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.

The shortcomings of the 1&1-based service:

• No IMAP access to e-mail. 1&1 only provides POP access (no SSL, either). POP is no good for multiple points of presence (checking mail from a phone would interfere on the “headless” downloading of mail at home).
• Very limited number of subdomains. Ridiculously, 1&1 only provides for 5 subdomains per 1&1 account (not per domain, per 1&1 account).

The above was written before Google Apps For Your Domain became widely available. 1&1’s $8.99 is still the cheapest registration out there – it gets you one year of registration with private WHOIS registration included. Other closely-priced offerings charge extra for the private WHOIS registration. With Google Apps, e-mail and DNS services can be separated from the low-cost 1&1 domain registration:

• MX records can be pointed to Google Apps
• DNS can then be delegated elsewhere to any of the numerous FreeDNS services (I will likely select http://freedns.afraid.org/, Namecheap, or maybe EveryDNS – recommendations are welcome).

Today we talk about configuring a home Linux system for use with Google Apps for e-mail in a way that still provides for web-based access to the same e-mail account (home download of e-mail shouldn’t cause mail to appear as “read” by the webmail client).

Getmail

I like getmail for mail download. It is an easy-to-configure alternative to fetchmail. Google provides the bare-bones “Configuring other mail clients”, but leaves it to you to figure out the exact configuration. Create a $HOME/.getmail/getmailrc:

[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
port = 993
username = username@gmail.com
password = #####
mailboxes = ('I',)

[destination]
...

[options]
read_all = False
delivered_to = False
delete = True

The interesting bits:

• I set up the Gmail account with a filter that adds the “I” label to all incoming e-mail (the e-mail I want to eventually download with getmail).
• getmail is configured to download mail from the “I” folder (Gmail labels are IMAP folders).
• getmail is configured to delete read mail. Gmail treats an IMAP delete as an “unlabel” operation (mail isn’t actually deleted unless it is moved to the “Trash” folder.

The result:

• getmail can download mail all day.
• The Gmail web interface can be used to read mail without confusing getmail about what has been seen and what has not been seen. Furthermore, normal Gmail filters can be used independently of getmail (as long as the magic “I” labeling is not interfered with).
• As a side-effect, the presence of the “I” labels is a visible indicator of getmail activity.

Postfix

For outbound mail (SMTP), most Linux (and Mac OS X) systems will use postfix. ISPs will direct you to use their SMTP servers. This is fine, but one loses the nicety that sent mail will not appear in the Gmail “Sent Mail” folder. Getting this kind of clean integrated “Sent Mail” behavior requires that outbound mail go through Google’s SMTP servers.

In /etc/postfix/main.cf:

relayhost = [smtp.gmail.com]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl/sasl_password
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_tls_CAfile = /etc/ssl/certs/Thawte_Premium_Server_CA.pem

In /etc/postfix/sasl/sasl_password:

[smtp.gmail.com]:587 username@gmail.com:password

Update and restart postfix:

sudo postmap /etc/postfix/sasl/sasl_password
sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart

The next project is to get DNS set up somewhere to work around 1&1’s pesky 5-subdomain limit.

• PuTTY/iTerm and/or urlview/urlscan give me easy access to hyperlinks.
• Attachment viewing is a keystroke away.
• LDAP integration at work provides tab-completion on names and e-mail addresses.

In all other respects – mail filtering (procmail), editing, quick scanning, etc. – mutt wins hands down.

The one deficiency is a decent search facility (a la Gmail); mutt “out of the box” only supports folder-based search, and doesn’t provide a mechanism for searching all mail.

Enter mu – an indexing system for Maildir-based e-mail. Indexing itself is pretty fast: at home (AMD64 1.0GHz), it took about 8 minutes to index 109857 messages (1.1GB) going back to 1993. Being Maildir-based, mu can incrementally update itself with just the new messages simply by examining file mtimes.

The rub is that all my mail was stored in mbox-format (maildir wasn’t invented yet); I had to use mb2md to convert all the mboxes over to maildirs.

Maildir’s one-file-per-message scheme is nice for lots of things because applications can create a separate set of directories with links to the actual messages to implement features like search results (such as done with mu) and tagging (a.k.a. “virtual folders”).

The maildir format is bad for things like backup and other applications where it would be convenient to have fewer files to manipulate. Individually compressing many small files loses any benefit from compressing a large concatenated stream of files. Maildir filenames contain a ‘:’ character, which makes them un-copyable to a Windows machine (such as for backup).

Pause while laughter subsides.

Go2

Coca-Cola

Pepsi

I normally don’t drink any soda, but curiosity got the better of me, and I had to investigate.

Ugh.

My conclusion is that if you’re going to drink cola (and you shouldn’t), you should just shell out the extra 30 cents per two-liter bottle and get the real thing (whether it’s Coke or Pepsi).

I recently received an Amazon Kindle as a gift from thoughtful family members. The good stuff:

• The display is very nice to read in good light (better than paper, I think).
• The form factor is quite good. One-handed reading is a joy (and easier than with a thick paperback), and very doable in crowded environments (like public transit).
• Battery life is good (up to two weeks of commute-time WiFi-disabled use).
• The Kindle Leather Cover has a very nice feel to it that is superior to a plain paperback.
• Multi-book storage is great. I used to have the problem of finishing a book on my way in to work, leaving myself nothing to read on the way home. The Kindle makes that problem go away.

