Dave’s Happy Place

I thought I had got lucky with my last attempt at stopping the intermittent humming noise coming from the ozone generator in the Sundance Spa. The last attempt was a bit unscientific and can be read at an earlier post.

I didn’t work long term. The noise came back last week.

While in the spa on Friday evening I noticed that the bubbles coming out of the circulation jet outlet were also intermittent. Every now and then some larger bubbles would come out. So I started playing with the outlet of the circulation pump with my foot. If part of the outlet was covered off the noise from ozone generator stopped and so did the larger bubbles. Interesting.

I popped the spa panels off at the weekend and looked more closely at the line running from the mazzi jet to the SunZone ozone generator. Sure enough I could see very small air bubbles getting sucked into the air line where it connected to the mazzi jet. A few zip ties later and that connection was sealed. As soon as it sealed the noise stopped as well. Voila!

I zip tied all of the other connectors in that same air line and checked the connections for all of the other components as well. I also zip tied the air line well out of the way of the other components. Now the spa really is quiet with a consistent stream of small bubbles coming out of the circulation pump. Excellent! Hopefully this problem is sorted for good now.

The Sundance Spa has been making a low humming/buzzing noise on and off for the past few weeks. This noise is quiet in comparison to the gurgling noise the spa used to make before the circulation pump was replaced, but it’s still annoying.

The low frequency humming/buzzing noise was intermittent which made it all the more obvious as it came and went. It sounded like something was loose or vibrating within the spa.

I took off the front panels of the spa to isolate the noise, which turned out to be coming from the SunZone ozone generator. This device uses high intensity UV light to create ozone that is sucked into the circulation water supply to help with sanitation.

To try and get rid of the noise, I thought I’d see if anything was obviously loose in the generator. After turning off the power to the spa I removed the SunZone ozone generator which was only held on by 4 wood screws. On the back though, there were at least 12 metal screws, 3 bolts and 2 rivets. Too many things to make pulling it apart simple.

Onto plan B. I held the unit at various angles and gently thumped the unit with the base of my hand in the hope that if something were loose it would move enough that it wouldn’t vibrate any more. It was a bit of a long shot but it was worth a try.

After reinstalling and turning the power back on I was pleasantly surprised to not be hearing that annoying buzz anymore. Magic! Sometimes I get lucky.

While I was there I also zip-tied the hartford loop in the ozone air line up above water level. Previously it was just sitting on the top of the circuit board housing. Not sure if that had any affect on the noise.

I spent eons this afternoon trying to get direct rendering to work with Kubuntu Gutsy (7.10) so the recently installed Compiz Fusion visual effects actually look remotely impressive rather than clunky and old skool. I am using AIGLX as opposed to XGL as my Shuttle SD32G2 server has an integrated Intel GMA 950 chipset which AIGLX supports well in Linux.

After much chagrin and reading of numerous bugs and waffly semi-related threads I finally found one page that actually resolved the problem (xserver-xgl on gutsy doesn’t work). I removed the xserver-xgl package from the server and double checked that everything for AIGLX was setup correctly. HOWTO AIGLX contains instructions for configuring AIGLX targeted for Gentoo but should work fine for most Linux distros.

glxinfo | grep direct now returns the much desired direct rendering: Yes output. Wohoo! No longer is scrolling in Firefox and other applications painfully slow and jumpy. The visual effects in Compiz Fusion are also now crisp and smooth as opposed to jagged and choppy. Excellent. Not sure it was worth the hours of what felt like banging of my head against a brick wall though.

It’s unfortunate that the problem may have arisen as I may have installed the xserver-xgl when I first started configuring the server to use XGL for Compiz. Rats!

I can’t believe that the latest release of Kubuntu Gutsy (7.10) has been in beta for so long. The upgrade rendered my system all but useless because KDE wouldn’t start.

When I logged in the only thing that was presented to me was the new Kubuntu background. Nothing more, nothing less.

Starting Kubuntu with the Session in Failsafe mode presented a terminal window with the new Kubuntu background behind it. This was all it did, but I presume this is all that Failsafe mode does.

Starting the X server using startx threw an error about the user not being authorized. I found a few links like X: user not authorized to run the X server, aborting with similar looking problems. This error was resolved using dpkg-reconfigure x11-common and changing Allowed Users to “Anybody” instead of “Console”.

Running startkde then had KDE fire up but then bail back to the login screen. The last thing I saw in the terminal window was

No battery found.
This is not a laptop, quitting…

This had me puzzled for a while since it looked like this might have been the problem. However, it turns out that is simply the output of the guidance-power-manager. Nothing to be concerned with it would seem, just an unfortunate piece of wording in that output.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using the iPhone for a little over 3 days now. I’m still in the honeymoon period, but below is a first impression review. I’ll do another post with the bits I really like - there’s too many to list here…

Things that I’ve Missed

Below is the list of stuff that I have actually missed so far. I’ve recently being using a Samsung D900 so unfortunately the bar is quite low and the iPhone surpassed most existing functionality by miles.

A better way to snooze the alarm

I sleep with my phone under my pillow so snooze is within easy reach when the alarm goes off. I want to be able to whack anything on the phone to snooze. My old Samsung D900 was good at this, you could press any of the buttons anywhere (even the volume ones) and it snoozed.

With the iPhone you have to exactly press the Snooze button right in the middle of the screen, which requires you to be at least faintly lucid, of which I never am when the alarm goes off. If I could tap anywhere on the iPhone screen that would probably be better. Since you have to swipe to stop the alarm so you couldn’t accidentally sleep in and then get stuck in traffic.

UPDATE: It seems that I might have been delirious when I first tried to snooze. I tried again this morning and all of the buttons did indeed snooze the alarm. Excellent.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am lucky enough to be one of the many New Zealanders using an iPhone. Many have gone before and many more will follow. The first hacked iPhone may belong to John Ballinger of Bluespark Interactive as described at Andrew James Sommervell’s blog.

The Red Ink Scribbles iPhone Review Part II: The Unlocked Phone blog post contains the best instructions I’ve seen to configure the iPhone correctly for New Zealand after it has been unlocked. It contains instructions to:

• Configure GPRS access for Vodafone (not full blown EDGE, just it’s baby sister equivalent)
• Configure the Voicemail button so it dials 707 to access Vodafone voicemail
• Change the phone number formating to suit New Zealand phone numbers. I’ve further updated the ABPhoneFormats.plist phone number formats to also handle 8 digit prepay phone numbers (the weird ones that look like 021 027xxxxx).

Other changes are also needed so Caller ID matches the locally stored contact phone numbers correctly. The Fix International Caller ID thread at ModMyiPhone contains instructions to fix this.