In The Home as a Place of Production, Karen Rosenkranz asks: “So what would an alternative vision for the home of the future look like?”

I think some clues are to be found in the past. In the pre-industrial era, the domestic dwelling was where most work took place. From shoemakers to blacksmiths or scholars, skilled workers made things out of their homes. Food was produced within or around the house. This was all part of life – making, mending and feeding oneself. The duality of life and work hadn’t been established yet.

via Dense Discovery

I was a very early adopter of Roomba robot vacuums. I’ve owned several models, including the ill-fated mopping “Scooba,” and my previous posts about these products remain some of the most popular articles that I’ve shared.

However, when I moved into a three-story home, the hassle of using a Roomba with stairs led me to sell all of my iRobot products. (I sold them to a battlebot competitor to use for parts!)

But recently, I bought a new Roomba and, boy, a lot has changed with the product over the years! It can now avoid stairs and (some) other obstacles that would previously cause it a lot of difficulty. (This New Yorker article about how it all works is quite enlightening.)

The product line has also become quite complicated. There are multiple series, with mysterious designators and inscrutable differences between them. I finally gave up and bought the one that Costco offered at the lowest price.

I’ve had a few hiccups, which I have mostly solved, so I offer these tips:

• The Roomba I bought doesn’t come with a user guide, and the iRobot documentation on their site is not only poorly written, it’s nearly impossible to search because of all the different models they offer. You’re better off just using Google to find YouTube videos (and blog posts like this one). But even then, remember that what you’re finding might be out of date or doesn’t apply to your particular model.
• The mapping function, in which the device “learns” the layout of your home, can take nearly a dozen runs before it completes. Extreme patience on your part will pay off eventually.
• If there’s an area that it simply won’t map, start, then pause a job (using the app). Pick up the Roomba and move it to the area that’s not mapped. Press the Clean button that’s on top of the Roomba. The status in the app will now read “Cleaning and discovering” and the area should be added to the map.



• Regarding the map, the definition of walls can be critical and tricky. If you have two adjacent rooms, if your delineation is off by just a couple of pixels, your unit will visit both rooms even when you tell it only vacuum one of them. You’ll have to move the location of the wall in the app to prevent this, even though in reality, the wall is not quite where it’s shown.


• Although the documentation doesn’t emphasize this at all, when you initially set up the device, you should place its base station where you intend to keep it located. If you fail to do so (like I did), don’t move the base station to its new location until the unit has fully completed its mapping of your home. Then you can move the base station, and the Roomba will figure out its new location after three or four runs. (Conjecture: A “clean everywhere” run might speed this process.)


• My Roomba is particularly annoying about sending alerts to change its filter and replace its debris bag. In fact, it started insisting the base station was “full” after just three runs, and I assure you, it was not. Get accustomed to ignoring these notifications and using your judgement. I am almost convinced this “feature” is a way for iRobot to sell more consumables.



• Finally, the biggest problem I’ve experienced with the new Roomba is that it hallucinates obstacles. About a third of the time when I start a run, it will exit the base station and travel a few feet, then pause for over a minute before returning to base and falsely reporting that there was something in the way. This is extremely frustrating and means that I cannot reliably use the scheduling function. I have contacted tech support, and they say to check the wheels (they are clean), and make sure lights are on in the room (they are).

Despite the glitches and annoyances, I’m glad to be back in the Roomba family as it does save a significant amount of time (when it works). Hopefully, these tips and observations will help you.

This HomeKit-compatible smart outlet is well-priced and works great. But if you have to reset to factory defaults (in order to move it to a different home, for example) it can be challenging to figure out how to reset it.

The Meross website only has generic resetting instructions, and the way they are written it seems like they don’t apply to this device. Here, they say to hold down the power button. (The device has two power buttons.) Elsewhere on their site, the answer is illustrated by showing a non-existent button on the back of the device.

