Over the summer we did a bunch of landscape work, including a new patio with an outdoor fireplace and a Fire Magic built-in gas grill. The renovation wasn’t cheap, but we haven’t regretted it a bit, especially with the evenings cooling down.

Now that we’ve had the grill for a few months, I thought I’d write up a quick review for anyone that might be considering one. Long story short, it’s far from cheap, but you definitely get what you pay for.

The model in question is the Fire Magic Aurora A540i. The “i” stands for island, though they also sell the A540s which is a standalone model that comes mounted on a stainless steel cabinet with casters.

As far as looks go, I’ve included a picture below. Keep in mind that I took it with my iPhone, so it doesn’t really really do the grill justice. It’s completely stainless steel and absolutely gorgeous.

The cooking surface is 540 square inches – 30″ wide and 18″ deep – and the burners (there are three of them) are cast stainless steel and independently controlled. There’s also a warming rack above the main cooking surface.

As far as usability and cooking performance go, our Fire Magic grill has been fantastic. It’s very straightforward to use, and we haven’t had a single cooking mishap. The temperature is incredibly even throughout, and the temperature range is amazing, making it very versatile.

The entire unit comes with a lifetime warranty, so we’re viewing this as a one-time investment that should (better!) serve us for years to come.

UPDATE: Just figured out how to grill bananas. Yum.

Months ago I reported on a problem that I was having with our new Sony Bravia LCD TV… The screen was going black for a few seconds at seemingly random intervals when watching a DVD over HDMI.

Well, I’m pleased to report that I’ve fixed the problem. On a hunch, I replaced our el cheapo Philips HDMI cable from Walmart with a similarly cheap, but well-regarded HDMI cable from Amazon.

Guess what? For the price of a $10 cable, our beautiful new TV works exactly like it’s supposed to. The cable in question is a Mediabridge Ultra Series High Speed HDMI cable (link).

If you’ve ever priced HDMI cables, there’s an important lesson here. While there are differences in cable quality/performance, you don’t have to spend an arm and a leg to get a good one.

We have a 2004 Honda Odyssey with about 110k miles on it. We’ve never really had any problems with it, and have always taken good care of it. Nonetheless, we just had a bit of a transmission scare.

Over the past couple of weeks, my wife has gotten a blinking green “D” (drive) light on several occasions. A quick check of the owner’s manual revealed that this behavior signals possible transmission trouble.

As it turns out, the 2nd generation Odyssey has a history of transmission trouble. This was especially true of those built between 1999-2001, though some problems persisted until at least 2003.

Anyway, our van hasn’t been showing any symptoms of transmission trouble – it’s shifting smoothly and reliably, never slipping, etc. – but you never know…

A bit of Googling revealed that this warning light can foreshadow anything from a minor transmission repair (replacing a pressure switch) to a full blown transmission failure.

In our case, we lucked out. We dropped the car with our mechanic this morning and got great news later in the day. The warning light was apparently alerting us to a problem with the 4th gear pressure switch, which is a simple and (relatively) cheap fix.

They got their hands on the part later in the afternoon, and had us fixed up and ready to roll by the end of the day.

I just spent the afternoon helping my son recover from a nasty virus on his Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook. We’re still not sure how exactly he got it, but he didn’t tell me about it right away, and his computer wound up completely disabled.

After getting him back up and running, I decided to change anti-virus software. Back in the day, we were running Avast, but switched over to Avira at some point. Well… Avira clearly didn’t protect him, so we’ve decided to try AVG instead.

Once I got his netbook configured, I turned me attention to son #2’s computer, which is the exact same hardware. He’s never had virus problems, but I decided to switch him over to AVG for consistency.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get AVG to install. It kept telling me that Avira was installed, and that I had to use the “Add/Remove Software” control panel to get rid of it. Trouble is, I had already done that.

Apparently some critical Avira fragment(s) had been left behind, making Windows think it was still installed. At the same time, the Add/Remove control panel thought it was gone, so it didn’t show up in the list of software that could be removed.

Frustrated, I did the only thing I could think of… I re-installed Avira so I could try removing it (again). Miracle of miracles, it worked, so I was able to get AVG up and running.

More generally… If you’re ever asked to remove software that you’ve already removed, you’ll know what to do: try re-installing and then re-uninstalling the software.

My son’s Asus Eee PC 1000HE running Windows XP recently contracted a nasty virus. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell me about it right away, and we ended up having to completely restore his system and start over from scratch.

