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....