Short review: Hoover HNT 6614 top-loaded washing machine
I love it.
Hoover HNT 6614, installed and running
I love not having to go to the washing house with tons of laundry. I love not having to plan ahead and book time in advance when you need to wash your clothes. I love not having to clean up after others and worry about leftover deturgent, mud on the floor, filled up filters and and general yucky things.
I love that the Hoover is pretty silent, very energy preservant (A+), has short programs (less than half an hour) when needed and dries the clothes very well (1400 RPM spin cycle).
I love that it takes so little space yet manages a full load (6 kg) of laundry. I love that you can program it to start later, in case you want it to be just done by the time you get home from work or wake up.
I love not having to bend over and accidentally drag out other clean clothes on the floor when you try to pull out one shirt for hanging – top loaded is da shit!
Buying a washing machine was definitely worth it, and Hoover HNT 6614 is a very good choice.
For the last two years or so I’ve become increasingly irritated when doing the laundry.
What mostly bother me is the following:
About half the time people have been using twice the amount of detergent in the machine, resulting in leftovers that will go into the next wash that I have to clean up before doing my laundry. Since M has a very allergic skin we have to use a special non-allergic laundry detergent, and having to remove old lumps of strongly perfumed detergent isn’t fun.
People can’t read instructions. They often put powder detergent in the compartment for liquid detergent, resulting in it being completely clogged as this only uses a thin pipe for the detergent to pass. Which I have to clean.
People do not empty the fuzz from the tumbler-drier. Which I have to clean unless I want more fuzz, feathers and other stuff on our clothes.
People leave detergent powder on the clothes table used for folding clothes. Which I have to clean.
About everything that you should clean after laundry (machines, tables, floors…) is often dirty, sticky or powdery.
-So talk to your neighbors about it!
No can do. The wash house is shared on over 100 households, and the digital booking system doesn’t allow you to see who had the pass before you. And I doubt writing angry notes will help much.
Generally, it’s all about cleaning up after others in order to do our laundry that I’m tired of. So I’m thinking about buying my own washing machine.
A washing machine with A+ energy class costs about 5000 SEK including delivery and installation, so with the electrical cost and divided over 5 years (I have no idea how long you usually keep a washing machine so that is just a guess) it will cost about 25 SEK per week. After 5 years the cost drops to about 4 SEK / week based on todays electrical price. Water is included in the rent so that is not a problem.
The drawback is that it takes a bit of space and the clothes will have to dry in the apartment instead of in the washing house on the inner courtyard. On the other side I don’t have to go back and forth to the washing house on the inner courtyard every time. 😉 And I can wash whenever I need without having to book a time days ahead.
Has anyone ever regretted buying their own washing machine and prefer going to a washing room shared with hundreds of other people?
I just bought a GPS for my bike (can I still say bike even though it’s technically a scooter?).
It’s nice. I can even hear the voice quite clearly through the helmet while riding if I crank up the volume.
I tried going to work the other day using printed google maps, but still got lost since I had to go through the inner city (Stockholm) since I live on the north side and work on the south side.
I’ll give it another shot in a day or two, using my new Garmin Nüvi 205. Unfortunately there was no good way of placing it on the handlebar, but some cable ties and patience fixed it good:
I have now moved the web server from my old VIA 800Mhz Win2k machine to the considerately faster Raid Radio machine.
Hopefully, this will make the web server snappier and more responsive than the last one. If you come across any bugs or experience particular pages as slow, please leave a comment and I will look into it.
Last weekend I was at my parents place, and on saturday we went to a big second-hand house. On this particular day, they had 50% off on everything, so I made a few bargains.
I like optics, I have a big photography and movie interest and I love old technological stuff. This was perfect.
First off, I found a west german camera from 1970: A Praktica LTL with a really fat lens (Panagor Auto Tele 200mm). The lens seem to have taken som minor hits, but the camera housing was in surprisingly good condition. Auto timer and everything seems to work fine. Cost: 60SEK.
Second, I found two old Super8 cameras, still functioning.