Here’s the story in a nutshell… He was trying to download music and movies from various places on the web when he got infected. He was running Avira with the latest definitions, but that didn’t seem to help.

Instead of telling me what happened, he decided to troubleshoot the problem himself. The details from here aren’t entirely clear, but he ended up installing Avast on top of Avira, which is a definite no-no.

By the time he brought the problem to my attention, he couldn’t get Windows XP to boot, and neither could I. I tired rolling it back to the last known good configuration, but it just went to a blank screen and froze.

I next tried booting into Safe Mode, but it wound up hanging when it tried to load “isapnp.sys” and refused to go any further. Not a good sign. In the end, we decided to punt and wipe the drive.

We ended up booting the System Restore DVD from an external DVD drive, and we restored the factory settings from there. Fortunately, he didn’t have anything irreplaceable on his computer. If he had, I would’ve worked harder to recover the data.

And now… We just need to grab the music and movies off his iPod Touch. We’ll likely have to use something like Senuti on my Mac to do this, and then shuttle everything back over to his netbook from there.

If you have a Garmin nuvi GPS, then listen up. I just received an e-mail from Garmin about a product safety recall relating to a potential risk of the battery overheating in your GPS unit. Bummer, huh? Here’s the scoop…

Garmin has decided that a defect which relates to motor vehicle safety exists in certain models of Garmin’s nuvi brand of portable automotive GPS products due to a potential risk of battery overheating. Garmin has identified potential overheating issues when certain batteries manufactured by the third-party battery supplier within a limited date code range are used in certain Garmin nuvi models with a specific printed circuit board (PCB) design. It appears that the interaction of these factors can, in rare circumstances, increase the possibility of overheating, which may lead to a fire hazard.

The affected units include a small subset of units with the following model numbers:

• Garmin nuvi 200W
• Garmin nuvi 250W
• Garmin nuvi 260W
• Garmin nuvi 7xx and 7xxT (where xx is a two digit number)

To determine if your GPS unit is included in the recall, visit click through to this site and enter the serial number from the back of your GPS.

If your GPS is among the 1.25M that are reportedly affected, you’re supposed to fully discharge the batter by unplugging it and running it until it turns off. You’ll then have to return it to a Garmin-authorized service center to have the battery replace and a small spacer inserted alongside the battery.

The good news is that the repair is free, and you will not have to pay any shipping charges, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.

This is just a quick note to say that the Netflix app has finally been updated to work with the iPhone and iPod Touch (it was previously iPad only). You can even stream over 3G on the iPhone. Pretty slick. Get it here.

I love technology as much as the next guy, so when Google Voice came out, I was intrigued. As handy as it seems, however, I just couldn’t find a good use for it. For me, it was a solution in search of a problem.

I mean, sure… I could start using Google Voice as my “one phone number to rule them all,” but that would mean telling everyone about my new number. Maybe if/when my number(s) change in the future, but right now? No thanks.

That being said… My opinion changed when the kids headed back to school.

As parents everywhere are no doubt aware, you have a to fill out a truckload of paperwork at the beginning of the school year. Have multiple kids? Then you have multiple sets of paperwork, especially if they’re in different schools.

One of the big things that they ask for at the beginning of the school year is emergency contact information. The problem with this is that, if your phone number changes, you’ll have to change your emergency info all over town.

Enter Google Voice. Simply sign up for the free service, get yourself some shiny new digits, and use them whenever you’re asked for emergency contact info. On the back end, you have full control over where calls to your Google Voice number wind up.

If your phone number ever changes, just tell Google Voice. There’s no need to change the number you’ve handed out all over town. You can even send your calls to multiple phone numbers at once.

In other words, you’ll no longer have to provide you home, cell, and work numbers. You can just give your Google Voice number and set it up to ring all of your phones at once.

Going forward, I’ll probably transition to the “one number to rule them all” mindset, but for now… This is a very handy solution for parents who want to maximize their reachability.

After moving into our first house, which had an all brick exterior, I was surprised to learn that wind-driven rain can cause problems with water intrusion through a brick wall. While proper flashing and weep holes should keep this from creating problems, those details are rarely done right.

In our case, the masonry contractor had failed to install the through-wall flashing and weep holes above our walkout bay window. The resulting problem is that water can soak through the brick and mortar and it’ll have no way to get out.

In our case, we ended up with water dripping down into the ceiling over the bay window following heavy, wind-driven rainstorms. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to correct such shortcomings after the fact, as you have to tear out the brick veneer to get at the problem.

