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As I continued to go through my house doing small repairs and upgrades, the toilet was next up in the queue. What was wrong with the old one?

• Getting old and the flush valve was leaking, so it was wasting water and topping of the tank every 30min or so.
• Fill valve becoming unreliable. Refill speed was slowing down and the float was starting to stick
• Non-elongated bowl. For guys, this is an annoyance.
• High water usage. I think it used 3.5 gallons per flush.

So I started doing my usual research. I knew that the new toilets had to be 1.6gpf or less, and there were even some out there that were 1.28gpf. These new 1.28gpf are called High Efficiency Toilets (HET), and in some municipalities have rebates. That got me intrigued. What I found were some good things to have in a toilet.

• Flushing ability. They actually have testing to see how many grams of waste a flush will take away. Above 500grams (slightly over 1 pound) of waste removal is more than adequate.
• A large water spot. This is the amount of surface the water covers the bowl. The larger the better, to keep your “kids” under the pool, as opposed to stinking up the room by hanging out “by” the pool.
• Rim/bowl washing ability. Sometimes you splash, or leave bits out on the sides, so you want the flush to clear away every inch of the bowl.
• Low water usage.

I stuck to gravity fed units as other pnematic or mechanical assists will probably have more repair costs. Part replacement was also a factor, but not as much as many of the 1.28gpf units have more proprietary flush valves. I ended up choosing a Kohler Cimmeron 1.28gpf two piece toilet with Class Six Flushing Technology. What is class six? It’s an improvement on class five, which is just a marketing term Kohler made up to differentiate its line of 1.28gpf toilets. Basically, the class five had good flushing power, but poor rim wash ability. Class six remedies this. See the video on class five and six. Toto also makes a good 1.28gpf toilet called the Drake II. It’s a bit pricier than the Cimmeron, which I got for $238 plus tax at HD.

A few thoughts on removal/installation

It’s basically pretty straight forward. You’ll need an adjustable wrench, a small putty knife (very handy) to remove the caulking (on a hard floor after you remove the bowl) and the wax ring. A hacksaw to cut the bowl bolts back so the caps can fit. And locking plyers to hold that bolt steady — optional but I found it helped because the bolt is not very secure (it locks into PVC on the floor). Buy two new fill hoses. One the size you think you need, and one the next size up. You’ll probably need the longer one. A large sponge and a disposable bucket (unless you want to clean it) to soak up residual water in the tank and bowl (there’s water in there even after the last flush). A good idea is to wash the toilet before you actually start the removal process. I neglected to do that and wish I did. Scrub the inside and outside (as people often miss and there’s dried stuff on the outside).

Update:

Toilet Shims. If your toilet isn’t level, there are plastic shims available that you can use to level and keep the bowl from rocking. Simply insert them into place and cut away the excess and caulk around the bowl.

Also, as a rule of thumb, do not caulk all the way around the back. Leave it open in the back so you can see leaks puddle on the floor before they flood the downstairs room (if you have a downstairs).

A humidifyer is good to have around during the dry winter months, especially during resting hours. It’ll keep the nasal passages nicely moisturized so you don’t wake up with respiratory ailments. I was searching for a new one after last year’s gift broke. The ultrasonics never seem very reliable, usually breaking down after one season. And with the evaporative units, you can’t ever find a place to get new wicks.

Basically, there are two methods for getting moisture into the air — through evaporation or forcibly breaking the water molecules into such small particles that they become water vapor, e.g. an ultrasonic humidifier. The evaporative is usually a wicking element with a built-in fan. However there’s a new type being manufactured called air washers, which are similar, but they use a cylindrical plastic element that has a grid, kind of like some types of plastic colanders and rotates in a pool of water. They claim this washes the air and also regulates the air humidity without over saturation since it’s based on evaporation.

I decided to go with another ultrasonic unit since the air washer was too expensive (>$200USD). A very nice review was found on the net comparing two mid-level units. I ended getting the Venta since it was 35% cheaper than the Air-O-Swiss and was available locally at Bed Bath and Beyond. It also has a built-in water filter to minimize white dust, which is a common trait of all ultrasonic units since they basically vaporize all the elements still dissolved in your water including the minerals, which are the source of the white dust. Plus the filter is significantly cheaper than in the Air-O-Swiss units. So far I think it’s helping a bit, but nowhere near their claim of 0% dust. The warming feature is a bonus since it’ll keep the temperature from dropping too much in the room. I find that keeping the setting between 30-35% RH is a good idea. Like the review says, the built-in hygrometer under-reports the humidity level. I ended up with a digital hygrometer as well to monitor the unit. All in all seems like a good buy, so far. We’ll see if it can last into next winter…

Edit: After doing a little more research, it looks like the EPA has a write-up on humidifiers as well. I’ve been wanting to try distilled water to see if that works better.

