We finally got a dishwasher! It took some time and work to get it installed, but fortunately we had a lot of help! A couple weeks ago Ken helped remove the old cabinet and Steve wired a new electric outlet. This weekend Paul helped do all the plumbing and install the new cabinet + dishwasher. But when we finally hooked everything up Sunday evening and tried to test it out, the dishwasher flashed a ‘technical fault’ error code. Blah!

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!

Filed under: gadgets, support | 2 Comments
Tagged: dishwasher , how to install a dishwasher , howto , Miele , recommended , shag

When you are building a digital library to provide Universal Access to Human Knowledge, how to you hold all the data?

You start with a few racks of machines to hold the data using redundant storage:

The red boxes are built by Capricorn. Each one is a 1U half-depth low-power server that can hold four 1TB hard drives:

Add a bunch of homemade routers:

And some BigIron: (this thing pushed 6Gb/s today!)

Now you need to power it up:

And cool it down:

And fill it with books:

For some reason, you need a 1980’s-era Connection Machine:

Finally, no Archive is complete without a world-class Linux kernel hacker:

Filed under: archive, photos, tronix | 0 Comments
Tagged: InternetArchive , shag

Bob, Shag and I are trying to move our book scanning hardware to Ubuntu 7.10 - the Gutsy Gibbon. It’s a ridiculous process, and our hardware is crap. Here are some notes:

• chai:20 (4:20) - Started up the installer app on the live cd. Unfortuantely the screen rez is 800×600, so we can’t see the important back/next/ok buttons on the bottom of the installer panel. What kind of installer requires greater than 800×600 screen rez?
• chai:23 - Somehow, by logging the Live CD user out and fucking with the screen rez, we got the screen to display a larger screen res, but we can’t see the entire desktop on our screen. Moving the mouse around seems to pan the desktop, which would kinda work, if we could see the mouse cursor.
• chai:25 - We are asked for the timezone, and San Francisco isn’t one of the available options. Los Angeles is. However, we opt to move to La Paz.
• chai:30 - It is now officially time for chai.
• chai:40 - We have found that starting a lot of xeyes processes lets us estimate where the invisible mouse cursor should be. There are fifty eyeballs on our screen
• chai:45 - Bob starts playing minesweeper
• chai:48 - Someone figures out that this version of xeyes lets us resize the window, so there is a GIANT EYEBALL staring at me
• chai:50 - Installation done, rebooting!
• Mouse works after reboot! Now to try and scan books!
  

Filed under: all talk, archive, bobslobster, no code | 2 Comments
Tagged: shag , ubuntu , xeyes