How to seal a brick wall

The good news is that, after a bit of research, we found a workable solution — sealing the brick. To seal the brick, we used a product called siloxane (a.k.a. silane), which is penetrating sealer that absorbs into the brick and mortar to produce a water-repellent barrier.

This sort of sealant is different from silicone-based masonry sealers that coat your masonry with a thin film. Instead, siloxane soaks in and partially plugs the gaps in the brick and mortar. The end result is an invisible, breathable, water-repellent barrier.

Siloxane can be applied with a brush, roller, or sprayer. In our case, we used a cheap tank sprayer from the lawn and garden section at Home Depot. If properly applied, the barrier should last 3-5 years. In our case, we moved away after three years and it was still going strong.

How to seal an outdoor fireplace

More recently, we had a new patio installed, complete with a brick outdoor fireplace. Following installation, the mason returned to seal the brick. Guess what he used? Yep, siloxane.

Once again, the siloxane is doing a great job, and not just on the brick… He also used it on the natural stone countertops on either side of the fireplace.

I recently ran out of hard drive space while ripping DVDs. The resulting lack of Virtual Memory caused Mac OSX to “pause” several applications. Once I freed up some additional space, I wanted to unpause them, but was unsure how.

As it turns out, the solution is very simple, though it requires a bit of UNIX magic. For starters launch the Terminal app. Next, find the process in question using the ps command, as follows:

ps -ax | grep Word

This will return a list of processes with “Word” in their name. Find the relevant process (for me there was just one – Microsoft Word) and look at the first number in that row of the list. This is the process ID (PID).

To revive that process, issue the following kill command:

kill -CONT ###

Where ### is the PID. The application in question should once again be accessible.

Alternatively, you could force quit and relaunch the application, but doing so could cause you to lose whatever you working on.

Our kids go back to school every year in early August, so we’ve made a tradition of taking one last trip to the beach at the end of July. This year, we headed to St. Augustine Beach, Florida. It was a great trip, and fun was had by all.

For those that have never been there, St. Augustine Beach is a small beach community along the Atlantic coast of Florida. It’s directly adjacent to St. Augustine, about an hour south of Jacksonville, and about an hour north of Daytona Beach.

We stayed in a beachfront condo along A1A Beach Boulevard, which is the main drag, and we loved every minute of it. While the beachfront is all developed in this area, nothing is more than about three stories tall, and the whole stretch has the feel of an old school beach community.

We hadn’t been there before, so we were a bit concerned about the fact that people are allowed to drive on the beach. This is apparently quite common in that part of Florida, and I’m pleased to report that it was never a problem.

The beach is amazingly wide, and car traffic is both very slow and restricted to a single “lane” up near the dunes. Since we were staying right on the beach, we just walked out each day. But if we didn’t have such a great location, the ability to drive out to the beach would’ve been very handy.

I’ll post more details on things to do in the St. Augustine area in the coming days.

Back in the day, there were two flavors of the Wordpress blogging platform: Wordpress and Wordpress MU (Multi-User). With the release of WP3, these two versions have been merged, but the MU functionality is hidden by default.

If you’d like to create a multi-user blog, you can edit wp-config.php to enable MU support. Simply add the following line of code:

define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

Next, save the file and then reload the Wordpress Dashboard. You should now see a new “Network” tab under the “Tools” menu. This is where the magic happens.

Note that, while it’s technically possible to convert an existing Wordpress install to Multi-User format, this is most easily done with a fresh install on a new site.

I still haven’t done this myself, but have considered creating a multi-topic blog using the multi-user functionality. I’ll be posting more in the future on this topic if I decide to go this route.

After 12 months of flawless performance, I was disappointed yesterday morning when I discovered that the GPS on my iPhone 3Gs wasn’t working. I had just fired up RunKeeper for my morning run, but couldn’t get a signal.

Since I was in a rush, I decided to just get going and not worry about tracking my run. Later in the day, however, I spent some time figuring out what was going on.

A few days earlier, I had updated my phone to iOS4 and then used jailbreakme.com to jailbreak it. I was thus a bit worried that I had messed something up and would have to restore my iPhone.

The good news is that it was a very simple fix. I had somehow messed up the “Location Services” preferences and just needed to switch it back on for certain apps. To do this, I went into the “Setting” and selected “General.” From there, simply select “Location Services” and make sure that: (1) the master switch is set to “On,” and (2) your apps of interest are likewise enabled.

