Like anyone else, I try to find the best deal on things. Sometimes the best deal isn’t the thing that’s cheapest up front. I work for a company that makes some of the world’s best lawn mowers, for instance, but they aren’t the cheapest.

Anyhow: after a series of cheap $20-$50 Walmart fans failing in various ways (buttons falling off, motors starting to take a minute to get up to half speed, etc.), I bought my first Vornado fan back in 2007. They’re expensive, but I think worth it in the long run.

Circulators

Vornado would like to call it a circulator instead of a fan. I maintain that it’s a fan that can be used as a circulator. Anyhow: the point of most of the Vornado fans is that they don’t just shove air out in front in a sort of random pattern. Rather, they emit a concentrated column of air that travels a long distance at a high velocity (think like a laser). The usual way to use a Vornado fan is to set it at the floor on one end of your room, and aim it at the edge between the wall and the ceiling at the opposite end of the room. This will create constant air movement throughout the entire room. You’re cool wherever you go. Vornado fans don’t have an oscillation feature because they don’t need it. Vornado calls this vortex action.

Another common use is to put one in the middle of a room and aim it straight up.

I find that they mostly live up to the promise. When you’ve got it correctly aimed, it does create a pleasant breeze throughout the entire room. It’s calm, and reaches everywhere. It does take some skill and occasional ingenuity to get that breeze working right. Sometimes if it’s really hot, you can also set one on the floor and aim it straight ahead along sofas and chairs. The air will just brush everyone, but at a high speed.

Most of their fans range in price from $50 to $100, though a few are outside that range. All of their regular fans come with at least a 5-year full warranty; some have a 10-year one.

I think we’ve got these fans in the house: one 750, two 735s, one 630, one 615, and at least four Zippis. Some of them I got at vornado.com, some on sale there, and some from woot. At full price, that would be over $500 of fans. So I better like them, eh?

The Zippi

The Zippi isn’t a circulator. It’s a personal-sized fan, but with a twist. It has no grill because its blades are made out of cloth, with a weight sewn into the tips. Turn it on, and centripetal force keeps the blades extended and working. It’s safe to touch and gives a mild sting if you put your hands into the blades.

It doesn’t move a lot of air, but it does work as advertised: it’s quiet (especially on low speed) and is a good personal fan. Occasionally after a bike ride to work, I’d prefer a bigger one, but overall it does very well. It uses very little space and folds down nicely if you want to travel with it. (It is AC-powered, not battery-powered).

Quality and Service

Overall, I’ve been happy with the quality of our Vornado fans. Recently we’ve had three problems: our 615’s power knob broke (I blame Jacob for that one), our 750 developed a loud rattle and whine, and the Zippi we keep on the nightstand also developed a rattle. I emailed customer service about it, and this is the part that really impressed me.

A human replied, and quickly. The put a new power knob in the mail immediately. They got the serial numbers from the other two. They replaced the Zippi and repaired the 750. They sent me a free UPS return label for the 750, so I didn’t even pay for shipping TO THEM.

The replacement power knob broke again within a week (it appears to be the only flimsy piece on the fan, and it’s within reach of a toddler…) They put another one in the mail.

The 750 arrived today with the rattle fixed, but a whine there. (It probably had the whine before, but I didn’t notice it due to the rattle, and therefore hadn’t mentioned it before.) I almost didn’t even ask them about it after all the expense they’ve gone to recently, but will go ahead and do so. I won’t be bothered if they said they won’t fix it, since they so zealously fixed everything else… but I suspect they will.

Oh: and included with the repaired 750 was a letter explaining what they found wrong, and what they did about it. It was personally signed by the consumer service manager (and her name was prominently listed). And because of the inconvenience of a malfunctioning fan (!), they included a card good for 20% off any of their fans. For the rest of my life.

It reminds me of the stories we hear about Japanese companies being personally embarrassed that one of their products wasn’t perfect. (GM: you could learn a thing or two here)

Conclusion

I’d say that few (5%?) of our Walmart fans are still operational after 5 years of heavy use. I’m sure that 100% of our Vornado fans will still be, and that’s saying something. The quality isn’t perfect (flimsy power switch on the 615) but is very good, and they do a good job of fixing problems when they arise. (Yes, imagine that: fixing a device when it breaks instead of throwing it out.) So even though they are more expensive than the Walmart fans, they’ll probably be cheaper in the long run.

I also like the circulator concept, though we do still use a box fan occasionally (to put it in the window and bring in cool air from outside).

Overall, we haven’t bought a non-Vornado fan since 2007.

And I never expected I’d post a review of fans of all things on my blog.

Update July 17: I bought my first Vornado fan in 2007, not 1997. Oops.

So a few days ago, I wrote about my failure to find a good music player. Since then, I’ve made some discoveries.

