Roo's View – Page 71 – A clever tagline should go here

Hacking Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Shower Cleaner

Like many, I enjoy a clean house. There are plenty of gadgets out there that help you keep on top of the various cleaning duties – Scrubbing Bubbles: Automatic Shower Cleaner being one of them. While some of the gadgets you pick up are really gimmicky, this one seems to help reduce some of the heavy cleaning the shower needs with minimal effort.

Now this doesn’t eliminate the need to clean the shower, and I should be honest here – when it does need cleaning I manage to neatly avoid doing the dirty work, but I can say that the Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner seems to lengthen the time between shower cleanings.

The only bummer is that the bottles are not refillable. We stretch ours out by only using it every 2nd day or so (instead of every day as is recommended). It still would be nice to be able to refill with a concentrate and dilute with water. The catch is – the caps do not screw off, so you can’t open the bottles.

Let’s take a look at how the cap works:

So on the left you can see a close-up of the threaded part of the bottle. Very sneaky, they’ve put a pair of small ‘ratchet’ nubs – there is another pair on the other side as well. Looking at the cap, you can see the corresponding teeth. Once tightened down, the cap is very solidly locked onto the bottle.

To hack this – you’ll need two of the scrubbing bubbles empty containers. From one you will recover a cap, from the other the bottle. To remove (destroy) the cap, I used a pair of wire cutters and a pair of needle nose pliers. I started a cut up the side of the cap, then grabbed the edge of the cut with the pliers and peeled it back. I used 2 or three cuts until I managed to free the cap from the bottle. Removing (destroying) the bottle to recover a cap was easier, but I used the same basic approach: a small cut, followed by the pliers to twist the material away. Go slow (and carefully with sharp tools!) since you want to avoid any damage to the part you are trying to keep.

The bottle must be modified to removing the nubs. The plastic is a hard plastic which seemed to respond nicely to a coarse file I had in my workshop. A few minutes of work and I had smoothed over the two pairs of nubs – the cap now opens and closes easily. Now we’ve got a refillable container.

HP Colour Laser Printer (CP1518NI) Review

So school is coming, and that gives me an excuse to buy a new printer. Back in 2005 I was tired of feeding my inkjet printer new printer cartridges at nearly $70 a pop, so I bought a B&W Samsung Laser printer which has served us very well. So far I’ve only had to refill it once.

Since 2005, colour laser printer prices have fallen steadily. You can now pick up one around the $150 mark if you do a little shopping. However, toner cartridges are still very expensive – and it almost makes sense to buy a new printer when you run out. Of course laser printers are not immune to the same “starter” cartridge trick that is played with inkjet printers – giving you a fraction (1/2 or worse) the toner that a full refill would.

Based on my previous experience with refilling the Samsung, I was keen to get another refill compatible printer. The Samsung CLP-135 can be found very cheaply, but the toner cartridge has a chip which prevents refills from working (this may change in the future). The HP CP1518ni can be refilled, but requires reset chips which come as part of 0f the refill kit. (I’ll probably get my refill kit via eBay closer to when I need to refill the printer)

I purchased the CP1518ni from FutureShop.ca (free shipping over $39), unfortunately there are no more left at this price ($230) currently. They also had the description incorrect, as it indicated that the unit came with only 1 toner (black) cartridge – the printer in fact had all 4 toners installed. I was comfortable shopping with FS due to their easy return it to the brick and mortar store policy.

If you’re keen to pick one of these up, CostCo.ca has them for $250, and staples.ca has a similar (but not as good) sale on. I’m a bit surprised that the US prices for the same printer are quite a bit higher (basically $400). Rarely are Canadian prices for this type of thing better than US prices. If you want to go cheaper, the HP CP1215 is similar but lacks the network interface and only has drivers for Windows.

Shipping was fast – ordered on Sunday, was here by Wednesday. The printer itself is quite heavy (40lbs), and quite a bit larger (15.7 x 17.8 x 10.0 inches) than the B&W laser we have. Setting it up was a breeze, as it is a network printer it just needed power and a net cable. The software (driver) was Mac OSX compatible, and the printer advertises itself using Bonjour on the network. I haven’t tried to print from Linux, but searching on the net seems to indicate it can be done without too much pain.

The first colour print was a full page photo onto regular paper. If you haven’t seen a colour laser print out, then the best description is that it looks like a picture from the newspaper. Jenn later printed out an activity chart (in colour) and that looked really good – and this is more typical of what I’d expect to print (think business graphics). I’m sure school projects will end up looking sharp (and colourful). Alison was very excited that we had a new printer, but we had to explain to her that the colour printer would not do the colouring of a B&W colouring page from the net.

UPS Monitoring

One of the things that I just hadn’t got around to after migrating to the new server was restoring my UPS monitoring. The first time I set it up, it seemed pretty involved – partly because the version of Ubuntu I was using (Dapper) needed some special USB configuration. Now that my server is on a more recent level of Ubuntu, it just works like it is supposed to.

The Ubuntu Community Documentation is well done and covers all the details. Basically I needed to install apcupsd. Reading through the known Linux USB issues listed on the APCUPSD site made my scratch my head a bit. It tells you to check the file /proc/bus/usb/devices to see if the USB device is recognized. My Ubuntu install doesn’t have this, I suspect it is due to usbfs not running. The lsusb utility seems to find the device just fine:

$ lsusb Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 001 Device 002: ID 051d:0002 American Power Conversion Uninterruptible Power Supply Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

So I figured I’d install and see what happened.

sudo apt-get install apcupsd apcupsd-cgi

You’ll note that I installed the CGI package as well so I can check in via the web, this is optional. You do need to do some minor configuration, this is covered in detail by the Ubuntu Community Documentation on apcupsd. In my case it was set UPSCABLE usb; UPSTYPE usb; and comment out DEVICE in the file /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf. Then change ISCONFIGURED to yes in the /etc/default/apcupsd file.

All that was left was to start the service:

sudo /etc/init.d/apcupsd start

and test it using apcaccess. I’ll leave the cgi-bin setup as an exercise for the reader.

So why bother doing this at all? Well, the apcupsd service (daemon) will shut down the machine in a controlled manner if there is an extended power failure, configured correctly it will also come back up when the power has been restored. Logs are also generated to indicate when power failures have happened. Knowing when, and how long the power was out is comforting.