The first one was an Elmo Super 306 from 1976. Fantastic optics! This one still has film in it, although I’m not sure how to get it out. I didn’t have any fresh batteries, and when I inserted some with about 30% left, a red E was shown in the viewfinder. Cost including carrying case: 20SEK.
The second Super8 camera I found was a Chinon 753 from 1979. This one doesn’t have quite as good optics, but it works better on the bad batteries – Both the film spinning drive and the motorized zoom works as a charm! Plus, it is really easy to handle since it only has very few buttons and knobs to worry about. Cost including carrying case: 25SEK.
When I was basically done in the store, I found on the top shelf a dirty case that looked “antique and German”. And I was right. Having some problems getting it down, I fell in love as soon as I managed to get the case open. Inside was an old Leitz diapositive projector.
I am having trouble locating the model number as I have not seen it printed anywhere, but it might be a version of the Leitz Prado from the late 1950’s or early 1960’s.
It is in near-mint condition and works like a charm. I have now placed it on the shelf next to my other projector, 45-50 years newer. And I only paid 30SEK for it!
Now, what to do with all this stuff?
Praktica LTL
Me holding my Praktica LTL
Panagor objective for Praktica LTL
Case for Elmo Super 306
Elmo Super 306 – Handle in
Elmo Super 306 – Handle out
Elmo Super 306 – Front view
Elmo Super 306 – The leather imitation is in quite bad condition
Elmo Super 306 – Viewfinder shows a glowing E: empty batteries?
Elmo Super 306 – How do I get the film out?
Case for Chinon 753
Chinon 753
Chinon 753 – front view
Chinon 753 – Case open and fully functioning
Chinon 753 – Serial number 045?
Dirty German antique case
Leitz slide projector
Close-up of the Leitz Wetzlar logo
Leitz Wetzlar optics
You can actually see the wire in the bulb from the front!
Front view of my Leitz diapositive projector
Leitz from the side
Open backside of the Leitz projector
Close-up of the light bulb in the Leitz projector
Leitz lives!
I like the pink lights on the underside of the projector
Actually, it was done about two weeks ago, I just hadn’t taken the time to give you the update.
It is now working fine, but I might replace the PSU with a full-sized ATX one due to unacceptable noise levels in the current FSP AC-DC 200W SFX12V PSU. Hiper HPU-4S425 looks promising. The problem is that a full sized ATX won’t fit in the case if located where the current PSU is. I am thinking about placing it above the drive cage which would also giving it better airflow and hopefully lower RPM. The problem is that I would have to build a second floor in the cage, and I’m uncertain how it would affect airflow and temperatures for the drives and motherboard (already actively cooled).
We’ll see.
Wanna see? Have a look:
I temporary placed everything in the first wooden case while waiting for the bakelite version to arrive.
The radio as it were before stripping it.
I started by removing the back.
With the help of my friends Mr. Screwdriver and Mr. Wire Cutter, the innards were soon cleaned out.
The actual radio receiver taken out.
Removing the cover plate. I used a towel underneeth as to not scratch the front.
Due to an extremely tight fit of the motherboard, I had to cut the lower part of the cover.
Some hot glue allowed me to use an original switch as a power button.
Screwing the power switch in place.
Testing that everything really fits. It’s tight, but it works.
From the front with the lower part of the cover gone.
Using a plastic clad wire as the station needle.
Some soldering were required for the LEDs lightening the glass.
Lightening in place. Green cardboard are now in place as glass cover.
Lights can be turned on with a simple switch and is powered by a regular 12V molex connector.
I used an oak board as base for the components. Plexiglass was used as a motherboard base plate.
Attaching the oak board from the bottom.
Plexiglass is also used to attach the PSU, along with double-coated adhesive tape to also prevent vibrations.
Everything in place, including a HDD LED placed right behing the Philips logo.
The wires fit tightly. Unfortunately, there was not enough molex connectors to power the lights as well. Will buy a cable splitter or new PSU.
To the left of the PSU is a dual USB outlet (gray cables) used to power the external DVD drive.
