Update 18th July 2008: I called Domotec today and the difference in response was like night and day.  New component on it’s way to us now.  Horrah!
If you’d spoken to me or Lindsay recently you might have thought we were on comission from iRobot, the manufacturers of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. We’ve been raving about how easy it is to keep the carpet clean when it can automatically trundle around the floor every day. Indeed in the past couple of weeks we’ve convinced two other households that the Roomba sounds like a good idea.

It’s a shame then, that we’ve discovered this weekend that the 500 series (we have the 560 UK model) has a glaring design flaw and is backed up by simply terrible customer service.

Roomba has two counter-rotating brushes underneath that sweep dust up into it’s little dustbin. Unfortunately even if you maintain the device according to the manual, cleaning dust from the brushes every 3 to 5 cleaning cycles – the parts of the cleaning head module that turn the brushes can eventually get so gummed up with dust that they stick, failing to turn at all. The motor that drives these gears doesn’t seem to have any sensor that tells it the gears are sticking, so continues to try to drive at full speed. Eventually, as in our case, the motor appears to burn out. Now our Roomba, even with the brushes removed, can’t turn the gears that would have turned the brushes.

We have a battery powered lump of plastic that can run round the room doing nothing useful at all. Great.

The warranty in the supplied manual states (page 26 of this pdf):

This product is warranted to the original user for use in the UK for 12 months from date of purchase to be free from manufacturing defect at time of purchase.

I took that to mean that iRobot would replace or fix the faulty part, since it’s clearly a known problem. Indeed, in the United States iRobot have an advanced replacment programme – sending out the faulty part as soon as they are able. It is telling the in the US iRobot have a backlog of orders and are often out of stock of replacement cleaning head modules.

According to the iRobot UK Store, a company called Domotec are responsible for UK warranty repairs. I emailed service@domotec.uk.com with my Roomba serial number, a description of the fault and a request for a replacement part. They sent back the following message:

I am very sorry but the unit you have was not sold by us in the uk.If you call service we will arrange to collect the unit but the evaluation and the repair is chargeable,
Sorry

I bought my Roomba from the iRobot UK Store so was surprised that Domotec were denying support. Next, I phoned the number listed for iRobot’s UK customer service (0845 225 1919). I explained how the unit had failed and that I needed a replacement part. The guy on the customer service desk directed me to contact Domotec. I relayed the content of their email, and to my surprise he confirmed their stance.

He said that because the Roomba was outside of 30 days since purchase any support would be chargeable. We’ll ignore for now that I bought the device on the 29th May and today is the 30th of June as a bit of cruel irony.

I asked a specific question in order to clarify things: “Are you saying that I need to PAY a third party to look at a flawed unit that has broken down and PAY again for them to fix it?”

After consulting with his supervisor he said that was the case.

I quoted the warranty terms and made it clear we’d been maintaining it as per the manual, and said if iRobot would not honour the warranty, they could take the unit back and I’d stop recommending them to friends. At that, he talked to his supervisor again, then took down my name, phone number and email address promising that his supervisor would be in contact soon.

I hope that they are, and that they have a better resolution for me. If not I shall chargeback the amount on my credit card, box up the Roomba and let them know it is ready for them to collect. I shall also make sure that anyone else knows that until Roomba improve a) their build quality and b) their customer service, most people would be better off with a Dyson!

A test of Flickr’s long photos (video) service, showing Gnarly’s many sleeping positions via timelapse. A frame taken every 30 seconds played back at 24fps. Note that Sparkle cleans him when he gets onto the bed. Cute! Oh, and they appear to fight at the end too. :)
btw: how cool is Flickr video?

I’ve been hankering after the K800i since it was announced some time ago. 3.2MP camera, 3G data, mp3 player, lots of memory and all sorts of other bells and whistles meant it looked like a good replacement for my Samsung D600 and my aging digital camera.

As it happens, I ended up buying a new Canon IXUS 7MP camera before I went to Ascot recently, but since I’d already pre-ordered the K800 there seemed little reason not to entertain a new toy! Vodafone delivered it a couple of weeks ago, and as Richard has commented, we’ve been comparing notes since he has the K750 – this phone’s predecessor.

