Roomba is great, when everything is working right. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work quite right. Some carpets – like the carpet I have in the great room of my house – trigger it’s cliff sensors, causing it to freak out and stop with an ominous tone that sounds somewhat akin to a sad “oh no”. Problems like that are easily solved (put white paper and tape over the cliff sensors), but not all of them are.

Recently, Flomar (my Roomba), has stopped almost immediately into cleaning and asked, rather cheerily, “Please remove and clean Roomba’s brushes!” And so I would open the brush compartment, pull them out and realize….. they’re still clean from the LAST time I removed and cleaned Flomar’s brushes.

I’ve since come to learn that this particular issue is a design flaw with the cleaning head module (CHM) in the 560 model, which – if your roomba is under warranty, iRobot will likely send you a new CHM that uses an improved design. IF however your Roomba is no longer under warranty… there’s still an option. You can perform invasive surgery into your Roomba.

The surgery involves taking out the CHM and cleaning the gearbox.

First you’ll need to take out the four screws holding the bottom plate onto the Roomba, (you can take off the spinning front brush first, if you want – it saves some effort), and pull that plate off. Then there will be four screws holding the purple frame around the brush box in place. Unscrew those and take the brush box and purple frame out of the Roomba. on one side there’s red gearbox. Unscrew the four screws holding that side of the purple frame together, and remove that side of the frame. Then, unscrew the six screws holding the gearbox cover on and carefully pull it off. Clean the gears inside however you want, if needed re-grease the box with white grease (use sparingly), and put it back together.

The underlying cause of the problem – as you’ll notice – is an accumulation of hair, dust and dirt in the gearbox that prevents normal operation of the brushes. As a result, a power output is required to keep the brushes turning, triggering the circuitry that determines if the brushes are dirty (and prompts you to clean them.) So, because turning the brushes requires too much power, it constantly stops and tells you to clean the brushes – even if the brushes themselves are already clean.

I have two cats living in the house, which means a TON of fur. This fur gets everywhere, and was a royal pain to remove from the gearbox. If you can, I recommend getting an updated CHM from iRobot. If not, give this a try – it may bring your Roomba back to life.

[Update: 4/13/10]:

I’m quite happy to see that so many people seem to be finding this post and find it to be helpful.   SOME of you might also find another post on my other blog useful: http://john.whelans.net/archives/705     –   My Roomba stays on the ground floor of my house, and has issues with dark colored flooring and it’s cliff sensors.  I tried the “piece of paper taped over the sensors” trick, but the paper kept getting messed up.   There’s a more permanent fix that doesn’t require cutting wires, soldering, or anything like that.    If you can work a screw driver you can do this – and it works great.

[Update 6/6/10]:

After about a year of cleaning the gears that drive the Roomba CHM (Cleaning Head Module),  the CHM in my roomba broke.  One of the metal spokes that the gears attach to caused enough friction that it wore through the plastic housing and threw the gears out of alignment.  I had two options:  Buy a new CHM from iRobot that has the same defect that caused this scenario in the first place,  or buy a modified CHM from a third party.   I opted to go for the modified CHM, which uses ball bearings to seal the gearbox from the cleaning brush chamber.   The end result is a CHM that cleans every bit as well as the original,  without having to continuously clean the gears.

It’s not cheap – $130 or so – but totally worth the money to avoid having to take apart my Roomba every few weeks.

I got mine from Vic – at http://vic7767.com.  He ships promptly and his workmanship is top notch.  Highly recommended.

Additionally, consider getting the AeroVac bin to replace the stock bin that comes with the Roomba.   The AeroVac bin is redesigned and works significantly better.    With that, and a bearing modified CHM your Roomba will become a super vacuum.

The Past

That’s how I initially felt about 1Password, from Agile Web Solutions. Perhaps it was because I was extremely tired and under a fair amount of stress – I’m not sure – but I simply did not give the app the time and attention it deserved for a truly fair assessment.   

And so it was – 1Password sat on my mac for a long time without really being used much. I knew – in the back of my mind – that it had potential and that I really should dig into it and see what it could do for me. For months, I avoided doing so.   

