Dyson DC25

We sprang for a Dyson DC25 ($400) to replace our old Eureka 5843AZ Litespeed ($100 or so in 2003, now discontinued). The old Eureka was fine for the two rugs in our one-bedroom apartment, but it wasn’t up to the task of keeping those two rugs and two carpeted bedrooms clean enough for an active nearly-one-year-old crawler.

We purchased from Max-Vacuum because their prices were competitive with the big “A”, and because they have very easy-to-read buying guides and comparison charts to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the various models.

Assembly was easy. It was no surprise (unfortunately) that the vacuum dust canister was nearly full after running it through the apartment, despite having just vacuumed a week ago.

The good:

• The vacuum is pretty quiet, as far as vacuum cleaners go.
• The cleaning head (with the brushbar turned “on”) is somehow able to go over our rug tassels without sucking them into the brushbar and stopping the vacuum. Nifty!
• Light weight. Carrying the thing around between rooms is an easy one-handed job.
• The “ball” really is more maneuverable (similar to using a swivel mop or a swivel-head “Swiffer”), although the marketing-speak for “turn at the flick of a wrist” would be an exaggeration.

The bad:

• There doesn’t seem to be a hook on the handle for holding the power cord up off the floor when the vacuum is in use; left on its own, the power cord just drags on the floor. For $400, there ought to be some kind of hook to hold the power cord up. Even the $100 Eureka has a hook for the power cord. I must be missing something, because this really is a design failure.
• The dust canister is small. The DC25 is smaller and lighter than the other Dyson models, but it was kind of surprising that it was already half-full after cleaning our small 2BR apartment (or maybe the apartment was just really dirty).
• The dust canister empties through the bottom. This means that after emptying, there will inevitably be little clumps of stuff clinging to the bottom of the canister, because they are made of nasty grimy dust, or because of static electricity. If the canister emptied from the top, these clumps would just fall back into the canister. Instead, these clumps just fall back onto the floor.

Only time will tell if this purchase is worth it. We lived with the $100 cheapie for 6.5 years, so Dyson will have to last us 26 years.

Home is never having to leave home (except for groceries and work), having a laundry machine downstairs, and a mailbox at the front door. Having finally gotten a small stackable washer/dryer in our garage (my first craigslist purchase ever), I set about improving our mailbox situation.

In San Francisco houses, it is common for the mailbox to be in the garage (the mail carrier drops your mail into a mail slot facing the outside). In a good setup, this mailslot is actually in the wall next to the garage door, and the resident has a box on a table or something right behind the mailslot. In our house, the mailslot is in the garage door itself.

The mailslot-in-the-garage-door setup isn’t a problem for most people, because it is very common in space-cramped San Francisco for people to park on the driveway or on the street, and to use the garage for storage. People who use their garage for storage can just stick a box on a table behind the mailslot.

We use our garage to keep one car, so that isn’t an option. There are a few solutions:

• When driving home, open the garage door (with the automatic garage door opener). Peer over the top of the dashboard and look for mail on the ground. If you see any mail, get out of the car, pick up the dirty mail and put it somewhere, then come back out, get in the car, and drive in to the garage. Or, if you don’t see any mail, drive in to the garage, and accidentally drive over the mail you didn’t see. Pick up the mail, dust off the tire treads from the envelopes, and hope that no CDs or anything were broken.
• Tape/nail an old cardboard box (like from Amazon) behind the mailslot. This mailbox catches the mail and keeps it from getting dirty. When the garage door opens, the mailbox rises to the ceiling and turns 90° sideways; the mail falls out and flutters down to the ground. You will see the mail for sure as it flutters down to the ground, so you won’t drive over it and break anything. If it is a windy and/or rainy day, the mail can flutter outside and get wet. Also, you still have to get out of the car, get the mail and put it somewhere, and come back out and drive in.
• 

  Build a better mailbox. I nailed an old Amazon box behind the mailslot, but I first trimmed one of the top boxflaps and only nailed the boxflap to the garage door; the boxflag acts as a hinge and leaves the mailbox free to swing at an angle (maybe 30° from vertical) when the garage door is up and open. The box is strong enough to hold a reasonable amount of mail without tearing away from the garage door. The angle is sufficient to keep the mail from falling out of the box down to the ground. The box is light enough such that if the nails fail, or if the flap breaks, it won’t kill anyone who might be standing underneath.