Computer in place and running. Using a flash and from a low angle you can clearly see the DVD drive on top…
But under normal circumstances you don’t notice the DVD drive.
After scrapping the Typewriter Project, I’ve been searching for a new case to house my new HTPC/NAS/Web server. I first bought a 50’s Centrum radio at the Tradera auction site. Unfortunately, when I got it the glass front was cracked and beyond salvation due to either bad packaging or bad handling by the delivery firm (or both).
I decided to replace it with plexiglass in front of a custom background printed on photo paper.
After having gutted the radio, cut and filed the plexiglass, measuring everything to a precise fit and ordering the parts, I browsed in to Tradera again. And almost fell in love. By that time there was 2 hours left with only one bidder for the auction of a Bakelite-cast Philips radio with room enough to fit everything I need for it. I won the auction paid 315 SEK for it, plus shipping.
Now I have received all parts for the computer except the radio itself and a slot-in DVD-drive that I ordered from eBay.
If you are not interested in technical mumbo jumbo, you can stop reading now.
AMD ATHLON 64 X2 5050E which I got almost 300SEK cheaper due to an error on the distributor’s part. I talked with the seller and he told me I would get the lower price anyway since I had already paid for it when the error was discovered.
2 x Western Digital 1TB Caviar GP (I already have 2 x 500GB drives which I will add at a later time)
Kingston HyperX DDR2 2GB 800MHz CL5. Only one memory slot on the board, and it doesn’t seem to support more than 2GB-
LIAN-LI EX-34 drive cage/cooler. Since I am going to use a total of 4 HDD’s in a custom case, it is way easier to use a pre-built drive cage than build your own.
FSP AC-DC 200W SFX12V PSU. Since both the PSU, motherboard and the drives all have very low power consumption, this should be more than enough. Plus, it’s way smaller than a normal ATX-PSU which wouldn’t fit in the radio.
Slimline slot-in USB-powered CDRW/DVD drive.
The Problems
First I tried to install Windows XP (Professional N Edition). Since I am using the drives in a RAID-1 configuration, I pressed F6 when asked to provide the needed drivers.
If you didn’t already know, SCSI and RAID configurations in XP requires that you before installing insert a floppy with the needed drivers. The problem is that the motherboard (where the RAID controller is located) doesn’t have a floppy connector. To get around that, I prepared a USB stick using HP Drive Key Boot Utility, making the USB stick appear like a floppy (and only holding 1.44MB). Unfortunately, XP’s installation procedure refused to recognize the USB stick as a floppy and would not read the drivers from it. This ment there was no way for XP to find the drives where the installation should take place.
I then decided to slipstream the drivers onto a custom installation CD using nLite. This worked fine and the installation went fine. However, upon starting windows for the very first time, I got a short bluescreen followed by a reboot. This happened again and again and Windows simply wouldn’t start. What I didn’t know at the time was that since the RAID drivers wasn’t signed, Windows diecided to replace them with it’s own default drivers during the final stages of installation. These did of course not work with the RAID controller, resulting in the repeating crash.
After much frustration I decided to give up and try Windows 7 RC, which had been released some day before. I had used the WIndows 7 public beta on my Eee 1000H previously, but switched back to Xp after about a month. I convinced myself that the RC would be better and I would feel more comfortable with it. So after some hunting down, I found a good ISO, burned it and installed Windows 7 on the machine. No hassle with drivers were needed, Windows found the RAID array all by itself. However, some time after installing Windows I started to get messages about the RAID array dropping out. Removing and rebuilding the array helped for a while, but the error returned. By this time (around a full day) I was also getting sick of Window 7’s I-will-not-let-you-decide-anything-on-your-own-because-humans-can’t-be-trusted attitude. Since this will be both a web server and a NAS, I want full control of it. Most of all, I want to feel that I am in full control of it. So buh-bye Windows 7!