1Password Touch came out for the iPhone and I dutifully downloaded it, but again it mostly sat unused (though it was synced with my mac, which I tested and thought was neat).   

The Present

Then, about six months ago, I finally got the time and energy to really use 1Password and see what all the talk was about. I can safely say – I am impressed, and can’t imagine not using it. In a job where I often have to keep track of dozens of passwords I no longer have to worry about them – I simply have to remember one password.

I was still not too thrilled with the 1Password Touch – not because I didn’t like the interface or think it was useful, but because it didn’t integrate with Mobile Safari – which I like and want to use. With the release of the 3.0 software for iPhone, and 1Password Touch 2.1, however, there’s now a bookmarklet for Safari that allows for quick copy-paste of passwords into web forms. This allows me to use 1Password to remember my passwords, but still use Mobile Safari. Very slick, and very much worth the $5 on the App Store (introductory price – final price will be ~$14 (still very well worth it).   

The Mac version and the iPhone/iPod Touch version sync over wireless – a process which has been improved over earlier versions of the wireless sync by allowing you to sync even if Bonjour doesn’t work over your wireless network (like at work, for me).   

As it is now – there are only a few things I wish 1Password could do above and beyond what it already does.

1. Work with anything that requires password, not just websites.
2. Work on more platforms (Windows, Linux)
3. Grill me a nice steak and bring me a beer.

The first would be great, but I’m not sure how feasible it is. It’d position 1Password to be an even stronger position possibly, though. The Second I seriously doubt will occur – they seem to be a Mac only developer, and I respect that. Sadly, there just isn’t anything comparable on other systems. Nothing near as cool, anyways. The third is just down right ridiculous. If the awesome folks over at Agile make THAT happen I’ll buy them a new car*.

Other thoughts

It’s not uncommon to find the 1password developers commenting on blog posts, and generally addressing concerns and thanking people for talking about their product. This is clearly a developer who cares not just about making great products, but also about interacting with their users and building a solid community of devoted followers. They seem less out to price-gouge and rip people off, and more out to make an honest living by providing great products. Having not met them personally – I can’t speak to their motives, but, that’s the way they come across. It’s also one of the reasons I have no problem paying for their products and recommending them to my friends as well.

If you use a Mac and don’t use 1Password, you should.

While visiting my friend, he finally wore me down and I let him jailbreak my phone. This gave me the ability to change how the UI looked, to some extent. Beyond that, it also severely decreased system performance and stability, causing my phone to run slow when doing simple things like, say, opening my sms messaging app.   

Beyond that, the app to get more jailbroken apps was slow, somewhat confusing to navigate, and not all that helpful. Some apps worked on the 3.0 software platform, others didn’t. I was never fully sure which ones would work and which wouldn’t.

Overall, I found the experience to be about what I expected it to be – too much hassle for too little gain – i.e. not worth it.

To a point I can see why some people Jailbreak. The phone doesn’t offer them everything they want, and jailbreaking is a way to freely get what they are looking for out of their device. They forgive the flaws and drawbacks, the performance hit, etc in the name of having that one killer app that they just can’t live without. There ARE some cool apps out there for jailbroken phones, and you can still take advantage of the app store – but you have to wait to upgrade to a new phone OS – including patch updates – until it’s been jailbroken.

Call me silly, but one of the draws of the iPhone is that it’s a system that works. When there’s an update to the software I just plug the phone in and it updates. I don’t have to wait, I don’t have to worry about being able to use some of my apps. I don’t have to re-add those apps in after an update. Everything is there, exactly like it was. Life is good. If there’s something I want the phone to do, in 99.9% of cases I can find it on the App store. in that .1% where I can’t… I can live without it.

The main complaints I had about the phone have been addressed: Cut and Paste, voice activation (on my 3GS), better camera w/video support (again 3GS) tethering (as I’ve mentioned here before) and the ability to search through my email or other items on my phone. There’s really nothing left to compel me to want to jailbreak.