My home mailbox technology has steadily progressed up through the third stage described above. I hereby release the design described and pictured above to the world at large, license-, royalty-, and patent-free.

Receiving broadcast HDTV requires an antenna. The conventional wisdom states that an outdoor antenna is better than an indoor antenna, and that an indoor antenna is better than no antenna at all. In all cases, higher is better.

Being a renter all of my TV-owning life, installing an outdoor rooftop antenna has always been out of the question. So my HDTV journey began with the fancy-looking $40 “Silver Sensor” antenna, but it was not up to the task of receiving signals in downtown Boston, surrounded by high-rise buildings. The $20 Radio Shack 15-1868 was the next antenna I tried, and it served me well in Boston and on the San Francisco Bay Area peninsula.

However, when I moved into San Francisco, the 15-1868 failed to keep up with the more challenging climate and terrain (ocean, fog, hills, lower 2nd-story location, and increased distance to the broadcast towers). Still renting, an outdoor antenna is still out of the question, and despite living in a house, I have no attic. Memories of Pringles cans and aluminum foil came to the rescue, and one tin-foil hat later, we’re back in business. Here is the before picture:

Here is the after picture, with a close-up of the tin-foil-hatted antenna. A bonus decor-friendly side-effect of the improved reception is that the rabbit ears do not need to be as fully extended:

It’s been 3½ years since I had a shower curtain; I’ve always had an apartment with a bathtub door. Our new place has no doors, so we’re back to curtains. We have a lightweight fabric shower liner that we use instead of the normal vinyl curtains; it means we can just throw it in the washer every so often and not worry about mildew buildup. The problem is that the light weight means it is particularly susceptible to the annoying “shower curtain effect” (the phenomenon where the shower curtain billows inwards when the shower spray is running).

There are two widely accepted causes of this “shower curtain effect”:

• Hot shower water heats the air, which then rises. Cold air rushes in via path of least resistance to take its place. This path of least resistance is typically under the bottom of the curtain, leading to inward billowing. This is not the only factor, because it has been shown that cold-water shower spray still exhibits the shower-curtain effect (albeit a reduced effect).
• The shower spray has some kind of thermodynamic effect that generates a force normal to the direction of spray, which happens to be inwards of the shower curtain.

Armed with this knowledge, there are a few tried-and-true solutions:

• Replace the curtain with a glass door. I’m a renter; this option is not available to me.
• Install magnets or weights at the bottom of the curtain. Most curtains come with magnets sewn into the bottom corners, or with sand sewn into the bottom hems of the curtain. Magnets only work if the tub is metal (ours isn’t). Weights don’t seem to work that well, or at least the weights in our liner aren’t sufficiently heavy to prevent the shower curtain effect.
• Don’t draw the curtain all the way closed; leave more room at the side for the cold air to enter. This actually works, is reversible (no security-deposit-affecting modifications to the bathroom are required), and is cheap (no purchase required). The downside is that cold air is entering via the side, nullifying most of the motivation for a hot-water shower.
• Add an outer curtain. Froofy shower curtain/liner sets are available at upscale housewares establishments like Target. The outer curtain typically hangs low to the ground (maybe slightly lower than the inner liner), and serves to block air, as well as to provide some aesthetics to the bathroom decor. The inner liner serves to keep the water from getting out. This has the reversibility and cheapness properties of the preceding solution, without the disadvantage of cold-air entry.

We had an extra vinyl curtain (new) that the landlord had left for us; I just installed that on the outside as an outside curtain, while using our nice lightweight fabric liner on the inside as a liner. Voilà: no more shower-curtain effect.