That’s it. A very easy fix for what could have been a troublesome problem. I’m still not sure what caused it, but now that it’s fixed, I don’t really care.

Are you still running iOS 3.x.x on your iPhone? If so, you should go ahead and update to iOS 4.01. The reason I suggest this is that Apple has patched the security flaw that made the latest jailbreak possible, and you’ll soon be unable to grab 4.01.

Not sure how to update? Simply fire up iTunes. Assuming that it’s set up to auto-update, you should see a message asking if you’d like to update your iPhone. If not, simply click on your iPhone in the left sidebar and then click the “Check for Update” button.

Once you’ve updated, do a quick backup and then surf on over to jailbreakme.com using Safari on your iPhone and simply swipe the slider to jailbreak. It’s so easy a kid could do it. Literally. In fact, I let my son jailbreak my phone for me.

Oh, and after jailbreaking, you should deactivate auto-updates so you don’t inadvertently update to the newer, non-jailbreak-able version of iOS when it’s release.

I’m sure that by now you’ve heard all about the surprising lack of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. In the time since BP finally capped the well, the amount of oil on the surface has fallen dramatically. So where did it all go?

According to a recent CNN report, NOAA is estimating that:

• 25% of the oil has evaporated or dissolved
• 25% of the oil has been captured, skimmed, and/or burned
• 24% of the oil has been dispersed (naturally or via chemicals)
• 26% of the oil remains to be dealt with

The implication here, of course, is that we’ve taken care of roughly three-quarters of the problem. On the one hand, that’s a rather sad state of affairs. After all, that remaining quarter is still a huge amount oil.

On the other hand, things are much worse than they seem. In fact, even if we take the numbers above as gospel, only about 25% of the oil has actually been actually removed from the environment.

Believe it or not, the ocean is full of life below the surface – or at least it used to be. Dissolved oil is still toxic to many marine organisms, and its full impact likely won’t be known for quite some time.

And that dispersed oil? It’s still mostly out there. It’s just been broken into small droplets and sent into deeper water. Remember those huge underwater plumes of oil? They’re almost certainly a byproduct of chemical dispersants such as Corexit.

The idea behind dispersing the oil was to reduce its impact on wildlife by keeping it out of wetlands. Dispersing oil is also thought to help speed its degradation. These are admirable goals to be sure, but they largely ignore the impact of the dispersed oil on the undersea life.

And of course, this all ignores the effects of the chemical dispersants themselves, which are known to be toxic. Here again, the full effects aren’t likely to be known for some time, as it will take time for things to ripple their way up the food chain.

The bottom line here is that things aren’t always what they seem. Just because we can’t see as much oil on the surface doesn’t mean we’ve solved the problem. In this case, out of sight definitely shouldn’t be out of mind.

Do you ever leave unread messages in your Gmail inbox? If so, then you might be interested in the “TrueNew” message count that was introduced with the MailRoom app for iPhone. In short, TrueNew lists how many new unread messages you have.

I’ve come to rely on this feature heavily in Mailroom, and was recently poking around for a similar solution in Mailplane, which is my desktop Gmail client of choice. While this feature isn’t officially supported, you can hack it into Mailplane pretty easily.

Here’s how:

1. Quit Mailplane
2. Download and install SIMBL
3. Download the TrueNew Count SIMBL plugin and unzip
4. Put TrueNewForMailplane.bundle in ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins
5. Restart Mailplane

That’s it. When you Mailplane restarts, it should now have the TrueNew count in the left sidebar of the Gmail interface. Unfortunately, this plugin doesn’t seem to support TrueNew in the Accounts drawer, which is where it would be really helpful.

The reason for this is that, if you use Mailplane to manage multiple accounts, you want to see if there are any “TrueNew” messages waiting to be read before you bother switching accounts. This is how it works with Mailroom, and it would be fantastic if you could do the same thing in Mailplane.

For now, I guess I’ll have to just rely on my memory of the “unread” count the last time I logged in. In the future, I’m hoping that the Mailplane developer will provide official support for “TrueNew” in the Accounts drawer, where it really belongs.

Our 12 year old’s iPod Touch headphones recently stopped working. More specifically, there was no sound coming out of the right ear. Unfortunately, since these are the same headphones that ship with the iPhone, complete with the on-wire volume control and microphone, they’re not cheap to replace.

My initial reaction was that he hadn’t plugged them in properly, and that if he would simply seat them more solidly in the jack, then both ears would start working again. Unfortunately, that didn’t work.