I’ve done it, I’ve used it, and you know what? It’s just not for me.

The update provides some wonderful new features (searching, cut and paste to name a few) with a few promised to be “on the horizon”. What it doesn’t offer, for those on AT&T anyways, is MMS and Tethering, two of the most sought after features. Two that SHOULD be there, but aren’t because AT&T seriously dropped the ball.

For those who are adventurous, it IS possible to enable tethering on the iPhone on AT&T. While I do vouch for these instructions working, I do not know what – if any – repercussions may come from following them. You do so at your own risk, and I will not be held accountable for YOUR actions.

Having said that – here’s how to enable it (if you’re using Mac OS X)

• First, download This File to your desktop
• Next, connect your iphone to your computer. If it syncs when you first connect it, wait until it finishes syncing.
• Then, run the following in a terminal: defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
• finally, go to the device summary for your iPhone within iTunes, while holding down the Option key, press “Restore”. in the window that opens locate the ipcc file you downloaded in the first step, select it and click ok.

NOTE: If for some reason the ipcc file is grayed out, re-run the command in the terminal. I had to run it twice for it to work.

Now, tethering is enabled on your phone, to turn it on go to Settings -> General -> Network, you’ll see a new option there to enable Tethering. Click that button and follow instructions.

There you have it – you can do what you want with this information, but you do it at your own risk

Enjoy!

[Update]: my buddy Brian points out that if you download the file linked above, directly onto the iPhone, it goes into effect immediately. shaving off three steps.  Thanks Brian!

Since the instructions for the camera don’t give any guidance on how to reset the camera, and I could find nothing quickly in a google search, I thought I’d post a quick set of instructions on here.

Since my camera now could no longer talk to Alarm.com, I couldn’t access it via their servers to change IP information.   Instead I had to reset the camera and perform the “initial camera setup” steps all over again.

To reset the camera, take a paperclip or similarly sized object and press the reset button located in a recessed area on the back of the camera.  I held that for approximately 15-20 seconds before releasing.    The blue and orange led’s on the front of the camera flashed a few times and it rebooted (twice, I think).  Do this WITH power connected.

After that I followed the instructions for initial setup of the camera and all was fine.

Simple.  The way I like it.

After almost a year I am still very happy with FrontPoint Security, and the alarm system.   The company has been very responsive whenever issues would arise – and that’s very important to me.   I’m realistic enough to know that problems WILL arise with ANY system.  The test of a company is how they handle those problems, and FrontPoint has exceeded my expectations.  They are prompt in responding to issues, knowledgeable on the systems and how to fix things, and will continue to follow up until the issue is resolved to your satisfaction.

Recently the service, which for those who didn’t know allows you to access your alarm from anywhere in the world via the internet, sent an unexpected bonus my way – an iPhone app.

The free iPhone app, Alarm.com, allows you to log in to your alarm.com enabled services natively from the phone.   This means I no longer have to go to a website, awkwardly enter my username and password, and use a sparse web interface to interact with my alarm system.   While that method still works, and worked well enough for what I wanted before, the alarm.com app makes interacting with my alarm a beautiful experience.

The interface is clean and straightforward, allowing you to see the current status of the alarm (status of doors and windows, armed or disarmed, etc), change the status of the alarm (arm/disarm), see the past history of events on the alarm and, if you’ve got the service, you can view and interact with an alarm.com video camera.

All of this works beautifully from the iPhone app, and there looks to be expanded ability to do home automation functions directly from the alarm.com app on the iPhone in the works as well.  The automation functions are ones I am waiting for, and am really hoping to see some cool things come from that.

The app is fairly sparse, but I didn’t expect much.  That said, it’d be nice if I could use it to change alerts, and do “everything” the web app could.   I’m not sure that’s realistic, or feasible, but it’s a “would be nice”.

Overall, I feel the app is a solid app for what it’s supposed to do.  It gives people who have alarm.com powered alarm systems the ability to interact with their systems via a native iPhone app, and does a good job of doing that.   It’s obvious that expanded functionality is coming soon as well, which means we have even more to look forward to.