The correct answer, specifically for the Meross MSS120 Outlet, is to hold down the top power button for five seconds (while the outlet is plugged in). You’ll hear a click, and then the two power buttons will being to flash (one green, one yellow). You can then add the device to HomeKit.

Thanks to Ronald Reagan, I only have an intuitive understanding of temperature when it’s expressed in Fahrenheit. Unfortunately, but understandably, the Eve Room environmental monitor defaults to Celsius. (I almost wrote “centigrade” there, which should also tell you something about me.)

Finding how you to change the units from Celsius to Fahrenheit is surpassingly difficult. It’s challenging to Google, and it’s not part of the device’s “Frequently Asked Questions” (WTF?).

Here’s the answer: You have to use the Eve app, which is sort of bullshit, but there you go. As a HomeKit user, I didn’t have the app installed, and I had to download it just to change this one setting. (I only figured this out accidentally, by the way.)

On the whole, I’m happy with the Even Room environmental monitor. The build quality is great. But the battery life is poor. And it doesn’t alert you when the power is getting low, it just silently dies and stops working. Sort of like Reagan.

As I’ve mentioned before, my printer is not located in my office, which is inconvenient when I’m doing a lot of printing, such as producing my series of Bizarre Fact Files.

An additional time-saving technique that I use is to pause the printer, run several jobs, then go put the appropriate paper tray in place before resuming the jobs. Not having to go back and forth between my computer and printer saves me about 70 stair steps. Here’s how it works:

Before printing, open System Preferences > Printer & Scanners, then double-click the printer in the Printers list. In the window that appears, click the Pause button. Important: Do not close the window where the Pause button appears.

Next, print the file as you normally would. When the warning message about the printer being paused appears, click “Add to Printer.” Repeat for each document that you want to add to the printer’s queue.

To take this even further, I created a Keyboard Maestro macro, triggered via Alfred Remote, to unpause the queue when I’m on the other floor. You’d need both of these pieces of software — which I recommend — to do this, so I won’t dwell on the details. But, briefly, you need to trigger the macro via Keyboard Maestro’s web server. The macro source is available at this gist.

I have written about my beloved KitchenAid Nespresso Espresso machine. Here are a few more tips, but this time related to cleaning and descaling the unit.

• The descaling information provided by Nespresso’s website isn’t very helpful. I refer to this eight-year old YouTube video every time. (I hope it stays published!)
• However, the video has a horrible instructional flaw. Namely, you must close the pod chamber before starting the descaling process. The video does not mention this, and you’re likely to have the chamber open as you’ve naturally ejected the last pod before cleaning. Do not forget to close the chamber or you will have a considerable mess on your hands! (Yes, I speak from experience.)
• A related discovery, thanks to the above situation, once the descaling process is started it cannot be stopped. Even if you unplug the machine, it will resume until both cycles are complete.
• No, I can’t fathom why the video instructs you to clean and dry the water chamber before filling it with water again. Seems like busy work. This sort of thing is typical of amateur technical writing, though this is an official video, so it should be better.
• KitchenAid recommends descaling the unit monthly! This seems excessive to me, especially given the amount of time it requires, but I guess it depends on how hard your water is.
• Unscientifically, making a cuppa seems to go a lot quicker after the machine has been descaled. If your machine’s coffee stream reminds you of an old man during the middle of the night, consider that it might need to be descaled.

And yes, thank you, I would like another cup. Black.

This leak detector works well, but once triggered, there’s no apparent way to stop it from beeping. Even removing the batteries doesn’t reset it.

In some ways, a persistent alarm makes sense, as you would want to know if it was triggered in your absence, even if the water and sensor are now completely dry. But I do wonder how many customers assume it’s a single-use item and discard the unit after it has been triggered. (I considered it.)

The reset procedure is unnecessarily obscure. Here’s how to do it:

• Hold down the button for at least 5 seconds.

