Install Rosewill-RNX-MiniN1-RWLD-110001 usb network adapter in Ubuntu

Today, I received the usb Rosewill wireless adapter that i ordered, and plugged into my Ubuntu laptop, only to find that it did not work.

After finding out on blogs and the rosewill website, it seems that you have to compile the driver for your distro. However Rosewill makes it really easy, and provides a script that does all the work for you. All you have to do is download the driver zip file, unzip it and run the install script.

here is the link to the Rosewill 8192cu driver version 3.3.0_2971

1) download the driver
2) unzip
3) on the command line make the install.sh executable (chmod +x install.sh)
4) run the executable. (./install.sh)

Black and Decker Toaster cable is overheating

This is an easy one. (yes i know its kind of disgustingly dirty...)

Our faithful Black n Decker (TRO570) easy clean toaster's power cord got burned. It turned out to be a very good toaster oven, since we've had it for over lets say ten years....
But, recently, the toaster's cord got really hot every time after we used it and over time, the cord burned and the cable was exposed. I think its just the heavy use that has made the cord fragile, and pulling the cord when is hot is not a good idea...
so we started looking for the replacement, only to find out that today, they are even more cheaply made than lets say ten years ago and they are far more expensive for a decent toaster broiler.

So, i decided to replace the cord instead and save some bucks at the same time. For the cord replacement i used a generic computer power cord, since i have tons of them lying around. (not literal)

I began by cleaning the toaster, which is no longer easy to do ;). Then i opened it up, and looked at the cables and mechanism, since i don't want to mess anything up.

It turned out to be super easy, the power cord is attached to the toaster with sliding connectors. The brass one corresponds to the hot wire and the other one is the neutral wire.

So i cut up the computer cable, and found a black, white and green cables. then I did a quick lookup of the color coding. black is the hot wire, white is the neutral and green is ground. (standard US color coding)

so i cut up the original sliding connectors from the original cable and soldered then to the corresponding cables.

then connected them to the toaster and tested it out, before putting everything together and voila, everything works as expected.

wifi radio

TTL header to adapter to serial com port

A while back, i found this project on line, where this guy (MightyOhm), teaches you how to make a wifi radio, out of a wireless router. It is a very interesting project, me and my son thought that we could do it just as a summer project. so we went and got this cheap ASUS router, open it up and solder the serial headers on the board. We didn't realise that the computer can not directly communicate with the router since the voltage levels are different, but as expected the mightyohm site tells you all about it and even which cable adapter to get. After connecting the router to the pc we could see the router's output on a computer terminal.

The hardest part was to compile the image and flash it after we got he OpenWrt Source.( basically over writing the custom firmware OpenWRT to a ASUS WL-520GU Wireless Router ) Which in Leiman's terms becomes a Linux box. 

After the OpenWRT is installed, we can add programs to the router like a music player client and server; to play music via a usb sound card connected to some cheap pc speakers that i had laying around. The sound card is listed in the website as well. It is a pretty awesome project, like i said. 

The last part of the project which is not required since you can use your computer terminal to view the song information. For this we used an Arduino UNO board with a lcd screen. there are plenty of sample sketches to run on the Arduino uno with lcd, but you have to take in account that some are for 4 line lcd and there are some fancy sketches out there that can scroll the text if it is bigger than the screen size. we didn't connect any potentiometers (knobs) to the arduino to control volume or change stations, since we got a little lazy at the end.

These are pictures and video of our attempt to make this project.  It was an amazing experience, one always wonder what can be done with this little router, and usb port... and my son and i had fun making it and this it is a cool project.

30 inch Cooktop replacement

The close to 10 years that we have been in our house, we have used the existing kenmore cooktop, which seemed ok when we moved in... over the years, a knob broke, and the grease, and dirt became very difficult to clean. we just couldn't wait to get rid of it and buy a new one.

 This is the disgusting view of our Kenmore cooktop, missing knob, and the dirt of 10 years or cooking.... plus what ever time the previous owner had it for....