I’ve been told that a Blackberry app is in development, so those of you with a crackberry addiction can get in on the phone app goodness as well.

In the year since I’ve started using FrontPoint’s Alarm.com powered service, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.   New features and capabilities keep being rolled out which keep expanding on the base functionality, making it ever more useful for a geek like me.

The wedding is now over, and the honeymoon taken, so it’s time to get back to work.  Part of that means getting back to work on my blogs and other things that have languished in the past few months as my attention has been directed elsewhere.

As part of that, last night I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the windows drive on my home office workstation from an aging Windows XP installation to the Windows 7 RC.

Since there’s no real upgrade path from XP to Windows 7,  and since I really had no desire to KEEP Windows XP,  I decided to reformat the XP drive and do a fresh install.

The installer was inexplicably slow,   especially since it was running on a Intel Core 2 Quad with 4 gigs of ram – certainly a beefy enough system to run it, and fast.  It took several minutes to get to a point where I could even start the install, and then the installer would hang at some points for absurd amounts of time spinning it’s wheels and appearing to do nothing ( it may be that it was processing in the background, but it honestly gave no indication that it was doing so).

After reading online that some people have had absurdly long install times (measured in hours) I got worried.    Especially since they indicated that after the install finished Windows failed to even start.    Thankfully, after the install completed Windows started just fine and everything seems to be working without any issues.  It would appear Microsoft needs to polish the installation a little bit more, but they’ve got some time to do that before the general release in October.

For me, the next (and last) gotcha was that this was  a dual boot windows/linux system,  and now the Grub bootloader stopped working.

This wasn’t a surprise to me – I actually expected it.   Typically, when you install a dual boot system you want to install windows first, THEN install Linux.   That’s not always feasible though, as seen in my case where I was upgrading to a new version of Windows.     Once you install windows, the bootloader no longer shows up and you can’t boot into Linux.

All is not lost!   The reason this happens is because Windows inserts it’s bootloader into the Master Boot Record (MBR), and set’s it as the priority after POST,  so instead of GRUB (or LILO, etc) loading first, the Windows bootloader does – and it doesn’t know about (or care about) Linux.

Luckily, this is ridiculously easy to fix.

The first thing you need to do is find a Linux Live CD,    in my case since I’m running Ubuntu 9.04 x64, I downloaded an ISO of the Install CD from Ubuntu.  Burn the ISO to cd, and boot to it.

Once you’re booted into the Live CD, open a terminal and type the following:

Sudo grub

This launches the grub prompt, and you should see “grub>” on your screen.   Once you see “grub>” , enter the following commands, pressing enter after each command.

Find /boot/grub/stage1

setup (hd0)

quit

In the above commands,  the first one will tell you the location of the stage1 file that Grub needs to determine where all of it’s files are.   It will return a location in the format of something like (hd0,1) use that value that it returns in the second command.   Continuing my example that would be root (hd0,1).

The second command tells grub that it’s files  are on a particular partition of a particular drive (in the example it’s partition 1 of drive 0).

The third command tells grub to set itself up on hd0, and when given without a value for partition grub then installs itself on the MBR.  hd0 is the label grub uses for the first drive’s MBR.

Quit is self explanatory

After you’ve finished that you can reboot the computer, remove the live cd and enjoy a working grub bootloader.

For some reason my Macbook Pro locked up during the encryption process (I can say positively that it’s an unrelated issue – the encryption itself is not the cause of the lockup, it was happening before encryption was introduced and Ive yet to identify the cause).

Upon reboot I was able to get into the drive, but PGP was locked up on encrypting the drive and wouldn’t proceed forward.   Likewise the gui gave me no option for stopping the encryption, or decrypting.  It seemed at first glance as though my drive was borked in an eternal state of half-encrypted.

Thankfully, first glance was incorrect.

PGP’s WDE engine recognized that there had been a poweroff, and because of that the disk was in an unknown state and PGP was not proceeding forward.

