JordanHackworth.com

Recalibraing Your Roomba Battery

Jordan — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:26:35 +0000

If you've owned a Roomba for more then a year you have no doubt noticed that the battery life is drastically reduced from when you bought it. Recalibrating your battery is a simple procedure that may help you recapture some of that life.

1: Charge your Roomba up all the way
2: Run a 'max' cycle instead of 'clean'
3: When the Roomba thinks the battery is dead, pull the battery out
4: Hold down the power button on the Roomba for ten seconds, this will discharge all of the capacitors which will reset the charging controller
5: Put the battery back in the Roomba
6: Plug the Roomba into the charger, don't use the home base for this initial charge. Let it charge for 24 hours and see if you've regained any battery life.

In some cases this will help, but in my case it didn't make any difference, my battery only has six minutes of run time.

If your battery is due for a replacement you could either replace it with the stock battery or crack open the battery case and replace the cells, saving $13 and getting you a higher capacity battery.

World Disaster Map

Jordan — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:33:03 +0000

While surfing the internet today I came across this real-time world disaster map ran by the Hungary National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/?area=%C3%A2%C2%8C%C2%A9=eng&lang=eng

Google Earth KML files are available here: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/services.php?lang=eng

Disqus Comment System

Jordan — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:36:33 +0000

I spent a short amount of time setting up the Disqus comment system here at JordanHackworth.com this weekend.

Disqus is a comment system vastly superior to the built in comments module on Drupal, (the CMS this site uses) but Disqus is independent of any particular web platform, in fact it could replace the comment system on nearly any website.

Disqus users have a profile which is used for every site that uses Disqus. By logging into Disqus I will automatically comment as myself on any Disqus enabled site.

Disqus goes much further then a centralized login, it has social aspects to it. My Disqus profile automatically grabs my Twitter status, and has links to my Facebook, Flickr, and Del.icio.us account. You're able to 'follow' other Disqus users, much like you can in Twitter.

Comments can be upmodded, downmodded, you can reply to a specific comment or follow the comment thread.

From an administration point of view, Disqus saves a lot of hassle of managing comments. In the case of setting it up with Drupal, it was a simple matter of installing the Disqus module. The module can be found here.

My Disqus profile is: disqus.com/people/JordanHackworth/

Feel free to leave a comment on this post to try out Disqus.

Wireless Internet Anywhere

Jordan — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:48:11 +0000

I recently picked up a Compass 597 EVDO Rev. A card from Sprint, allowing me to access the internet nearly anywhere. I also picked up a Cradlepoint PHS-300 wireless router. The PHS-300 is a very small, battery powered, Wi-Fi router designed specifically for USB EVDO cards or supported phones. By plugging the C597 into the router I have Wi-Fi for a about two hours.

Speed varies, in areas where Sprint has rolled out EVDO Rev. A I see anywhere from 800 to 1,600 kbps, which is about the same speed as DSL. The C597 is sold by Sprint, for $50 with a two year contract. The PHS-300 runs about $150 at the time of this writing.

Yes, $200 to start out and $60 a month is an awful lot to swallow, but sometimes it's worth it for the convince of having any of your Wi-Fi enabled gadgets online wherever you are.

Pictures of the router and card are here.

Do you do something different for wireless internet? Is there a cheaper, better way? Let's hear it in the comments.

Keeping Your Inbox Clean

Jordan — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 01:20:52 +0000

I want to outline a few different ways I keep my inbox free of email.

An inbox, in any form, isn't meant to hold things forever, it's designed to be the first place an item goes before getting sorted, or taking action against; Like deleting or throwing out the item. This same approach is the most effective and efficient way of using email.

First off, the way I handle email is only going to work for me, I'm just going to outline how I do things to give you ideas how to keep your inbox clear.

Second, since I own jordanhackworth.com I have all emails sent to that domain land in one email account, and any time I have to sign up for something I use the name of the service @jordanhackworth.com, for facebook I use facebook@jordanhackworth.com. Since I do this, it's very simple to automatically label incoming messages and have them skip the inbox. For facebook messages, I have a label setup that labels everything to: facebook@jordanhackworth.com as 'Facebook' and skip the inbox. If you don't own your domain, but use gmail, you can do this: somebody+facebook@gmail.com. Anything after the plus sign is ignored by gmail and sent to the address before the plus sign, in this case 'somebody.' From there you can filter it messages the same way I do, although some websites don't like the plus sign in an email address.

In gmail, I have various labels set up, for different types of common email types I receive. If I'm working on a project, I create a label for it. For instance, all emails I receive about www.daytonchristianchurch.com go into a 'Church' label. Labeling these things right off the bat will allow me to come back and find the info I need very quickly and easily. If it's something that I need to take action on, like adding new content to the site, I immediately put it into Things, my GTD program. If you have any type of TODO list, I suggest that you would add the action right then. If you don't use any type of TODO or GTD list, I would suggest that you star the email (if you use gmail) and later remove the star when you've completed the action.

Next, I have three labels for when I buy things online, 'Sales,' 'Shipping,' and 'Delivered.' They should be self explanatory, when I buy something I stick the invoice into my 'Sales' label and remove it from the inbox, later on when I get a shipping tracking number I'll add it to 'Shipping' and finally when I receive the item it will go into 'Delivered.' This is especially handy when you buy something and it gets lost in shipping, and you forget about it; (It's happened to me) You can just look at 'Shipped' and see that it hasn't delivered yet.

I have a 'Money' label for anything that comes in from my bank or from Mint.com. These are automatically sorted into that label.

I have a 'Pictures' label for when people send pictures to me, I also take the pictures out of the email and stick them in iPhoto right away.

Next, I have 'Review' and 'Respond' labels. Any time I get something in my inbox that I have to look at more before I can label it anything else, I'll stick it in review and take it out of the inbox. If I've read it but need to respond, it goes into the 'Respond' label. I tend to batch my responses instead of doing one here and one there, unless my response is time sensitive.

Everything else is labels for specific websites, such as Voice Mail for any voice mail that come in from Grand Central, and it's automatically labeled as well. With anything that doesn't need to be labeled, I'll archive it, and if it's something that I don't need any longer I'll trash it.

If you're interested in learning more about this, I recommend 43 Folders' Inbox Zero: http://www.43folders.com/izero

If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to leave a comment.