Last weekend, we went to Sears, to check out the prices and the models they had available, so that we can buy during black friday. However, we found this cooktop, which was an open item. So we decide to take it, and give it a shot. The new cooktop is Whirlpool G7CE3034XB , its a radian heat type, so the heating elements are under the glass, and they do get pretty hot i must say. it does have a temperature warning light that tells you when its "save" to handle. The knobs are dishwasher save, and the glass is easy to clean.

 

You may have noticed that even though the cooktop is supposedly the same size as the old one (30"). the new cooktop is about 3/4 of a inch bigger than the old one. So we had to cut the counter about that much to fit it in and because of the tile, i used one of those expensive diamond blades on the skill saw.

Kindle fire tablet

Today we received the Kindle Fire, Full Color 7" Multi-touch Display, Wi-Fi , and we had a chance to look at it.  its fast, pretty responsive and light, at only 7 inch. There are two speakers in the side. The tablet runs android operating system,  but has a custom skin from amazon. 

Speakers

Back logo

 The amazon premier movies comes with the kindle fire, so you are able to watch movies free. For this test i selected Ip man, the loading took a long while (longer than netflix) and then the movie started, it looked grainy, and somewhat pixelated, but that may be due to our limited speed.

can not browse windows network after Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade

I recently upgraded one of my computers at home with Ubuntu 11.10 (the latest and greatest), just to find that i was not able to browse my NAS from my home network. It seems that in Ubuntu 11.10 the samba network rules/properties do not work the same as in previous versions of Ubuntu.

the fix consists of editing the /etc/hosts file and appending the address and machine name to the file.
in this format:
<IP ADDRESS> <Machine Name>
example:
192.168.0.100 Ubuntu-desktop

this seemed to fix the problem for me where, I was not able to browse my home network.
luckily, I have my router setup with reserved IP addresses for my devices, for example. the Apple TV, NAS, printer, etc.

but if you have dynamically assigned addresses then this fix might not work.

Kenmore Elite Dishwasher

My Kenmore dishwasher has worked diligently for the last 8-9 years without complain. However, in the last month or so, my little helper has not been washing the dishes well. The dishes on the top rack never get washed, and the ones on the bottom sometimes are dirty as well.
After a little 'research', it has come to my attention that it may be a simple part to be replaced. The symptoms are very consisten on all other websites and forums where people talk about the dishwasher problems....the top rack of dishes is not washed and food is allover the place.

I disassembled the interior of the dishwasher to see if some parts are broken or missing, and i found two things wrong, that seem simple enough to fix.

The first one is a part called "the chopper", which was broken. The Chopper consists a metal grill and blade with a plastic shaft. The clip that retains the metal part to the shaft can no longer hold the parts on the shaft since the plastic on the shaft was eroded probably due to heavy use. Because of this part not doing its job,  some food was stuck to the chopper grill, clogging the supply of water to the upper part of the dishwasher.

The other problem was that the spinner at the top of the dishwasher was missing completely. (but somewhat not significant)

I went online to this place were they have lots of appliance parts and i check out the parts that i want to replace, then total comes out to a fraction this with shipping and tax included. Now what remains is to replace the parts and test. not bad considering that i thought about replacing the damn thing all together for about $300+.

Replacing the parts was a snap but it took me an additional 30 mins because i decided to replace the door gasket as well.

The door gasket had been showing signs of wear and tear. One problem that i found was that once replaced the door would not close, it kept opening by itself. i read some more about this problem on the forums and solved it by soaking the gasket in hot water for about an hour, and putting it in place and i also replace the strike just in case.

In the end, with all the parts replaced, and the door not opening by itself... everything seems back to normal. All that for about $43 total, some patience and spare time.

