In the town I grew up in there was a small TV repair shop named “Ron’s TV”.  The folks at Ron’s TV repaired televisions and many other electronics. From what I heard, the owner’s name wasn’t Ron, that was just a ruse for sales guys and bill collectors. Apparently they did something right, because many years later they are still in business – amazing given the change in this industry.  The great thing about this repair shop is if it was electronic and had a screen or speaker they could repair it.

Today everything is disposable.  Most electronics are built in China at factories that would never pass our safety standards.  They are made by people making wages we would consider unthinkable. Unfortunately, I think we exported our morals along with our electronic manufacturing.  The upside is costs have gone way down.  A growing problem is many electronics cannot be serviced.  I’ve heard many low-end 40+ inch LCD televisions can’t be repaired anywhere (well except maybe the famous Ron’s TV).

I’ve found the growing trend to combat the lack of repair is a good old American “do it yourself” spirit.  Recently I’ve had some Nintendo DS game devices in our house break.  The pictured device is a perfectly good machine, but the bottom screen stopped functioning as a “touch screen”.  Many people would just buy a new device, but I wondered if there were any tricks to fix it.  I went to my friend Google and found several tricks to fix the problem.  None of them worked!  I knew replacing the component was an option so I dug deeper.  Turns out you can not only get the part on eBay for $8 delivered, but find YouTube videos to show you how to put it in!  I ordered the touchscreen on eBay and it arrived a week later (it even came with the right screwdriver for this machine).  I immediately took it apart and started the repair.  My son watched and a few times asked me if I knew what I was doing.  I didn’t read any online instructions but it seemed simple enough to me.  Find the old part, figure out where it is connected, and replace it with the new one.  About 20 minutes later he was up and running.

So if your stuck with a dead device, head onto the internet and find your $8 solution!

You’ve seen the Mac and PC commercials right? Apple products are hip, fun, and counter-cultural. iPods, iMacs, and iPhones generally exude a fun, simple, elegant design. Working at Apple must be a really progressive place just like the commercials right? Everybody blogs, lots of wikis and ad-hoc collaboration? Nope. Apple employees aren’t supposed to have personal blogs (something about speaking with “one voice”).

The United States Government typically brings to mind thoughts of red tape and process for anything and everything. Think up-tight, uniforms, and nobody shares information. Wikis and blogs would be squashed by regulators or the CIA Right? Nope. The government, particularly the Intelligence and Military, is all over social media tools and is a role model in many respects (one example).

We’ve come a long way. Wikis and other trendy collaboration tools popped up many years ago under the desks of IT folks who got tired of boring document management systems and static Intranet portals. Today every corporate leader is being yelled at, “Get a 2.0 Collaboration Strategy!”

Most companies go through an evolution of tools and platforms to get to a consolidated, supported, “everywhere” platform. As the tools evolve so do new policies to deal with this new media. Often younger segments of the workforce expect these tools, more seasoned employees question them.

How about your workplace? Do you have tools to find other employees based on their user profile? Is there a corporate “Encyclopedia” anyone can contribute to? Can you quickly create ad-hoc communities to share information without email lists? Do you have these tools but your corporate culture is holding back their adoption?

Don’t try this at home.  Wait, TRY this at home!

Often I get assigned “coffee duty“. This often happens when we have people coming over, we host a party, or bring coffee to an event. I often find myself getting out my two glass airpots and brewing coffee into the carafes. Then I carefully pour into the airpots.  While this solution works, I was interested in brewing a larger quantity directly into an airpot.  This would be less work and temperature loss (a lot).  Even my great home equipment isn’t made to do this, but I developed some workarounds to the problems I ran into.

1) Cone filter.  These are great for brewing smaller batches of coffee. With larger quantities you wind up over-extracting the grounds at the point of the filter (the bottom). This can give you a nasty bitter taste even if you use the correct amount of coffee. Workaround? Stir the basket grounds when brewing is 2/3 complete.

2) Water reservoir is too small.  In my Technivorm I can do 10+ cups (close to 1 liter) of filtered water.  Unfortunately, an airpot is typically 1.6-1.8 liters. Workaround? Before the 10 cups were gone I’d add 6 more cups of water.  Your application will vary, I did a “dry run” with just water.

3) Basket too small  for extra coffee.  Typically to brew an airpot of coffee you want about 3.25 ounces of beans, which is roughly a cup of dark roasted whole bean coffee. This may be too much coffee for the basket and cause an overflow. Workaround? I did a scant cup of coffee (7/8) as to not overload the basket.

4) Airpot is taller than the brewer!  Workaround? As you can see, I was able to put the brewer on a small box to accommodate the airpot perfectly under the brewer.

