drqware blog

Appliance repair – Take 2

drq — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:02:27 +0000

We realized on Saturday of this weekend that the dryer never stopped running. Even though the lint filter was clean and the ductwork was clean too. It looks like it is the timer. No matter where we set the timer (auto, timed, etc.), it never moved while the dryer was running. This isn’t going to be a $2.67 repair (like the dishwasher). A new timer is a little more than that. While I had some of the dryer apart I decided to vacuum out the cabinet inside. While rotating the drum by hand, I saw some noticeable wear on the drive belt. Oh well, another part.

New timer and drive belt have been ordered from www.appliancepartspros.com.

Dishwasher repair

drq — Sat, 29 May 2010 17:29:40 +0000

Our dishwasher (D/W) decided to act up recently. It was making ugly noises when doing something (I never figured out a pattern). It also wasn’t completely draining at the end of a cycle. I could hit the “Cancel” button and it would drain, but that bothered me and made me wonder just how clean it was if dirty water was left there after a part of a cycle.

This topic came up for discussion while I was laying on the physical therapist’s table getting my ankle worked on. Her recommendation (based on personal experience) was to put some white vinegar in the bottom of the D/W let it soak for a while then run it thru a cycle. I told her that I would try it.

We bought a gallon of white vinegar ($2.67) and I poured 3/4 of it in the bottom of the D/W this morning. I left it in there for at least 2 hours while we ran some errands.

After we put away all the groceries, I started the D/W. It ran thru a cycle with nothing in it. Actually I put the coffee maker filter basket in there since it had all that vinegar and I could kill two birds with one stone.

Well it drained completely! I also watched the force of water coming into the disposal drain and it was significantly stronger than before. Yay! I’m running one more cycle now (with a few items in the racks) to verify that it is indeed fixed. The noise is gone too.

$2.67 is a whole lot cheaper than a new D/W.

Varsym Patches for FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE

drq — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:55:56 +0000

Here’s the patches for varsym for FreeBSD 8.0. These have been modified from the Dragonfly sources to work with FreeBSD. Thanks to Matthew Dillon for including varsym in Dragonfly and Andrey V. Elsukov for helping me with creating these patches. This patch set include the fix that allows realpath to work correctly (thanks to John De Boskey for helping debug this).

To apply the patches, and rebuild do the following:

cd /usr
patch < varsym.patches.8.0
cd /usr/src/sys/kern && make sysent
cd /usr/src/sys/compat/freebsd32 && make sysent
cd /usr
then make world and kernel and install both

Patch file is here:

http://www.drqware.com/downloads/varsym.patch.8.0

This is part of the ln manpage from a patched system describing varsym:

VARIANT SYMLINKS
DragonFly supports a special kind of dynamic symbolic link called a
variant symlink.  The source_file of a variant symlink may contain one or
more variable names.  Each of these variable names is enclosed in braces
and preceded by a dollar sign in the style of variable references in
sh(1) and csh(1).
Whenever a variant symlink is followed, each variable found in
source_file is replaced by its associated value.  In this manner, a vari-
ant symlink may resolve to different paths based on context.  The facil-
ity supports per-process, per-user, and system-wide varsyms.
Varsym variables can be set with the varsym(1) utility.  Regular
environ(7) environment variables are not used to resolve variant sym-
links.
EXAMPLE
sysctl -w vfs.varsym_enable=1
ln -s 'a${fubar}b' test
echo 'Hello' > axxb
echo 'Goodbye' > ayyb
varsym fubar=xx; cat test
varsym fubar=yy; cat test

Berry younglings

drq — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 23:46:31 +0000

My new blueberry and blackberry younglings. Check these out:

Macbook utility

drq — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:02:30 +0000

Do you have a macbook and need a proxy at work and not at home? Don’t you wish there was a way to automatically switch from one network location to another based on what SSID you were connected to? That way you can open your macbook and it will just work. I have one that works for me. It requires “sleepwatcher” and growlnotify (from the Extras/ folder in a Growl dmg).

Download it from here:

http://www.drqware.com/downloads/updatelocation.tgz

Check it out!