Akom's Tech Ruminations

It took me 24 hours to notice that my Maytag top-freezer refrigerator (PTB2454GR) stopped cooling. (OK the puddle on the floor helped me notice). When it started (Saturday morning, I think), there was a click, 10 seconds of buzzing, then silence. This would repeat every 2-3 minutes. I didn't think much of it, thinking it's the ice maker acting weird. What I should have noticed was the complete absence of compressor noise - just the fan. Actually, there wasn't even that noise - it was silent.

I eventually figured out that the start relay (if you can even call it that) needs replacement, but that was not the initial problem - the problem, as it turned out, was one packing peanut. Yeah, one peanut - it got stuck in the Condenser Fan, literally preventing it from running. This in turn probably caused ice buildup, or in some other way increased the compressor load, which in turn finished off the start relay. Frankly, I'm not sure how long the peanut was in there - may have been months, or maybe just a day.

So if you're seeing similar behaviour (see first paragraph), these are the steps to troubleshoot and temporarily remedy the situation (Disclaimer: there is a very good chance of electrocuting yourself in the process, as with any high voltage appliance). I have a little wiring diagram that explains what and why in here as well.

Continue reading "Getting your refrigerator to run without a start relay while you wait for the part"

Ever since I built my Asterisk-based VOIP phone system I've been finding more and more interesting ways to put it to work. I mean, it's a business phone server, but it's got plenty of resources as it sits around waiting for a phone call. So I figured... why not be able to pick up the nearest phone, dial an extension, and be able to stop/start/skip my whole-house music? How about doing this from anywhere? OK this may seem odd to you, but you'd be surprised how often it saves you from having to get up and go find the remote or having to wake up a computer . OK you're not convinced that this is very useful. How about pausing music for a phone call? Automatically?

For those who don't know, Asterisk is a open source (and free) software PBX system. You know, the thing that IP phones connect to (you know, that little box you got from Vonage - it connects to something - well in my house, it connects to my server). It provides call routing and management, voicemail, IVR (menus), etc. In short, it's awesome. I mean, yeah, it's a little unintuitive at first, but it's not that complicated once you loosen up your old fixed programmatic thinking a little

So, here is the setup.

Continue reading "Teaching your Asterisk phone system to control your music"

The bench

OK so this is pretty low-tech, but hey - why not? Kneeling benches are really unbeatable for meditation and prayer, but they are also great to just sit on - not only does it keep your back straight and prevents slouching, but it also places your feet right under you, so your weight distribution is optimal (and you don't fall). Sure, sitting like that can be tough at first, but it comes with practice. Plus, if you're intent on deep meditation, it is definitely worth getting used to.

I've made a non-folding bench before, and figured I'd try to make a portable one this time. I took what I learned from the last one and made some adjustments - I decided on a 10° angle this time. I also wanted it to fold and I didn't want the feet to protrude when folded. Here are the details.

Continue reading "Making a Folding Meditation Kneeling Bench"

I've been happily using nagios to monitor all my servers for quite some time, yet two days ago, suddenly, I started getting "Offset unknown" from my check_ntp check. Same from check_ntp_time. Then it was intermittent, service was flapping (going in and out of Unknown state). I messed around with ntp.conf and changed servers, restarted ntpd and then it stopped working across the board...

asterisk asterisk # /usr/nagios/libexec/check_ntp_time -H srv
NTP CRITICAL: Offset unknown|

The problem?

Apparently a leap year second is inserted periodically, and that's what was done on Dec 31 2008! Just one second, but enough to expose a bug in nagios-plugins-1.4.11

Continue reading "Nagios check_ntp quits working in 2009 with Offset unknown"

Continue reading "Replacing NiCd power tool batteries with RC LIPO's"

I have an Enterprise Activated Blackberry 8830 (World) which has worked just fine for over a year. I recently installed Opera Mini (which works great for most things), but some time after that I noticed that the built-in Browser no longer works and produces the following error message:

Your device does not currently have any Browser Configuration Service Book Entries.
Please contact your service provider to enable the Browser on your device

Took me some time to sift through the various responses on forums and various advice. In the end, it appears that they all boil down to two possible solutions (assuming that your blackberry browser should/did work at all, as in you have a data plan, etc, etc):

• Send Service Books
  1. Click your internet email icon (the envelope with a gear in front of it)
  2. Log in to your BIS account, as needed (yes even if you are on a BES). Create one if you've never done this before
  3. click service books
  4. Click send service books
• Register Device
  1. Click options
  2. Click advanced options
  3. Scroll down and click host routing table
  4. Press menu key
  5. Choose register now
  6. You can now exit. You should receive an happy email shortly

As for me, the first one did the trick. The second one (including resetting device) did nothing.

Update

If your Browser and/or Email Setup icons are missing, try this:

1. Go to the verizon BIS site with your desktop browser
2. Log in or create account
3. Go to help->Send Service Books (Seriously, it's hidden in the help menu!)
4. You'll get activation emails on your device
5. Pull the battery and it should be fine after a reboot
6. NOTE: my blackberry stopped receiving mail after this - and after logging back into the BIS account I was asked to set up my blackberry from scratch. Never fear - just click the newly restored Email Setup on your blackberry and you'll see what to do, and voila - everything is back to normal, even the online account

The Motorola HS850 was a very popular bluetooth headset in its day. A lot of people seem to complain that their HS850's gradually develop one of the following symptoms:

• Dials/hangs up, randomly
• Redials on its own, randomly
• Hangs up or dials at the slightest touch or handling of the unit

This is what is most likely causing the problem:

Continue reading "Fixing Sensitive Button on Motorola HS850 bluetooth handsfree headset"

I have a hand-me-down Garmin C330, the el-cheapo, no-text-to-speech teletubby-looking GPS unit that every online store was liquidating a few months ago. Mine also has a dead battery, and while it used to run for 1-2 minutes on it, now it barely runs 5 seconds. I can live with that, after all - you generally use it while plugged in, but it is oh-so-handy to be able to hand it to the passenger for co-pilot... co-piloting.