The fix was fairly straightforward.   From a command line I issued the following commands:

pgpwde –enum    (this will tell you the disk number)

pgpwde –disk 0 –stop –passphrase <passphrase>  (this stops the current encryption)

At this point I logged out and logged back in to complete the process.

When I logged back in, PGP still looked like it was stuck.   Issuing the following commands rectified that:

pgpwde –disk0 –decrypt –passphrase <passphrase>

pgpwde –disk0 –stop

pgpwde –disk0 –encrypt –passphrase <passphrase>

The first tells pgp to start decrypting the drive, which throws it immediately into a known state.   The second stops the decryption, and the third restarts the encryption – at a known state – and will resume at or around the same place where it had been stuck before.

Passphrase needs to be the passphrase you set up when you initiated encryption in the first place.

Earlier today, on a hunch, I went and booted the server. I figured the worst that would happen is another Kernel Panic. This time, instead of the expected text output informing me the kernel had a mental breakdown I was greeted with, after a short delay, the login prompt.

My best guess, and it’s just a guess nothing more, is that this is a temperature issue. It was VERY cold last night, to the tune of about 0 degrees. Also note that, at the time this started, the garage door had been left open (and yes, my server rack is in my garage). My best guess – at this point – is that the server had a difficult time booting at such temperatures. Once things warmed up a bit during the day the problems disappeared.

This is, however, just a guess. The machine could crap out and start kernel panic’ing again at any time for all I know. I sincerely hope it does not.

I have not cut my network over to start using it as the gateway again yet. That is a project for either tomorrow or Tuesday, depending on the stability of the system.

I’ll update here as more information becomes available.

[Update]: The issue was temperature.  The temperature around the rack was approximately -3 degrees F.  For those that happent to have read the specs on XServe operating temperatures,   the low end of it is about 53 degrees warmer than my rack was.    Oops.   Apparently you CAN get a computer too cold .   Helluva problem to have, though.

And so it was, last night, when I noticed my connection to the Internet did not appear to be working (quite suddenly, as it had been working moments before). I decided to go check out my router – an older model XServe I built into a gateway. I found it hung on boot with a strange message (that I PROBABLY should have written down but didn’t – it was 12:30am) so I hard cycled it. And it promptly Kernel Panic’d. Subsequent reboots all were met with the same panic: Panic(CPU 0) Unable to find driver for this platform: rackmac 1,3

I have tried a few potential solutions, such as booting while holding Command-Option-O-F, waiting until it gives me a prompt and typing reset-nvram, pressing enter then typing reset-all followed by enter, which resets the NVRAM then forces a reboot. The reboot came up the first time with a flashing folder/question mark. At that point I figured “ok, it now just can’t find the system volume – I can probably repair the disk and be good to go, at least that’s worth a shot. So I tried booting from the 10.5 DVD by pressing and holding C while booting, and was met promptly with the kernel panic (before I could even select the boot media). Subsequent attempts at using the reset-nvram trick have not met with the same success as the first attempt. In fact – everything tried since that has met with the same kernel panic.

What I have NOT tried, mainly because I’m still not entirely sure of the correct procedure, is resetting the PMU. I spoke with a buddy of mine regarding this last night, shortly after it happened, and it was suggested that resetting the PRAM might work, and if that didn’t then resetting the PMU might but is a bit more work (since I believe it requires actually pressing a small button on the logic board).

You may be wondering: If the xserve you were using as your gateway/router is dead, and you WEREN’T able to get it working again, how are you writing this?! The answer to that is that I have been using an Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) for my wireless. A quick re-configuration of the AEBS, and my 2-Wire POS DSL gateway, as well as a re-routing of some ethernet cables in my server rack, and everything was back online. It’s not the IDEAL solution, but I’ve got everything working fine in the interim.

I did lose internal DNS functionality, but I’ve been considering bringing up an internal DNS server on my second XServe that I can use in the interim.

If anybody has any suggestions on possible causes for this kernel panic – or better yet, solutions, please let me know in the comments. I’d like to be able to recover the system if I can.