Author: Joe

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games movie is coming out this coming week and the group at work is planning to see it, so I figured I’d read the books this weekend.

I was planning to at least finish the first book, but they were so much faster than the books I tend to prefer I ended up finishing all three (I didn’t time book 1, but book 2 I finished within 4 hours of getting the email receipt for buying it on my nook last night, and 3 I started over breakfast today and finished within 4 hours of getting home from church). That’s a decent chunk of the weekend, but I guess I’m comparing it to each book actually taking most of the weekend with few distractions last summer when I was finishing at least a book of Wheel of Time a week.

I enjoyed the entire series, but I generally liked the plot of the first one the most. Between that and that fact that wikipedia tells me the author helped write and produce the movie I actually want to see it now, as opposed to being vaguely interested because several people had told me it was a good book.

On the other hand, now I’m about to go find a Discworld book that I haven’t read to cheer me up. I’ll admit that the ending of the series was a decent resolution to the story, but given some of the events leading up to it I wouldn’t call it a particularly happy ending. I suppose I’m not exactly the target audience considering it’s a young adult novel.

Since I’ve got everything open right now I guess I’ll toss in a few of the sites that I’ve been looking at for ideas of fantasy books to read (in case anyone is interested and so I don’t lose them):
Patrick Rothfuss blog
a goodreads fantasy list

Cleaning Tools

I knew Dash didn’t at all appreciate my vacuum cleaner, but I didn’t expect him to kill it.

To be fair, it’s just the brush assembly that gave out, and it’s because Dash is a medium-haired cat and sheds, not because he actually did anything to it.

Apparently cat hair was getting into one end of the brush assembly and collecting between the bearing and the cap on the end. I’d noticed a faint burning smell, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from so I ignored it. Then the weekend before last I had the vacuum on and I was cleaning up around the litter boxes with the hose when suddenly it started rattling and shaking horribly. I took it apart and discovered the brush wasn’t fixed on its axle, but I didn’t disassemble the brush assembly until the replacement arrived today.

Here’s the mass of cat hair that was between the bearing and the cap on the end of the axle:

Here’s the bearing (if you look closely you can see part of the gap between the edge of the bearing and the wall of plastic that’s supposed to hold it in place):

The friction of turning against the cat hair caused it to heat up and eventually melted the plastic around the bearing so the bearing became loose and was no longer holding the brush steady. At that point the brush was wobbling far enough to rub on its surroundings, which is why I found flakes of burnt plastic on the carpet when the bearing finally went.

I ordered a new brush assembly from Bissel last weekend to repair it. While I was ordering I went ahead and ordered a spotbot too since I’d been considering it for a while (I have white carpet) and it was on sale and even got me free shipping for my entire order.

The spotbot came in on Wednesday (it was shipped from a different place than the brush assembly), so I immediately tried it on a spot that Talore threw up a hairball on a couple weeks ago and I hadn’t managed to clean it as well as I wanted:

Apparently it’s important that the carpet actually be clean around the spot that you’re cleaning. I knew that section of carpet was darker, but I thought it was a stain and it’s been like that since I got the house. Now I’m thinking the carpet just wasn’t cleaned thoroughly before they sold the house to me, so I’ve got a clean spot that’s obvious in the middle of a big dirty patch.

It also looks to me like the spotbot doesn’t do a great job of cleaning around the edges of the spot it’s placed on, so with the dirty carpet it collects a bit of dirt around the edges where it was already dirty and cleans the middle. I’m inclined to accept it, since the spotbot wasn’t made for cleaning large sections of carpet. Despite that, I started just using the spotbot to clean the large section of carpet, but I’m not sure it’s worth the time and trouble.

Sharing Music from Linux

Last weekend I finally got fed up with the movie player that came with Ubuntu for playing music and started looking for alternatives. It turns out Rythmbox is the music player that came with Ubuntu, but it wasn’t set as the default for opening audio files. It was rather easy to import my music directory into it, but about ten seconds into the import the ftp to my file server died and killed the import. I don’t know why it disconnected, but I figured there had to be a decent way to share the music directly from my server over the network instead of connecting with ftp and playing music from the file mount.

I finally got around to looking into that this weekend, and almost immediately found mt-daapd. Rythmbox automatically discovers DAAP servers on the local network on start, so I figured I’d try it. Supposedly, ITunes will discover DAAP servers too, so I’ll even be covered if I boot into Windows for some reason.

Mt-daapd was by far the easiest thing I’ve set up on my server. It installed with apt-get: sudo apt-get install mt-daapd. The installer even set it up to start on boot and started the service. Unfortunately, it didn’t have a clue where to find my music (since I don’t keep my music in my home directory), so I had to edit the conf file: sudo vi /etc/mt-daapd.conf and set the mp3_dir property to the directory all my music is in. At that point I restarted my server (to make sure the start on boot script was working before I forgot about it), opened Rythmbox, and everything just worked.

My only complaint now is that Rythmbox won’t let me search by genre, but it will let me sort by genre, so I can just select the set of songs from the list that I feel like listening to and add those to the play queue.