The Zoom H2. Here’s a competent review. Back in the day when digital voice recorders finally came out, I was pretty excited to get my Olympus stereo recorder. I could upload recordings on to my computer and encode them to MP3. Unfortunately, the sound quality was always in want. If you wanted better quality you’d have to get a digital audio cassette recorder or go for a reel. Marantz had a unit but they were always too pricy (>$500). I’m glad to see that there’s a portable unit out on the market now that isn’t hindered by lousy recording quality. This one can do the full spectrum 44.1Khz sampling at 16bits all the way up to a hi-fi 96Khz/24bit resolution. And it’s not made by Sony, which means industry standard SD flash card compatible.

Unfortunately I have no use for something like this right now. Would’ve been great in college.

With satellite radio and HD radio. It’s the biggest reason why I decided not to continue with XM Radio. Apart from the poor channel selection, the sound quality just sucked. Sounded like a 64kb/s mp3. And it’s appalling to find out that HD radio isn’t much better. Currently it only allows for up to 150kb/s bandwidth. Talk about quantity over quality. This sucks. America, this is all your fault.

I picked one up this weekend after frantically calling over 12 different vendors. Nobody had a new one in stock. It was an interesting adventure because I was actually on the way to pick up a demo unit for full price when I opened up the paper to a Fry’s ad. Now why didn’t I think there was a Fry’s in Austin? Called them up and they had a new one in the box waiting for me.

First impression out of the box is that the paint looks just like the black L lens’ paint. Light texture and black. Fancy. Has a nice weight in the hands and it’s not too small to hold. Might be kinda banana in the pocket though. It’s nice to have cross compatible features between the cameras I own. The G9 uses the same battery as the XT so I just popped in a spare. First thing I did was bring the optical viewfinder up to my eye. Damn, it sucks. The specs say only 80% frame coverage. Coming from an SLR, it’s painful to look through. It makes the anemic viewfinder of the XT look like a full frame old school film SLR. And a bunch of distortion to boot. The LCD is better, but not dense enough to make images look crisp. I still like the look of the 1.8″ LCD on the back of the XT. I hope the newer Nikon cameras encourage Canon to increase the back LCD quality and density. The thumb wheel the back is nice though. I think I’ll rather enjoy using a 40D or 5D in the future which have a similar wheel.

Taking a look at the different ISO outputs, you can see that anything above 400 is either lacking color detail and/or just super noisy. Will any manufacturer step up and make a low pixel count larger sensor for the P&S category? (One that is actually available, unlike the vaporware Sigma DP-1.) The benefits of RAW capture are still there but the small sensor and high pixel count bring their detractions to the table. I did some ISO 80 shots with a hotshoe flash bounced and they look pretty clean. But you can’t go shooting at ISO 80 for everything. I do appreciate RAW though and the hotshoe is also a big plus.

AF is just gonna plain suck in a P&S until they find some newer technology or somehow integrate phase-detection AF into a non-reflex camera. Fortunately the manual focus mode is quite usable and includes a magnified portion to assist you. You’re not gonna be able to take sports or fast action photos with this thing, but you might be able to get away for a couple by pre-focusing and using MF mode. Shutter lag (not to be confused with the AF lag) is then acceptable.

Most of the controls are available through the quick access buttons without having to access the menu system. There is one customizable button (I assign WB to it) which is nice and 2 custom shooting modes which you can assign different shooting settings and have them memorized. It’s nice to have one assigned without the AF assist light or with/without the red-eye reduction light. Some niceties include adjustable flash output/FE compensation and adjustable timer duration.

The included 3x ND filter is nice feature that might come in handy for those time you need slower shutter speed to blur things out since the smallest aperture available is f/8.0. (Anything above that for a P&S sized sensor would result in serious diffraction.) Or cause the scene is just too bright for even the lowest ISO and min aperture. (say a solar eclipse…)

I’m still trying to get used to the increase in depth of field and to be honest I’m struggling a bit to figure out how to make a good capture with it. (I know, I know…it’s the photographer and not the tool, stupid.) I’d be very happy with a 45-50mm equiv field of view lens and a larger sensor, I think. Right now the 28mm (equiv. to 45mm FOV on a full frame) is nearly always on the XT.

One thing that caught my attention was the movie mode. It has the typical 640×480 30FPS mode but in addition, the mic is able to capture nearly the full spectrum of audible sound and also has user adjustable input levels, and an electronic windscreen feature (though I haven’t had a chance to test that out yet). The lens zoom and focus motor is not ultrasonic, so it’d be too noisy to use while capturing a clip, but the camera does have a digital zoom that you can activate while recording which I’m assuming would be more feasible since the VGA resolution (0.3MP) of the capture is much much(~40x) smaller than the 12MP resolution of the sensor. The compression of the file is decent enough to get at least 80+min from an 8GB card, which the camera does support (up to 32GB thanks to SDHC).