There’s no good reason to hide this function — a single press of the unit’s only button should, intuitively, turn it off. In fact, the company’s marketing material says to press the button to mute the alarm. Apparently, the copywriters have never used the product, as that is decidedly not how it functions.

Fortunately, the tech writers have used the device. According to the user manual, there are other arcane button presses to change the volume of the alarm. Who knew? (And, frankly, why? Being loud is a good thing. The aforementioned copywriters tout its 100db alert as a key feature.)

The Govee support website doesn’t have a copy of the user manual and their FAQ search returns nothing for words like “reset,” “water” or “leak.” I didn’t try “annoying” or “STFU.”

Despite all this, if you’re looking for a very inexpensive water leak sensor that works (and, in particular, won’t be easy to ignore), I recommend these! The best deal is from the Amazon.

If you have a Kohler toilet in your home, it’s likely that it makes a “clank” sound when you flush it.

According to two professional plumbers and Kohler tech support, this is normal. (Unbelievably.)

Kohler's toilets have a proprietary flush mechanism that uses a cylindrical riser, instead of a lever, to actuate the valve that controls the flow of water.

The clank is caused by the cylinder hitting the underside of the tank cover. (You can confirm this by removing the tank cover and flushing. If the noise is gone, you found the problem.)

The fix is to put a couple of very thin rubber feet under the tank lid to raise it. The tolerances are very tight — it won’t take much to move the lid out of the way. Try something like this.

To be more specific and to help the findability of this tip, the toilet I have is a Kohler San Raphael 1.28 GPF Elongated One-Piece Toilet. Part number 1126374. Model 3722

You’re welcome.

I don’t think too much about my Synology NAS device. Its “DSM” operating system is chock-full of apps and options, most of which I ignore, apart from dutifully keeping them up to date.

However, there is one Synology app with which I have a love/hate relationship: Download Station. The main feature of Download Station is downloading torrent files. But I don’t use for that. The feature that I (attempt to) use extensively is automatically downloading files distributed via RSS enclosures, such as podcasts.

Sadly, however, Download Station has a fatal flaw and I can’t rely on it. It is unable to follow server-side redirects for attachments. (The biggest offender using redirects in RSS feeds are the bastards at anchor.fm)

Synology knows that Download Station won’t follow redirects. I reported this bug and their tech support has acknowledged that they can reproduce it. They say that it is in their queue and will be addressed in a future release.

They’ve been saying this for three years.

Clearly, Synology doesn’t care that Download Station is broken.

Oh, it gets worse. When Download Station encounters a redirect, it keeps the download task in its queue, even though it will never be able to complete it. Eventually, the queue fills up, and Download Station completely stops working until the queue is manually cleared.

I have not been able to find a replacement for Download Station that runs on the Synology, so instead I use the butt-ugly gpodder (on my Mac) to download the podcasts that Download Station can’t handle. Then, I dig through the gpodder underbelly, find the files, and manually copy them to the Synology drive for later use.

At some point, my Synology device will die. (I’m already on my second one.) When it does, I probably won’t replace it with another. Their lack of response to this issue has soured me on any future business.

If you read my overview of AirTag cases, you might be wondering why I don’t use Tile products, as their thin, notched design doesn’t yearn for a case.

Well, I did use Tile, until the arrival of the AirTag. I took a half-dozen Tile Pro tags on a long trip to Europe, and they were nearly worthless. It was common to go a week or more without the tags ever being seen on the network, even by my device.

The issue, as far as I was able to determine, is that the tags are only seen by devices that have the Tile app installed. And there simply aren’t enough of those to make for a robust and useful location network. (Although this doesn’t explain why my phone, positioned mere feet from the tag, sometimes still couldn’t see it.)

When I switched to using AirTags, I thought I might be able to sell my Tiles on eBay. But seeing that they are going for pennies on the dollar, clearly other folks have figured out their underperformance too. (I ended up recycling mine.)

Trust me, if you want something that can actually locate your items, your answer is AirTag. It’s remarkable how well they work.