The photo on this post links to a set on Flickr that I took while wandering around the Longacre’s garden centre this past weekend. Without changing any of the default settings, or moving to macro mode or anything else I just snapped away allowing the camera to auto-focus as necessary. I’m quite pleased with the results, and Phil and Richard both seemed reasonably impressed too!

Technically the rest of the phone is excellent. The menus are responsive, the 3G makes checking email (and RSS feeds) a breeze, and I can even watch TV as long as I’m in a strong 3G signal area. Applications like Google Maps run beautifully – looking great on the K800′s screen, and again loading quickly thanks to the 3G connection. My next challenge is to work out a way to stream my MP3 collection from home to the media player on the mobile. It ought to be possible, I think!

The image you see here was taken via a webcam situated on the corner of Bleeker Street and MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.  The guy standing by the lamp-post I’ve zoomed in on is Phil, who is on holiday in New York with Catherine.

So, why do I have this picture?  Because we’re geeks, that’s why.  Phil texted me to let me know they were going to be near the webcam so I could get to a PC to capture the images.  I sat at my desk and texted him instructions 3000 miles away so he could look up at a (public) webcam, and wave to me.

This is the Netgear SC101, a budget (60 quid) SAN device. It takes two hard drives which it presents as storage to any client on the network running the Netgear software. Out of the box you can allocate storage to multiple drive letters, or even set up a pair of mirrored disks to protect your data.

What you can’t do, however, is create a spanned drive set – using all the space on both disks as one big volume.

Well, not without a bit of hacking anyway…

We (Phil and I) took two 300Gb disks and loaded them into the SC101, then installed the software on his laptop.  Using Netgear’s configuration tool we allocated all of each disk to a drive letter – that gave us two drives (E: and F:) each of 279.3Gb.  Those drives would also be available to any other user with the Netgear software installed on our network.  But we’re not that fussed about multiple users being able to access the storage, what we are interested in is creating one massive volume for storing media.

So, we uninstalled the software from Phil’s laptop, and installed it on his media server.  Again, it created E: and F:.  I opened Disk Management and deleted those partitions, then converted the basic disks to dynamic disks.  Once that was done I could create a new spanned volume using those unallocated partitions.  Voila!  Big disk!  The beauty is that when Phil gets another SC101 we can do the same thing and expand the existing storage non destructively.

We are trading the benefit of a SAN (multiple users off a networked device) for the ability to span the disks, but in our case that’s an acceptable trade off.

Why, you may be asking, didn’t we just fill the machine full of hard drives if we wanted lots of storage?  Well, we already did that… the system already has 1Tb of storage, this is for the overflow!

So today I installed Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Standard Edition.  Well, that is I tried to install it, but towards the end of the install I got an Error 1402: “Could not open key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Msxml2.DOMDocument.4.0\CLSID.  Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel.”  Taking a look at the key in question in the registry nothing looked out of place – the values weren’t corrupt, and the permissions were fine.

Since it was bitching about MSXML2.DOMDocument.4.0 (a part of MSXML 4.0) I downloaded the latest version of it from Microsoft to see if I could fix the problem by rolling it over the top.  It failed to install with exactly the same error as Virtual Server.  Joy!   What next?  The nuclear option!  Delete all the bits of the registry that start MSXML2.   Did that.  Reinstall MSXML 4.0 from the download (success!) and then try installing Virtual Server again.  Success!

Horrah.

Of course after figuring all this out, I find that someone has been through it all before anyway.  D’uh.

Funny. Rude, but funny.

for /r %i in (cover.jpg) do @rename "%i" folder.jpg

Simple. cover.jpg is the file you want to find, and folder.jpg is what you want to rename it to.

If I had thought it through properly I’d have written a script that actually found all the cover.jpg files then ran the rename against that list. This script actually attempts to rename the file even if it isn’t in the directory it’s looking at. This is less of a problem for me as the majority of the folders do contain a cover.jpg. ymmv.

Anyway, this is for my (and Phil’s) benefit rather than anyone elses! :P

Download the code and installation instructions.

I had to learn TCL to make this work. That’s a whole new language for me. Neat.