So far I’m fairly please with my purchase. It ain’t ever gonna replace my main SLR, but it’ll supplement it nicely for those times there are restriction on cameras or when it just ain’t feasible to bring the larger one. I’m looking forward to more testing with the hotshoe and off-camera flash. Oh, and the X-sync restriction is gone, yay! I can flash sync all the way up the max shutter speed, thanks to an electronic shutter

Here’s a short summary of why this one was enough of a compromise:

• RAW capture
• full manual controls
• hotshoe (yay for hotshoe and wireless slaves!!!)
• no lens cap (it just became very annoying on the LX-1)
• optically stabilized lens
• low noise base ISO (much better than the previous LX-1)
• ergonomic controls (stay away from menu navigation)
• very acceptable lowest shutter speed (15s)
• responsive enough when working in RAW mode (no noticible delay after a shot)

A couple of cool features:

• 44.1KHz sampling (as stated above) audio recorder (up to several hours)
• Focus zoom for playback review (zooms in at the focus point to check focus)
• Focus bracketing
• Time-lapse mode
• Battery meter (rare on a Canon P&S)
• Live histogram

Foreword: My other friend Bob told me not to get this. Apparently he didn’t speak loud enough. THANKS BOB! j/k.

This is the steering wheel by Logitech that was designed for Gran Turismo 4 on Sony’s Playstation 2. Dramatically redesigned (the previous wheel was the Driving Force — for GT3) with an all new 900 degrees of rotation equating to 2 1/2 turns lock to lock (compared to the usual 200 degrees), this wheel is supposed to revolutionize the current state of console/PC steering wheels. Unfortunately, it still sucks compared to just using the controller. My friend was using the wheel on the first S-class license exam (GT3) and never got within 1/2 a second of the bronze time. This was after trying for at least 4 hours. I get on with the controller and get the bronze within 3 trys. That really doesn’t say much I guess, however, it may speak to the low level programming within the wheel (or maybe how GT3 responds to the input from the wheel). The main faults are the delayed response of the vehicle to the steering input and the twitching of the car when held in a straight line. I feel that the force feedback is also not very appropriate. It doesn’t get stronger the more you turn the wheel (as you would expect), but it does a great job of kicking back at times where you wouldn’t expect.

I really hope that it’s something that’s strictly GT3 related and that GT4 will be much more realistic with the wheel — at least as responsive as with the controller. (It should be as GT3 is restricted to 200 degrees of turning — sorry I forgot to mention that earlier; GT4 is currently the only game that supports the full 900 degrees.) Otherwise this wheel is a POS. A hearty thumbs up the asses.

Gaim is a multi-protocol messaging client. In other words, it runs AOL IM, Yahoo IM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, IRC, Jabber… all on one program and all running at the same time. Obviously the best feature is that it replaces all those separate clients with one clean interface. I had tried out Trillian briefly as well but soon came to hate the interface. The default skin was way too colorful and rounded — like a bad winamp skin. I wasn’t able to find a skin that looked professional enough on their site. (Although some of the skins for the non-free pro version looked ok.) It did however have a more windows look and feel to the menus as gaim is a port from linux using the GTK+ widgets.

Presently I have been using version 4.7 of the official AIM client along with DeadAIM and/or AIM+ depending on my computer location. Unfortunately, DeamAIM is no longer free as of version 3.2 and AIM+ does not fully support AIM clients above version 4.x and is also no longer being developed.

Gaim and Trillian are void of the excessive ads and tickers and buttons that the newer IM clients seem to gain with each sucessive version. That was the main reason for me to use the add-ons described above which I actually failed to explain their uses so here goes: DeadAIM and AIM+ remove many of the unnecessary interfaces of the AIM client — namely the ads and the buttons. They also add a very useful log manager to keep track of old and new conversations. Gaim can also extend its functionality with a built-in plugin system. One of the more promising plugins is called history which will tack on the last few lines of a conversation when you open up a new IM window to a person. This way you can keep track of where the conversation was going last time (or if you accidentally closed the window).

Gaim is moderately skinnable in that you can change the GTK+ widget theme when you install (or reinstall) it. I prefer the default wimp or blue curve. These mainly affect the scroll bars and the checkboxes. Most everything is customizable, from tabbed browsing to buddy list prefs to transparency. It also has a feature called aliasing which allow you to rename confusing or inappropriate screennames to something more memorable or less offensive. (The newer AIM clients might have it as well.) But like I said, if you like a simple and “professional” look, you can’t go wrong with Gaim.

BTW, I’m looking to add more people to my ICQ and Yahoo! lists that I’ve neglected since switching to AIM a while back. So shoot me a comment or email me.

Update: One thing that is missing is the DeadAIM/MSN Messenger feature that has a visual pop-up in the corner that alerts you of when your “buddies” sign on/off. Having that and a reliable image transfer/direct connect would make this even better.

Update #2: Found it: Guification. Woo Hoo! Now I can migrate completely to Gaim. This one even includes which network the user is signing in from. Very good stuff.