Amarok

• Version 1.4 can’t sort an iPod’s library by genre. Oh, and any version less than 2.x isn’t supported upstream anymore.
• Version 2 has mysteriously lost: the ability to see an iPod’s playlists, the ability to store a playlist in an m3u file and automatically keep it up to date, the ability to sync the Amarok statistics to an iPod, and more. Reminds me of the Gnome print dialog fiasco. “We’ve removed features. It’s better! Really! Oh, and we won’t support the old version either.”
• The entire Amarok 2 interface is very slow and sluggish.

So just as I was about to post about how nicely Amarok’s playlist saving works with Firefly, here I’m instead posting how I can’t use Amarok because it can’t even do what Rhythmbox does with an iPod anymore.

Banshee

• Can’t play most of my iPod tracks due to a long-standing case sensitivity bug.
• The only player other than gtkpod that groks iPod advanced playlists.
• No way to tell it where to put tracks copied from iPod to PC.
• Strangely thinks that every track is a different album with some albums.

Listen

• Now does actually see the iPod and seems to play it well.
• When you try to copy tracks from the iPod to the PC, it appears to work and gives visual cues that it’ll work, but silently does nothing.
• Strangely thinks that every track is a different album with some albums.
• Strangely doesn’t let you sort when you’re looking at a playlist.
• Doesn’t let you set a rating.

Rhythmbox

• Doesn’t see an iPod at all if it’s in fstab.
• Won’t play much of my iPod’s music due to a long-standing case sensitivity bug (since August 2008).
• Won’t let me sort anything when viewing a playlist.

Conclusions

I’ve renamed some of the directories on my iPod so they work with Banshee and Rhythmbox. I’m going to try Banshee for awhile and see how I like it.

So I have an iPod, and I have several PCs. I have the 60GB iPod, which is enough to hold my entire music collection. I want to have my music there, and on the PCs, and sync it all together: if I rate something 4 stars one place, rate it 4 stars everywhere. If I add music to my PCs, add it to the iPod, and in the same playlists.

Nothing like that appears to exist.

So here are my reviews of some of the Linux-based music playing systems. I am not all that happy with any of them. Actually, these aren’t reviews so much as they are wishlist (or more serious) bug lists.

Amarok

Last looked at it just before KDE 4.

• Copied tracks to iPod OK, but couldn’t put them in a playlist on the iPod.
• Poor sorting of stuff on the iPod. One giant list of albums, and no sorting of the playlist.
• Did seem rather stable.
• Showed album art from local collection only — not from the iPod.
• No apparent actual syncing; just copying back and forth.

Banshee 1.4.x

• Claims to sync with the iPod, but doesn’t actually document what it does anywhere. Messed up my iPod when I tried it.
• Mysteriously can only copy tracks from PC to the iPod; can’t copy tracks from iPod to the PC.
• Rescan library wouldn’t remove missing tracks. Not sure if it did anything at all.

Listen

• Couldn’t ever get it to even see the iPod. Complex interactions with hal. Numerous bug reports with complicated workarounds — or not. Fail.

Exaile

• Bug in the box that asks where the iPod is. Couldn’t get it to see the iPod.

Rhythmbox

• Doesn’t actually delete iPod tracks. Moved them to /ipod/.Trash-1000. Caused my iPod to fill up until I noticed that.
• Doesn’t update the iTunes DB at all, rendering new tracks invisible to the iPod.

gtkpod

• The best, most fully-featured iPod support out there. Far better than iTunes even.
• Docs claim to have some sort of iPod-to-PC syncing, but it is poorly documented and appears to break if the absolute path to the music on the PC ever changes — and doesn’t support more than one PC because it writes the paths to a file on the iPod.
• No built-in player, but can send tracks to xmms, xine, audacious, or the like.

Other

I have had brief experiences with the popular proprietary software such as iTunes. The one time I tried iTunes, it ironically scrambled most of the metadata on my iPod, especially the playcounts and the data that said whether or not I had listened to the podcasts. I am none too enamored with other Windows software either, and of course all this stuff is proprietary.

So, I guess music players are like mail readers. They all suck. Some just suck a little less.

We’re looking for an MP3 player for our kitchen. Ideally, it would be a standalone device that can browse and play music from our server using Wifi. It should have its own speakers and a reasonably small footprint. If it has an FM tuner, that’s a plus too.

I’ve tried searching, and found things such as the Squeezebox. But ones that are decent at this task seem to be in the $200-$300 range. That’s trange, because TV devices that do this are actually cheaper!

I’ve tried Googling, and can’t seem to craft good search terms.

Any ideas?

So I just recently switched to KDE 4 (still using it with xmonad, of course) and I just now ran into my first really big annoyance.

I just downloaded a PDF, and tried to copy and paste a bit of text from it. I used the selection tool, and Okular (KDE’s document viewer) offered to speak it to me, but said “Copy forbidden by DRM.”

pdftotext was able to convert the entire file to text format in an instant.

Why are people intentionally adding code to KDE to remove my freedom? This is crazy and nuts. Nobody should be doing this, least of all in Free Software!

I’ve written twice recently about my grandmother’s failing health.