If your coffee maker doesn’t brew at the right temperature, or takes longer than six minutes to brew a normal pot don’t try this.  You need a quality brewer that will brew for the right amount of time at the right temp. The Technivorm MoccaMaster is a high-quality coffee maker that will last for many years and make coffee as good as your best local coffee shop.

If you are looking for Bible study software for the Mac you aren’t alone. On Windows there are quite a few options – even great free ones like Online Bible and e-Sword. I did a lot of “poking around” for low cost and free solutions. The only real solution I found, that was native to the Mac, was MacSword.  MacSword is a port of the open source “SWORD Project”. It didn’t do much for me, though it had great integration with the large Sword project library.

On Windows I used e-Sword, and I had bought a couple of modules for it (like NASB translation). I decided to look at running e-Sword on Mac using virtualization or emulation. Since I only have 1G of RAM on my MacBook I immediately tossed the idea of a tool like VMWare Fusion (which would have been easy and effective). I looked at using the Windows emulation software called “wine”. I already own a copy of Crossover, a paid supported version of the “wine” project.

I was able to use e-Sword on the Mac, and it works pretty well. The verse navigator box causes it to crash, but everything else works so far. Here are two options I found for installing it.

1) Get Mac e-Sword Package. This package bundles the free version of Wine with an e-sword distribution. You can click, install, and run. I found the tool worked fine but was a bit slow.  This was totally free and simple!

2) CrossOver with e-Sword. Since I own CrossOver which has the latest Wine code, etc. I decided to try it out. First I installed IE6 with CrossOver to create a Windows 98 “bottle” as my default. I then ran the installer for e-Sword using the CrossOver control panel. This worked fine and product started normally and works much faster than the one using the Darwine wine package (above).  CrossOver costs $30 but it’s a great product.  You can easily install Quicken, IE, Office, and many other windows programs easily onto the Mac.

Regardless of how you install it, I would recommend following these instructions for turning on font smoothing. Enjoy!

About 3 weeks ago my wife and I started noticing an odd rubbery metallic taste/smell to my espresso drinks. We had some immediate suspicions. The first was the cup itself. We had just picked up some new fun mugs at IKEA in Chicago and figured the nasty smell came from the cup. We swapped out cups and thankfully it wasn’t our new mugs. My next guess was the espresso blend itself.

I thought the beans smelled a little different when grinding. I know sometimes too much Robusta in a espresso blend can give the cup that flavor so I emailed my local roaster to see if there was anything new or maybe a bad roast batch had been reported (anything!). Nope, dead end. Time to clean the Ranchilio Rocky grinder.

I unscrewed the plate that holds the hopper and unthreaded the top burr. Yup, a 1/4 inch of yucky oils and residue. I got it all clean and cleaned the small cavities around the bottom burr. Fixed right? Nope, another dead end. Time to clean the machine.

I started with descaler, soaked all the components (wow – the portafilter!). The first shot I pulled revealed no change. I start wondering about that gasket in the brewhead that’s been there for 5+ years and the scary process of backflushing that I’ve not done (because of the vendor recommendations). I stumble across a great website (there are many for this machine) that finally gives me the courage to do these two things. I ordered a rubber insert for the portafilter that turns it into a blind (which forces pressure back into the machine for backflushing). In addition I picked up a $5 gasket. $10 in parts, $10 in shipping (boooo…!)

After emptying the machine and turning it on the side I wrestle out the gasket. Prying it out from the innermost part seemed to be the trick. To say there was a lot of oil and burnt reside in this area would have been an understatement. After removing it I used a standard espresso cleaning brush to get every corner of that brass brew head clean. Putting the new gasket in was simply, insert smooth side down and push. Next I backflush. I first put the knobby part of this rubber stopper down into the spout (made sense to me) but it didn’t seal, upside down did the trick. I flushed it several times and let it sit for a bit, then cleaned it out and backflushed again with water. After putting it all back together I pulled a couple shots with old beans.

The moment of truth. Will I be cursed forever with rubbery metal flavored coffee? I was happy to only smell coffee flavors when I dumped the 2 shots into the hot water to make an Americano! Gasket, backflush, who knows – one or both of them did the trick.

I found a lot of people complaining about this same issue on the net (but not a lot of answers). If you have a similar issue read the above links and order from Chris Coffee (I got parts in a few days). Gotta run, time for another Americano.

For a while I’ve wanted something a little more useful than my iPhone when I’m not at a computer.  I had a Toshiba laptop, but wanted something smaller with a longer battery life.  I started looking at the netbook models, and these caught my eye:

Dell Mini 9
MSI Wind U100
Lenovo S10

The one issue I kept getting hung up on with these devices was the screen resolution.  Most of them are only 500-600 pixels high.  That means a lot of scrolling on an already small trackpad.  Unfortunately right now in laptops (and netbooks) we mostly have 15.4 inch screens and 9-10 inch screens.  I started to look at my options for something closer to a 12″ screen.  This brought options like the IBM x40, ultramobiles, macbooks, and the new Dell Mini 12.  My plan was to run Linux or OSX (potentially try installing on non-Apple machine).  At the end of the day I found a used white macbook for a little over the price of a loaded netbook.  After just a day I can say the smaller Mac laptop fit the bill perfectly and didn’t break the bank.