Next, we tested in another device. Again, no sound. That was actually good news, as it meant that his iPod Touch headphone jack hadn’t gone bad; rather, it really was the headphones that were failing.

Interestingly, the volume control and mic are on the right headphone wire, and they work just fine. Thus, the problem seems to be higher – probably where the wire connects to the headphone itself.

Anyways… The good news is that there’s no visible damage to the headphones, and his iPod is still under warranty. Thus, we should be able to get them swapped without having to buy a new set.

Do you have an iPhone and an iPad? Do you wish you could share your iPhone data connection with your iPad for a little surfing sans wifi? Sure, you could buy a 3G iPad and pay a ton for the service, or… You could jailbreak your iPhone.

Unleash your iPhone

Jailbreaking your iPhone sounds scary, I know. But guess what? It’s very easy, completely reversible, and totally worth it. Once you’ve jailbroken your phone, simply install MyWi, which lets you broadcast a local wifi network using your iPhone’s data connection.

Yes, the newest version of MyWi costs $19.99 (upgrade for $9.99), but that’s a one-time fee. That’s much better than paying an ongoing fee to AT&T for a data connection when you’re already carrying one around in your pocket. Isn’t it?

What about tethering?

I know what you’re thinking… Why go to the trouble when I can just add the tethering option to my iPhone service plan? Well… For starters, tethering costs $20/month. Moreover, when you add tethering, you’ll have to drop down to one of AT&T’s capped data plans. In other words, say goodbye to unlimited data.

But the bigger issues is that the iPad is not compatible with iPhone tethering. The officially supported tethering methodology works only via Bluetooth or USB, but the iPad can’t connect to either of these. Rather, the iPad requires either wifi (thanks, MyWi!) or a direct (and costly) 3G connection.

So do yourself a favor… If you have an iPhone and an iPad, jailbreak your iPhone, install MyWi, and surf to hearts content on your iPad no matter where you are.

Note: There’s at least one iOS4 jailbreak in beta, and a couple of people have also reported jailbreaking the iPhone 4. For the time being, however, I would recommend holding off on the iOS4 upgrade.

We just got back from a long road trip during which we logged nearly 3000 miles. When we make such trips, we depend heavily on our portable car DVD player to entertain the kids. Unfortunately, on the way out of town, we discovered that certain DVDs wouldn’t play.

The problem presented itself as a “No Disc” error when attempting to mount a DVD. The DVD player in question is an Insignia dual screen unit from Best Buy. While it’s a few years old, it only gets used on a handful of trips per year, so there’s no reason it should be acting up so soon.

When we started having problems, I first thought it might have been a disc formatting issue, as these were mostly movies that I had ripped and burned. As the trip wore on, however, the problem got worse until every single disc resulted in the “No Disc” error.

Thinking that it might be a dirty laser lens, I picked up a CD/DVD lens cleaner and popped it in. Unfortunately, that didn’t help. I next turned to the (gasp!) instruction manual for help.

Apparently moisture can be a problem, and the manual suggested turning the unit on for an hour without a disc. Once again, no dice. Given how important the DVD player is to peace in our car during extended road trips, I relented and picked up an RCA dual screen DVD player at Target.

Once we got home, I decided to investigate the problem further. Apparently the mechanism responsible for moving the laser back and forth across the disc gets gummed up and/or the lubricant dries out, resulting in an inability to read a disc.

This “No Disc” problem seems quite common regardless of brand, as I’ve seen complaints from owners of portable DVD players made by Insignia, RCA, GPX, Philips, Sony, etc. The fix is to open it up (thus voiding the warranty) and manually loosen up the head. You might also try cleaning and/or lubricating the gears to get things working again.

I haven’t had a chance to try this fix myself yet, but it doesn’t sound too hard.

With Apple’s release of iOS 4 just around the corner, you might be wondering how to stop iTunes from automatically updating the system software on your iPhone or iPod Touch. This is particularly important if you’ve decided to jailbreak your device.

The reason for this is that a software update will overwrite your jailbreak, and you likely won’t be able to redo it until the jailbreak community comes out with a new hack. Once there’s a jailbreak method available for the new software, you can go ahead and upgrade.

The good news is that iTunes will not update your device without your permission. In fact, it doesn’t even have an auto-update option. It will, however, automatically check for software updates. If it finds a software update, you’ll then be asked if you wish to install it.

If you don’t even want it to check for updates, simply open the iTunes preferences, make sure that you’re on the “General” tab, and uncheck the “Check for new software updates automatically” option.