Yesterday, she was taken to the hospital due to severe pain. After many hours of tests, I believe her current diagnosis are: pneumonia, congestive heart failure, diabetes, gangrene in the gallbladder, and nonketotic hyperosmolar coma.

She is able to hear and to see, but can’t eat, drink, or talk. She can communicate a bit in other ways though.

She has made it well known over the years that she doesn’t want heroic measures to be taken to try to save her life in a situation like this. At this point, her treatment is focusing on making her comfortable, and she probably has a few days to maybe a week or two of life left.

I went to visit her today. I walked in to her room, and she was visibly worse off than she had been a week ago. I said “Hi Grandma” as I went to her bedside. She — with effort — turned to look at me and managed to say “hi” back. Apparently that was the first word she said all day.

She was clearly in pain, sometimes grimacing from it. It was hard to see, but I am glad I got to be with her.

She wanted to hold my hand, and I sat by her bed for quite awhile doing just that. Sometimes my mom would comment that we all love each other, and I’d see grandma nod, or she’d give my hand an extra squeeze.

My brother and his wife showed up just as I had to leave. Grandma said hi to them too, and gave them a little wave.

I said goodbye as I left, and she was able to look at me and understand what was happening. I don’t know if that will be the last time I’ll say goodbye or not.

They seem to have found better ways to treat her pain by this evening, and she is resting comfortably by now. If her condition stays like this, she will probably be moved back to her nursing home room with hospice care on Monday.

She’s 94, and all of us knew that this moment would come someday. I think she is the most comfortable with the idea of her death of anyone, and utterly ready for it.

We got a new camcorder recently. I was trying it out after it was unboxed, of course. Jacob came over and got a glimpse of the LCD screen on it, which he called a light.

“Dad have a light. See it.”

So of course I rotated it around so he could see it. Then I couldn’t, so I was shooting blind. But he enjoyed it.

Here’s the video:

If the embedded video doesn’t work in your RSS reader, try this link.

That’s the first video I’ve ever uploaded to a public video sharing site. Finally catching up with the Internet, I guess.

“Old train! Smoke inside.”

That’s what Jacob said today when he saw an old steam locomotive at the old Union Station in Wichita, KS. Never mind that it’s been sitting there for decades — he’s got that concept of smoke coming out of steam engines down, and apparently realizes that for smoke to come out of them, it must start out inside them. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about a steam engine in a more cute way. Two is a fun age.

Today I needed to return a power supply to Circuit City, so Jacob and I made a day of it. He came with me to town (yes, us country folk “go to town”). We returned the power supply, then ate lunch at a Mexican place. Jacob would call it a “chips and salsa” place. Today he drank from a straw for the first time, and loved it so much that I think he got more liquid than food in him over lunch. Oh well.

After that, we went to the “eye cream” (ice cream) store – Cold Stone Creamery. Whenever Jacob hears talk of Wichita, he comments with something like “Go ichita. Eat eye cream. Go town.” Jacob ate his entire kid-sized chocolate ice cream with sprinkles. He loves sprinkles.

While we were eating ice cream, I asked him, “After you are done, would you like to see skyscrapers or trains?” “NO! Eat eye cream!” I don’t think he quite got the after bit, so I asked him again in the car after we were done eating. His eyes lit up. “SEE KYCRAPER!!” So we drove to downtown Wichita and saw the skyscrapers. (Yes, I am aware that other cities have much taller buildings. It doesn’t matter when you’re 2.) We got out of the car and he got to touch a few of them. In fact, the only way I got him back into the car without a meltdown was by pointing out the train crossing above the road on a bridge, and the fact that he’d still be able to see it from in the car.

That, of course, led to us needing to see trains. I drove him up the ramp to be trackside by the old Wichita Union Station. There weren’t any trains going past right then, but he did get to see the locomotives at the Great Plains Transportation Museum through the fence.

We started to head home, but he really wanted to see the train again. So we stopped at the park in Newton to see the old ATSF locomotive there. By that point, it was waaaay past naptime and we narrowly averted a fit when I informed him that no, we could not go inside the adjacent grain elevators.

So all told, I think Jacob had a fun day with his dad.

Now, in case there is any doubt out there about what kind of child Jacob is, I should point out the things he notices in church lately.

First off, when we get into the sanctuary, we sit in the back. But first thing he said lately when we walked in was “TWO THERMOSTATS!” Yes, he saw two thermostats at opposite ends of the room up front, pointed right at them, and was very excited. He also notices the organ speakers (“oran peaker”), “big cross”, ceiling fans, and now “furnace vents”. Yes, furnace vents.

At the Christmas Eve service, there was a candlelight part. He loved it. “Daddy hold fire!” A few people nearby smiled. While we sang Silent Night, he really wanted to blow out the candle. When it was time, I said “OK Jacob, now you can blow it out.” A very excited “Fffffffffffffffff” followed, and several people nearby were chuckling by then. I also let Jacob put the candle in the box on our way out. He said, “I put fire in box. I did it!”