Cupcakes via Nokia 900, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

this is a macro test shot taken from a Nokia n900! Cupcakes from Cako. N900 from Finland.

Update: second link fixed.

this motherboard grows trees., originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

approximately 6,914,333 trees.

I suspect the reason that they were blocking AIM for so long is that it allows you to send SMS messages for free to any phone number in the US. I think it’s crazy that they have been blocking AIM when blackberry users on their network pay a minimum of about $100/month after taxes for “unlimited” data.

Anyway, I’m glad to no longer have to keep a AIM->Jabber gateway up and running. You might as well get your money’s worth and make up for lost time by adding SMS contacts to your aim buddy list. If you want to send an SMS to 415-123-4567 add a buddy with screenname “+14151234567″ and send an IM. This should work for all US mobile numbers.

The Canon 5D is rated for 50K+ shots, but they last much longer, and fail after an average of 150K shots.

The Canon 1Ds mkII is rated for 200K+ shots, but actually lasts for 750K shots before shutter failure!

Someone else might find these numbers useful.

Maybe you have spent hours trying to get the devices to connect, only to see a weird “Bluetooth connection starting…” message on your Treo, but nothing else happens. (Caused by connecting to the OBEX RFCOMM channel, not the DUN RFCOMM channel.)

Or maybe you have spent hours trying to figure out why your Treo complains “ERROR” “ERROR” “ERROR” to your Linux box when you send it an AT command. (Caused by connecting to the headset audio RFCOMM channel, not the DUN RFCOMM channel.)

Or maybe you haven’t yet wasted any moments of your rapidly dwindling life on this crap at all and Just Want Things To Work and Don’t Understand Why They Don’t.

If any of this sounds familar, maybe this script, start-bt-modem, may help.

You will need to save it to your local disk, and edit it to replace the “aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff” with your phone’s Bluetooth address. To find this, go to your Treo’s Bluetooth application, and change the “Visible” dropdown to “Temporary.” Then on your Linux box, run “hcitool -i hci0 scan” – your phone’s Bluetooth address should appear.

You also need to already have paired your phone with your computer before running the script. To do this, I suggest making your computer discoverable and doing the scan from your Treo, rather than the other way around. Probably the easiest way on your Linux box is to use the GUI tools for this. Look for a weird-looking B in a dark blue oval on your menu bar (aka panel). If it isn’t there, you can try running ‘bluetooth-applet’ from a terminal. (This is part of the bluez-gnome 0.8 package on my machine). Right-click on the panel Bluetooth icon, choose “Preferences”, select “Visible and connectable for other devices”, and click “Close.” Then you will need to go to the Bluetooth application on your Treo, click “Setup Devices”, click “Trusted Devices”, click “Add Device”, click on your computer’s name, and click “Okay”. You’ll go through the pairing process – your Treo will display a number – make sure you enter the same number on your Linux box when the dialog box pops up. Then you should be set.

Finally, you will need to run the script as root – for example, ‘sudo sh ./start-bt-modem’. If all goes well, you should see some IP addresses appear after about 30 seconds.

I guess if you don’t use Verizon, you might also have to edit that “#777″ that appears at the bottom of the script.

Paul called Miele this morning at about 8:45. They did some tests over the phone and said they would have to send a technician out to look at it. After lunch, I got a call Miele saying that they could send someone by in and hour. At 2pm or so, a Miele technician named Glenn shows up, hooks up some debugging equipment, carefully pulls out the dishwasher, unclogs the circulation pump, puts it back together, and it works! Elapsed time from frustrated customer support call to happy customer: about 6 hours! Yay! I think I got lucky because someone had canceled their appointment so they fit me in right way, but still.. yay! So much better than dealing with AppleCare or Blue DoubleCross.

To top it off, Glenn explained a lot about how the Miele worked (I had no idea), and tweeked the software to increase the fill level and water temperature so we can run it on economy mode and still get super-clean dishes. This is like taking your computer to a Linux hacker who hooks you up with a custom distro to get more reliable network connections. Or like taking your car to a gearhead who reprograms the ECU to give you an extra 50HP. Our dishwasher now runs GlennOS. Awesome.

If you care, the clogged circulation pump (error code F14) was suspected to be caused by water drying in the the machine after testing at the factory in Germany. Apparently German water is very hard, and it hadn’t drained completely before shipping (it arrived at our house still full of water), so it left residue in the circ pump.

Here is Zara inspecting the dishwasher (the cabinet work is not done yet):

Here is Paul, who did a weekend’s worth of install work, and the inside of the dishwasher:

This dishwasher connects to the cold water supply, and heats the water depending on what the selected cycle requires. Connecting to the cold instead of hot water supply adds an extra 10-15 minutes to the roughly 2 hour normal cycle, but increases efficiency.

To add a second line to our cold water supply, we replaced the shut-off valve under the sink with a dual 1/2″ to 2 x 3/8″ shut-off valve made by BrassCraft:

If you have 1/2″ unthreaded copper pipe coming into your house, and you need to attach a 1/2″ threaded fitting, you need one of these 5/8″ compression to 1/2″ pipe thread unions. The 5/8″ fits over the unthreaded 1/2″ copper with a compression fitting, and then you can just screw the shut-off valve onto the other side of the union. The fine folk at Cole Hardware helped us find this elusive adapter, shown here covered in teflon tape.

We hope the dish robot likes its new home in our kitchen! Thanks to Ken, Steve, and Paul from helping get it installed, and thanks to Glenn for Miele for making it work!

I have a feeling I wouldn’t notice the blinky light on some of my plants though (because they’re tucked away in a corner)…but if they also made a small beeping noise when they’re thirsty, they would definitely get watered.

Still, it’s a great idea!

Looking around for help resulted in some pointers to this Canon FTP site, but it never responded. Digging a little further turned up this useful page, mostly in Japanese, but if (like me) you don’t read Japanese, you can find the files you need by searching the page for the file sizes. The two files that you need for the iP6700D are:

cnijfilter-common-2.60-3.i386.rpm

which you can find by searching the page for “24,410 byte”, and

cnijfilter-ip6600d-2.60-4.i386.rpm

which you can find by searching the page for “2,054,347 byte“.

Download these two files, install them as root with ‘rpm -ivh cnijfilter-common-2.60-3.i386.rpm cnijfilter-ip6600d-2.60-4.i386.rpm’, and you should be able to find the new driver in the GUI printer config tool, system-config-printer.

Incidentally, it looks like the source RPMs are there too. Pretty cool!