GoodNAS for movie streaming

I purchased an inexpensive D-Link DNS-321 2-Bay Network Attached Storage in 2008 and installed a couple of 7200 RPM 500 GB Seagate hard drives that i had lying around. I know for a fact that Seagate drives are loud, so at first, I didn't mind the noise of either the Drives and the fan the NAS had. I thought that it was normal for the NAS to try to keep itself cool. But even with ffp installed my NAS would not keep the temperature down and the fan would be running at a high rate with a high pitch noise. I went as far a drilling holes on the NAS to help the very pittifun D-link air intake pull more air into the unit...
Ever since , I've used it to stream movies to a D-Link media player (which was awful), XBOX 360(ok, but many movies did not work, a Western Digital TV(probably the best movie streaming experience except for the interface which sucks),  and most recently an Apple TV2 (good interface, and with some hacks ,plays all movies now even with iOS5.1).
Just recently, I was running out of storage space and I jumped on a sale for a 2 TB drive. I decided to buy the Western Digital 2 TB Green Drive to replace the 500 GB drives on it. Boy, was it a great surprise! The green drive has made with my little NAS smooth and quiet. First of all, the drive is very quiet (5900 RPM) and keeps itself cool better due to the lower RPM, so the NAS fan is not constantly spinning at a high RPM.
The noise level, overall has dropped significantly. Now, I am very happy with the drive so far; speed is good enough for movie streaming, even in HD. in the future when i again run out of space, i will purchase the same drive to fill the other empty spot.

Apple TV goodness

Just when you think that all is gone, then we get pleasantly surprised... ;)

After feeling disappointed with vanilla Apple TV. I installed a custom version of the atv firmware and XBMC a few months back and had a pretty good setup to watch movies streamed wirelessly from my DNS-321 Network Attached Storage.

Recently, I was tinkering with my Apple TV; I just wanted to install a particular plug-in to listen to music. That is when everything started to go to hell. One thing after another, started to fail, until I decided to reset the atv to factory default.

Right after the reset, I realized itunes had upgraded the firmware along to the latest and greatest release. And when i went to re-flash my custom firmware version, which i had built using the pwnage tool, itunes complained that atv was not eligible for the custom firmware version.

After some preliminary research,I discovered that one tool by firecore.com was able to make a custom image for the current version on my atv. so i went ahead and got the tool, built the image with the latest firmware and tried to flash the atv. Same result. I was starting to get pissed and frustrated. why did i even try to do anything in the first place? of course i tried several times with the same result.

A week went by, and i had not found any solution to my problem.

so, on my day off, i researched some more (and by research i mean googled), and found a solution to the not eligible for requested build error of flashing with my custom image. Apparently, I'm not the only one who tries to do this sort of thing. The solution, involved commenting out the apple server on the host file of the os. "It can not be that simple", I thought. but it turns out, it is that simple.

so after the successfull flash, i went on and ssh to the atv and got greeted with a prompt. So, all that i needed now was to get nitoTV and reinstall all the plugins that i had previously installed.

and, that goes to show me, that patience and knowledge payoff, so for me life is good again....

Child Safe Internet Browsing

As any concerned parent would know there comes the time when we must childproof our computer from explicit content. Children are more and more technology aware. Recently I've been researching what is the easiest way and the most effective way to make the internet safer for my family.

• Take advantage of openDNS content filtering.
• Go to http://www.opendns.com/ and register a free account.
• Go to manage the account for your ip address.
• Choose the filtering level you are most confortable with or customize your own level.
• If you have a router then configure the open DNS ip addresses as your DNS addresses. This configuration will be effective when the computer gets the assigned DNS from the router's DHCP.
• To connect other computer without the filtering you only need to manually assign a different DNS ip address such as google DNS or your ISPs.

• To minimize configurations on several browsers, only use one web browser and install web filtering content add-ons. For example Firefox has some nice add-ons to filter web content. be aware that the add ons sometimes take a few seconds to kick in on the first request. 
• Linkextend
• ProCon Latte

• Use safe searching on your search engine and lock it: many of the popular search engines already provide the save search mode, to protect wondering eyes from explicit search results.

• Google SafeSearch - go to your google preferences page then select the filtering level you want. The google content filtering is pretty effective, it filters images, websites, and text.

• Bing Safe Search - Bing and Yahoo also provide safe search feature, and in a similar manner go to the bing preferences screen and select the appropriate filtering level.

• block explicit content from other sources: sites like YouTube offer a content filtering feature that can be turned on. 

• YouTube - search for the "Safety Mode: Off" link at the bottom of the page. and turn it ON. furthermore if you login you can lock this mode.