The bad stuff (and these are really mostly minor):

• The lack of obvious weatherproofing doesn’t leave me with a feeling of confidence. A paperback will easily handle a wait for the train in morning drizzly fog. I’m not so sure the Kindle is up to that task.
• In dim light, I think paper is easier to read (although things are already quite difficult to read at this point).
• Sprint and AT&T don’t really have anything to fear as far as data traffic is concerned. Book-purchase traffic is probably paid for by Amazon. Web browsing on the Kindle is just way too painful. The bandwidth itself is fine, but the display refresh rate is so slow as to be unusable. Kindles will not be replacing iPhones for portable web browsing any time soon. The only interesting terms-of-service-violating hack I can think of would be using the Kindle as some kind of tethering device.
• The slow display also makes page-flipping painful. Occasionally I will want to flip backwards to earlier pages to reread a paragraph or two. With a paperback, that is no problem. With the Kindle, flipping pages is almost painfully slow (1-2s per “page turn”). I really don’t see this as a viable textbook replacement.
• You lose some of the fun of a colorful book cover. It used to be interesting to see what other commuters were reading, but these days, as I see more people using Kindles and iPhones as reading devices, I think all reading commuters appear very homogeneous.
• At some point in time, my grubby hands will leave my white-plastic Kindle smeared with unattractive grubby little prints.

The economics of a Kindle purchase are quite compelling for avid readers of new books (Kindle e-books are typically priced at $9.99 or lower), but they are not as compelling for readers like me who buy used books or who frequent the public library.

The slow display is occasionally annoying in the rare page-flipping sessions, but otherwise, the form factor and multi-book storage easily overcome these minor shortcomings to make the Kindle a real winner.

The ergonomics are great:

• The trackball form factor means a fixed footprint. This is important for keyboard tray users, since “footprint space” is more limited.
• The “marble” design means manipulation with many fingers or the whole hand, and clicking with a more natural “grasping” motion with the biggest, strongest finger: the thumb. This is better than other so-called trackballs with smaller balls designed to be manipulated with just the thumb or one finger (and with buttons that require the traditional clicking motion).
• The symmetric design means rightie or lefty use. “Lefty” use is especially important for users of traditional keyboards with numeric keypads to the right.
• The smaller buttons are programmable. I program them as “PgUp” and “PgDn” keys, which provides equivalent functionality to, and faster use than, the small “scroll wheel” buttons found on many mice (which are also very ergonomically bad).

The only bad thing about these trackball mice is that they are bad for gaming (which I no longer do).

I had a problem with mine a few days ago (plugged into a MacBookPro) where the mouse cursor would just freeze at seemingly random times, with recovery requiring an unplug/replug of the mouse, or sometimes even a reboot of the whole computer.

With a coworker, we quickly narrowed the problem down to the mouse itself (we swapped mice and the problem moved with the mouse). Furthermore, the coworker discovered that recovery was much more conveniently achievable by simply popping out the “marble” and putting it back in.

This was almost acceptable, but I went ahead and called Logitech Phone Support to see about getting a replacement, just to see what would happen. The support representative told me he hadn’t heard of my problem before, but he gave me some “device reset” instructions:

1. Unplug the mouse from the computer.
2. Hold down both buttons for 90 seconds.
3. Release both buttons.
4. Plug the mouse back into the computer.

Voila! I haven’t had any more mysterious problem since! The tech support experience was great:

• After navigating a phone tree to enter my mouse model and operating system, I was speaking to a representative within 15 seconds.
• I did not get the standard script of rebooting the computer, unplugging/replugging the mouse, etc.

My only gripe is that the device-reset instructions should be available on the product support page; it would have saved all of us a phone call.

This book fails to live up to the gun-porn action suggested by the two balaclava-clad machine-gun-toting troopers on the yellow-on-red book cover. As one might guess from the cover, a hostage is taken, and violence ensues. I won’t go into the “plot” because this book is over three years old (2006); “plot” summaries can be easily found elsewhere on the web.

The viewer of this cover might reasonably expect to read lots of text like, oh I don’t know,

The three 9mm rounds fired in rapid succession lifted his body upwards and backwards into the wall; he fell and settled, sitting, like a life-sized Kevlar-wearing rag doll.

(Yes, I wrote that myself, on the spot.)

The failed promise is that out of 750 pages, the reader (me, with the protagonist) encounters only three pages’ worth of shots fired in anger, none fired by the protagonist, and none fired at the protagonist.

My (other) gripes about this book:

• The Hostage, at 750 pages, is too inconveniently unwieldy to carry in my commuter bag for my ride to work.
• The garish primary yellow-on-red color scheme draws attention to me. But let’s just say that the ladies don’t walk up to me asking what I’m reading.

After finally completing this book, I did some research and found that Griffin’s style is to highlight the behind-the-scenes bureaucratic and logistical gymnastics that must precede the expected Kevlar-wearing-rag-doll-yielding operations. Instead of gun-porn, we get pages and pages of West Wing-style dialogue and bureaucratic shenanigans, which people apparently pay good money to read.

Ingredients:

• One ripe avocado (I prefer to err on the side of almost-ripe rather than over-ripe).
• Extra virgin olive oil.
• Fresh sea salt.
• Ground/powdered chili pepper.
• Other spices to taste (paprika, etc.).

Preparation:

• Cut avocado in half.
• Scoop out of rind, cut into thick slices (either latitudinally or longitudinally is fine), place on plate.
• Slightly separate the slices from each other. (The slices will inconveniently stick to each other; there is no need to go overboard with this, it is for the next step.)
• Drizzle olive oil over the avocado slices.
• Add salt, pepper, and spices to taste.

Eat with fork.

If the avocado turns out to be too ripe for fork slices, it can also be mashed like guacamole, spiced, and spread on toast.

One-liners like that draw me into a movie.

Unfortunately, neither the dialogue nor the Frank Miller styling could save this movie. The plot was simple yet somehow confusing. The action was ho-hum. And the styling managed to look like a Frank Miller copycat even though it was the real deal.