLOADED Toast due to “missing upc proof of upgrade” (even tho I had to supply my old serial number).
I got a nice little postcard in the mail, so i called the rebate center and the dude looked up my rebate and immediately oked it. What a joke. They just reject them now and hope you never respond.
I, like every other microwave oven owner, has had to deal with the buildup of smells in their oven. I clean mine, and will even more now that I’ve gone back to scrubbing sponges thanks to new data showing that nuking a sponge for 2 minutes kills all bacteria in them!
However, thats still not enough to cure that popcorn odor, or last three frozen dinners odor. Enter baking soda.
I use Arm & Hammer refrigerator baking soda (which is just baking soda in a box with open sides to allow more surface area to contact air) in my refrigerator and freezer. It works incredibly well and I replace mine every 3 months or so.
Thus I decided to try a box in the microwave oven as well. I take it out while cooking of course and each time I put it back, I turn it upside down to shake up the baking soda some.
Don’t buy any music from the big four labels. None of it. No iTunes music, no CDs, and best of all, don’t pirate it. Don’t listen to it. Don’t tell your friends about it.
If the RIAA wants Apple to license DRM so they can cram it down our throats even deeper, I say a big “Screw You!” to the RIAA.
Now, is there a site where you can enter a song and find out who will be paid if you buy that song?
In the end, we the consumers control the music business. The sad reality is, we’re all dolts and go along with the crap they feed us just so we can listen to some artist they have deemed worth of their promotion.
Buy only open and free non-big four music. See how they like them Apples.
While it sucks eating soup and left overs, I can tell you that I love how quiet my neighborhood is. Not a peep outside, no road noise, nothing. Its amazing how noisy the city is with just background noise - And I live in the burbs!
I’m staying in - Watching the video of all of the cars getting crunched, no thank you.
How cool is that? I really appreciate it and it works great! My external laptop drives enclosure is being repaired so I had not been able to backup to it for a couple of weeks. I popped this cable onto the end of the bare drive, set it on the desk, plugged into USB and I’m backing up!
A very, very handy utility any geek should have in their arsenal.
So Aperture is happily importing my iPhoto library in the background. I’ll mess with it next week, after this milestone release, but now I can start in earnest with the export SDK on BHE.
The Airport Extreme will be here in February or March sometime. All of you PMUG members be sure to take advantage of your discount at the Beaverton Mac Store!
I have insurance through Allstate. A month ago I used their website to look at my account information and they had to snail mail me a PAK (Personal Authorization Key) for security purposes. Thats fine.
I get the PAK but due to holidays, etc I don’t use it. Yesterday I get an email from Allstate reminding me that they had sent me my PAK, and in the email were two links, both ending in the domain “rsc01.net”
Ok, this is fishy I thought. So I used their website (going there manually) to complain about this.
Lastly, I get an email followup whose links go to rsc01.net, and you can be damned sure my phising plugin for the Mac caught this. Even the “Email us” link is to that domain, and not allstate.com.
Allstate.com’s response:
Please be advised we outsource our email - that is why your email is from rsc01. Allstate does not sell any sort of email address - rsc01 is a trusted source.
And my response:
John I understand this, but you are missing the point. Any customer would be a fool to use those links because the customer has no way to know it is a trusted source.
In this day and age of identity theft it is with sever lack of judgement that Allstate send out emails with some odd domain in the content. At the very least, there should be an allstate.com email address that the outsourcers access, or something.
Please reconsider this policy. It is in very poor judgement to train customers, especially the elderly, that it is ok to click a link from a unknown source.
I’ve been trying to learn regular expressions for years, but never had a good use for them, because the tools that used them were so obscure. Now with TextMate, I have plenty of uses.
In the blogging bundle, the preferences format was:
Blog Name http://www.blogurl.com/
The regular expression for parsing that was:
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\.+)
I’ll break this down, mainly as an exercise for myself (talking helps understanding) and others can chime in. I’ll bold what I am commenting on.
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) - Start at beginning of the line.
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) - Grab at least one character, reluctantly, which means pay attention to the following patterns
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) - Set a variable $1 to whatever is found inside the parenthesis
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) - Find any breaking space (space, tab), one or more of them. 0 and the pattern fails
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) - followed by http
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) - followed by an optional s (the ? means 0 or 1 times)
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) - followed by a colon
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) - followed by a / (/ is a special char, so we need to escape it, with \)
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) - followed by a second /
^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\.+) - followed any any characters, at least one of them
Whew! That is a lot of stuff. Ok, but I wanted to add an optional timeout value, spaces or tabs followed by numbers. Here is what I came up with:
/^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/
/^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/ - Here, I changed the .+, which was overly aggressive, to \S+, which means match any non-space characters, one or more
/^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/ - followed by white space, 0 or more. Has to be 0 or more, or a line without a timeout would fail
/^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/ - followed by one or more digits
/^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/ - capture those into a third variable
/^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/ - Specify that we can have either 0 or 1 of the digit patterns
Thats it. Now both of the following lines are valid blog entry lines:
