This one's dumb. We've got the same trash can that everyone who shops at Target has. The inner removable pail is handy for keeping spills from pouring out the foot pedal hole, but its air-tight nature creates quite the vacuum when you're trying to pull the bag out.

|http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/sr=1-11/qid=1169524414/ref=sr_1_11/602-0868447-3796659?ie=UTF8&asin=B000JT7N7A|

After ripping the handles off yet another Glad bag trying to get it out of the pail I went to get a drill to poke an air hole in the bottom -- leak proof be damned. Next to the drill I saw a piece of 3/4" plastic tubing, which I ran from the top of the inner pail to the bottom.

This weekend I put in a Honeywell 360A whole house humidifier. The instructions said it should take an hour, and it only took me four. Nothing went wrong, which what you hope for when a project means cutting holes in your duct work, tapping into your water, and some wiring. Now when we wake up our throats don't hurt.

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Update: If you don't tighten down the compression fittings on the water supply line it will let go and you'll drain water into the floor drain all night. d'oh

When I don't post here in a while it either means I'm not building anything new or that I'm too busy to write about what I am doing. This time it's the later. Not that any of it's been exciting, but almost all of it involved using a saw, which totally counts.

Gwin, our eldest cat, has always kicked toys into the basement sump for the joy of watching humans pick them out later. Milo, on the other hand, likes running into the muddy sump and then running up stairs. To keep the cats and their toys out I built a little wooden frame to fit and covered it with chicken wire. It's ugly but functional.

After moving into the house I started a series of small home improvement tasks. Some of them have genuine safety reasons but many happened only because changing things demonstrates residence. Here's an incomplete list of things I've done:

• added a ceiling fan to the bedroom
• rewired the doorbell with modern wire so it doesn't ring everytime you walk past the dining room heat register
• added shelving, a phone jack and power outlets to create a server corner
• added appliance-grade outlets behind the stove and fridge (rather than the ungrounded lamp-grade extension cords running through holes in the floor they previously had)
• added a motion light to the break-in-ariffic back yard
• cleaned out the gutters (I knew there's a reason I got that condo)
• replaced the rotting wiring for the basement lighting

|https://ry4an.org/pictures/web/datacenter| |https://ry4an.org/pictures/web/motionlight|

Google has a new calendar service, and it's great. I really try to avoid hosted data solutions, but this one's just too good to pass up. My one gripe is that there's no easy way for non google calendar users to view the calendars. They're available live as both ical and rss/xml files, but the average home web user doesn't know what to do with either of those.

There are plenty of services out there that will display an ical file as a web page, but none of them I tested rendered the google ical output well, and all of them were packed with ads. Previously, I'd used software called phpicalendar to display ical files created by my old calendaring solution on the web, so I started there. It didn't parse the google output well either. However, with a little tweaking (see the patch in the zip file below) and some Apache trickery (see the README in the zip file) I can now get good phpicalendar output from google.

My Roomba had been on the fritz lately. When I powered it on it went forward a few inches and then started backing up in a tight circle. I figured it was a dirty sensor, but I cleaned everything I could see and had no luck.

My coworker Brandon pointed me to the Circle Dance website, which explains how a dirty internal sensor can cause just that problem. I've got an older Roomba, but the wheel assembly seemed the same. The site has great instructions and photos showing how one can fix the problem. They do, however, go through incredible contortions, including removing 10 screws and a hard to replace panel, just to remove a single screw.

Years back I wrote an IRC nick tracking script. It's served me well since then, but it has one major annoyance. When people changed their name slightly it would remember that name change, even though the old/new mapping didn't contain any real identity change information.

For example, when Gabe_ became Gabe it would display every message from him as <Gabe_(Gabe)>. That doesn't tell me anything interesting about who Gabe is.

Yesterday I got the warranty replacement machine for my (company's) Dell X300 laptop. Dell mailed me an X1, which seems a nice enough machine. It meets my firm criteria: under 3 lbs and thinner than an inch. If Apple would hit those numbers I'd be there in a second.

Unfortunately, it looks like getting Linux on to this thing is going to be a pain. Emperor Linux will sell an X1 with Linux pre-installed, but they want $450 to take the X1 I already "own" and put Linux on to it. If they're not able to simply mirror a debugged installation over, that says a lot about their volume. I value my time pretty highly, but $450 for a software install seems extreme.

My email server is configured such that email to ry4an-anything@ry4an.org gets correctly delivered to me. The dash and whatever is after it are retained but ignored completely.

When I give an email address to a company, say Northwest Airlines,I'll give them an email address that shows to whom it was given, say ry4an``-nwa``@ry4an.org. By doing this I'm able to check which companies are giving/selling/leaking my email address to spammers. Some of the leaks are surprising -- just a few weeks after giving out ry4an-philmont for the first time, giving it to the Boy Scouts, I started getting porn spam on it. When I called to let them know about the leak they assured me it was impossible.

Since this post I've upgraded my mailman installation to a newer version, which allows me to automatically reject messages from non-subscribers without having to resort to external scripting.

However, some of the mailing lists I run are subscribed to by a significant number of members who can't be counted on to post from the email address with which they subscribed, or indeed to even understand what that means. For those lists a policy that automatically rejects messages from non-members is just too draconion. Unfortunately, that means the few spam messages a day from non-members which make it past my filters but would normally be automatically rejected due to their non-member origins have be manually discarded so that I can approve the few non-member messages per month that really do belong on the list.