I found it interesting my employer is now offering $50 netbooks in some areas if you purchase the right data plans. Too bad no MacBook discounts

If you are a coffee lover like me you probably don’t like the fact that the popularity of coffee has more to do with product branding than the experience of the drink (or the quality of the bean or roasting). Since I’m always thinking of business opportunities on the web (in a grand delusion to escape corporate America) I’ve been intrigued by a few coffee companies (web and local) have used different forms of branding, causes, etc. to take this great commodity and make a decent profit.

Someone recent gave me a bag of this coffee, A Land of a Thousand Hills, which will be brewed tomorrow for me and the wife (and a carafe to take to work friends).  The thing that intrigues me is the work to build a message and niche branding behind the coffee.  I’ve often considered private labeling a local roaster and selling on the web, but haven’t found the right niche.

People love the coffee, but they also love the look of the bag and the story of the coffee.  In this case there is an Environmental, Christian, Help Rwanda Message.  Start helping by buying the coffee.  Most people don’t realize that coffee is what keeps many people in these countries fed.

These guys have a great niche and story… And we’ll see about the quality of the beans tomorrow.

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Update: The roast was Italian, and the bean sized varied.  Like a Sumatra the smaller beans were fairly charred.  I expected to taste mostly a roast profile rather than a varietal one (starbucks effect).  The grind had an unusual distinct smell I couldn’t place until I drank it.  To my surprise I didn’t really taste a dark carmel roast flavor but something that tasted like green tea!  I have to say it is the most unusual coffee I’ve had.  Not being a fan of green tea, it’s not my “cup of tea” so to speak. One of my co-workers (with no prompting from me) said, “Is this tea or coffee?” I showed them the beans to dispel their unbelief!  I’ll have to ask my local roaster for some background on Rwandan coffee.  Thanks Therian for sharing some interesting Joe with an interesting message.

I’ve used the OliveTree software for many years (and platforms). The iPhone version started off VERY rough but now they have a great product for this platform. I love the pop-up references when reading Grudem’s Systematic theology!

What I’ve got installed?

• Several Bibles including NASB (thinking of buying Strongs version)
• Grudem’s Systematic Theology (Great!)
• Matthew Henry Commentary
• Some Lewis and Piper books

If you have an iPhone and want to study the Christian scriptures look no further.

http://www.olivetree.com/

Google is winning because it works.  People like things that “just work”. 

Let’s look at home computers.  They have become more complicated and error prone.  This has to do with Viruses, half-baked software, Microsoft engineering, and too many options on hardware.  Users get frustrated when their IT friend says, “Just buy a new PC from Best Buy”.  The answer is usually upgrade the hardware, wipe the drive, put better virus software on…. But the answer to “just make it work” is get a new PC.  Wonder why a lot of people are trying the Mac?

How about Google?  What “just works”? For an experiment I tried the Yahoo search bar in my browser first for two weeks. After a few searches I usually reverted to Google, and got what I wanted on the first page of results.  Today I’m switching my default search bar back to Google.  Remember “just works”?  Try putting “buy Mark lunch next Friday” in your Google calendar.  Yes, it will figure it out.  Google Calendar “Just works”. 

Rather than wrangling over features and functionality I’ve started just asking the question “Does it just work”?

KDE 4.2?  Does it matter to you?

I recently tried KUbuntu live CD (8.10).  After being a KDE fan for a long time I figured it would be great to try the 4.1 version and see how it worked.  

Unfortunately, I found some of the basic things I wanted to do very confusing.  Not impossible, but after trying Ubuntu and seeing the simplicity I love in my Mac I was a bit underwhelmed.  Taking the 4.2 release for a test ride should be interesting.  There has been a lot negative press on the 4.x release – maybe 4.2 will address some of the problems.

Here is one of the big reasons I think KDE 4.2 might matter.  Each release there is a little better support for Windows.  I think a lot of Windows users that are using open source applications would love the opportunity to have a new window manager (a popular thing among us theming geeks for years [Sorry Frank, I know you don't get this part]).  Ars Technica has a very interesting review / test drive of what worked, and what didn’t.  It’s a very interesting option that I think I’ll go try for myself.  If you are on Windows XP and planning to skip Vista but would like an eye-candy upgrade this might be the free ticket you were looking for.  I’ll add a comment on my results…