So, I had to do something...

Continue reading "Replacing Garmin C330 Li-Ion battery on the cheap (with whatever is onhand)"

Last week I hacked up my RC transmitter and added a Dual Rate switch

Dual Rate switch

See here: (How I hacked it up).

I thought I was so cool for adding two wires, one toggle switch and two drops of solder to an RTF transmitter (oh and a nice hole too). Well, everything worked great on the ground, but once I actually flew the plane, not all was well - the control range dropped to about 60 feet!. I didn't connect the dots at first and thought it was a broken antenna wire or something, or a new flying site (coincidence). Nope.

Apparently, adding two thick wires radomly into a complex circuit and placing them along the perimeter of the case can have some unexpected results. I took the wiring and the switch out, and all is well again, control range is longer than sanity permits me to test (plane is a dot in the distant sky, but still seems to be controllable).

Continue reading "Not all that is hackable should be..."

I can't say that I have a good reason for doing this, other than the potential for letting inexperienced family members fly my plane, but I thought this should be easy enough to do:

RTF Radio with DR Switch

The RTF transmitter that came with my Pitts S2A has a bunch of dip switches, which are not so quick to flip on the fly - and I've played with friends' real professional transmitters - and they have what seems to be useful toggle switches to control this stuff. So I figured I'm gonna pretend that I'm cool too.

The transmitter turned out to be very neatly designed, and finding the switch and soldering a pair of wires was surprisingly easy. Moreover, the cute silver pads on the top corners of the transmitter are actually silver stickers, covering up pre-drilled holes intended specifically for what I'm putting in there - a toggle switch.

Continue reading "Hacking up RTF RC Transmitter with a Dual Rate switch"

This was annoying. Whenever the blackberry was plugged in (USB), windows would ding and show a baloon saying "USB Device not recognized", and this would continue forever, repeating about every 10 seconds! Clicking the baloon would show you the USB device tree, with a very helpful "Unknown Device" shown in bold. It took some time to figure out that it's happening only when the BB is connected. It sort of seemed as if someone is rapidly connecting/disconnecting the USB cable.

Well? Turns out that this is sort of what was happening. It was a bad cable. OK, perhaps not a bad cable, but one that the blackberry didn't like. And, unlike what some people suggested, having it plugged in through a hub is not the culprit. Interestingly, the cable that was malfunctioning was heavy duty, with ferrites. The cable that works is thin and flimsy.

Or the infamous "Or you can add an exception" thing.

Apparently since Firefox 3, if you stumble on a site with an invalid SSL certificate, be it expired, self-signed, or bad in any other way, you are greeted (as before) with a warning. Only this warning requires 8 steps to bypass, not all of which are intuitive to the normal power user. Moreover, in my experience, Firefox will prompt you again and again once your restart it, despite the fact that you checked "Permanently store this exception". And why do I need to "download" the certificate anyway? The browser must have already retrieved it by now since it's warning me about it.

I actually considered downgrading to Firefox 2... but I found a solution.
Here is what you do:

Continue reading "Firefox 3 Uber SSL Security madness for Self-Signed Certificates"

My old motherboard finally died, so I managed to free up another one and threw it in. This is one of my very few windows machines, dual boot Win2K/XP. Neither one worked with the new motherboard - 2K gave me a very nice bluescreen with the infamouse Stop 0x0000007B error, while XP simply quietly rebooted.

The old board was the wonderful (back in 2001) Gigabyte 7VRXP (1.1) sporting an Athlon XP-1800+. The "new" board is a NVidia based A7N8X-VM, complete with an Athlon XP-2000+.
I managed to downgrade my server to an Intel Atom low power setup (see separate post), so this one was available, moreover - it has n AGP 8X slot and the old board - only 4x. Yes I know this is ancient hardware, but I have no interest in spending hundreds on all new hardware when all I want is something to run Nero and Realflight. (And occasionally, Blackberry JDE).

Anyway,

Continue reading "Old Hard Drive, New Motherboard and the Windows Stop 0x0000007B error "

As the CTO of Namaste Holistics and Nutrition 4 Entrepreneurs (see links in nav above), I was dealing with a progressively more dissatisfied CEO, and with good reason.

She is dealing with an overcomplicated email/calendaring/contacts setup that's somewhat... imperfect.

The following is the setup and what was done to improve it.

Continue reading "Syncing, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Blackberry, Outlook, etc"

This week I found myself in one of those situations...

I had initially implemented corporate web services in Axis2 1.2, using ADB data binding, starting with a WSDL. Only problem is - the WSDL I had to reimplement came from .NET, sometime around 2001... when overloading must have seemed like a good idea. Since then it's been abolished by just about everyone, including of course the current WSDL specifications. Moreover, the WSDL was most likely auto-generated by .NET with no regard for how manageable it would be. Yes, this is an experience infused with "ArrayOfAnyType", <anytype xsd:type="string">, and other such pearls.

I can't say that ADB handled overloaded methods

Continue reading "Convincing JAX-WS on Axis2 1.4 to handle overloaded web service methods"