Philips radio as showed in the ad
During this time, I had learned about the fault in my first slipstreamed XP CD and re-did it. Only this time, I instead of only adding my new RAID drivers I also removed XP’s default RAID drivers – Success! Installation went smooth, XP started as it should and no RAID error messages. For a while. Happy that everything was working as it should, I started to transfer files from the existing computers in the home network to the new computer (as this should now serve as file server). Copying some data, moving some. Stupid, stupid Frank. After a few hours, I rebooted the computer for some reason and noticed that the RAID controller during POST blinked red, stating that the array was degraded! I removed and re-added the drives from the array, but for some reason it refused to be rebuilt. What was worse, Windows now refused to start, giving bluescreens and rebooted every single time. I disconnected the drives from the motherboard computer and hooked them up to my other computer. During bootup, Windows wanted to check for consistency on the drives. Fine, I thought. Perhaps this will solve the problem. I went away from the computer and came back a while later, still doing the consistency check. Only the screen said “Deleting index $blablabla from blablabla” or something like that. I got some bad vibes but didn’t want to turn off the computer in the middle of that process. Windows then started, and the drives were almost empty.
Personal data I always keep backed up, so no worries there. What was really sour was that I lost about 250GB of movies and shows that I hadn’t watched yet. Many of them really hard to get, like Green Hornet (a TV show from 1966 starring among others Bruce Lee) or HD versions of various good movies. Plus all programs, games and other goodies. Well, what are you going to do – it’s not going to do anything good moping.
The real problem
After much searching and many, many forum threads later, I learned about TLER.
Apparently, it is quite common that a disk gets a read or write error under disk operations. When this happens on a normal desktop disk, the drive will enter a recovery cycle, attempting to repair, recover and reallocate the data. This cycle can take anywhere from less than a second to up to a couple of minutes. Since RAID controllers are designed to handle these errors by themselves, RAID-specific disks (often costing twice as much) have a feature called TLER, or Time Limited Error Recovery (name may vary with vendor), which prevents the hard drive from entering into a recovery cycle longer than 7 seconds. Without this feature, both the hard disk itself and the RAID controller will try to fix the problem at the same time.
Most RAID controllers will deactivate a disk in an array if it doesn’t respond in 8 to 15 seconds. Since my drives didn’t have TLER enabled, whenever they encountered a problem taking more time to fix than allowed by the controller, it would get thrown out of the RAID array. The remaining disk would keep on working as usual, and I would not be aware of the problem until the disks were completely unsynchronized. When rebuilding the RAID array without being able to synchronize, errors would occur and Windows would not boot.
The solution
Luckily, there is a small tool from Western Digital [Google] that enables you to turn on TLER their disks that normally has this disabled. I used the tool, and presto – no more problems! Too bad I didn’t know that before losing all that data and having to reinstall Windows yet another time.
Next
I will hopefully get my radio some time this week so that I can put everything in it (right now the motherboard is mounted on a piece of plexi glass with distances in between. I would like to cut a slot in the top of the radio for feeding discs to the DVD reader, but I am a bit afraid of cutting in bakelite. Anyone have any experience? I don’t want to ruin it completely so I might be mounting the DVD drive under the radio instead, adding bigger rubber feet to it if needed.
I was working on my typewriter project today and had finally removed all the parts needed so that what I basicaly had was an empty frame.
One of the beams wennt into the area where the motherboard would be located and needed to be removed. This was held in place by a number of pegs. Using a hammer and an awl/center punch, I began tapping the pegs to push them out. As they wouldn’t move, I used a little more force.
And that’s when the frame broke. Both front and back, so it was now completely in two pieces. As it is made out of cast iron, the chances of getting it repaired and still look would cost many times more than I paid for the actual typewriter (which was 80 SEK).
Economically, it’s no biggie. It’s just the time I’ve spent on it that feels a bit sour. It took over 10 hours to get it stripped down to the state it was in before it broke.
To commemorate the moment, I took some pictures of just the screws that I removed from the typewriter when pulling it apart. Note there were more screws than this on the typewriter, including tiny calibration screws for each and every key. These are just the ones I unscrewed.
So now what?
There are a few options. Either I find another typewriter with a more suitable frame. Or I use a NES casing (I have two in storage for such a purpose). Or I build a custom case. Or I find something else to build my computer into.
