W168 lamellendak repair

I started the repair of the sunroof (lamellendach) of our Mercedes A160 after the gliders (gleitschlitten) broke off. It was quite easy to remove the sunroof from the car. And I’ve located the broken part.
The problem is to get a replacement part. My MB dealer has ordered several parts, but none of them are right. I found a site on the Internet that shows my broken parts and mentions that they are part of the A 1687800405 repair kit. This repair kit however, also contains many other parts that I don’t need and costs a fortune (330 EUR). I’m trying desperately to get these parts separate, but no luck.

I’m using the Webasto manual.

iPhone 3G downgrade

The slow speed of my iPhone 3G after the iOS4 upgrade started to irritate me lately. It was skipping music while writing an e-mail. The camera was unbelievable slow and I had trouble accepting calls. I tried most of the tips to make it work like a reset and restore, but nothing helped.

Today I decided it was enough and I downgraded the phone to 3.1.3. Thanks to Peter’s post it was a breeze and my phone is snappy again. If you have the same problems, I advise you to do the same.

Update: here’s the video of what I mean, and worse, mine does not answer the call!!!

Update 30/06: WSJ has published an item about the bad performance as wel

iPhone 4G reservering puinhoop

Het is weer een puinhoop rondom de introductie van de iPhone 4G in Nederland. Bij T-Mobile kon je al vrij snel inschrijven op een nieuwsbrief. Tijden lang geen bericht, en dan eindelijk begin juli een mailtje. Of je misschien een 3G of 3Gs wilde omdat het wachten zo lang duurt ;). De mail daarna ging over de abonnementen die bekend zijn gemaakt. Precies dezelfde informatie als 2 jaar geleden. Dezelfde abo’s en dezelfde prijzen. Grr….. En toen ik gisteren toevallig op de site van T-Mobile keek zag ik dat er ineens een pre-order is georganiseerd.

Ervaring inschrijving Small Society

Graag wil ik iedereen waarschuwen die zijn / haar kind van plan is in te schrijven voor opvang bij Small Society.

Zodra je het plaatsingscontract ondertekend zit je daar aan vast. Niet meer dan logisch zal je zeggen. Dat dacht ik ook . Maar ik denk dat niet iedereen de gevolgen hiervan voldoende ziet.

Door het (vaak) beperkte aantal opvang plaatsen wil je er vaak snel bij zijn. Dus je schrijft je op tijd in. Zeg 6 maanden van tevoren. Vervolgens krijg je een plaatsingscontract met het verzoek dit binnen 10 dagen ondertekend terug te sturen.

En dan blijkt dat een half jaar best lang is. Je hebt ander of geen werk meer. Je verhuist of er komt een kindje bij. Dus wil je de aanvraag verplaatsen of misschien annuleren.

Time Machine tips

I found a great read on Time Machine from pondini. He has constructed a FAQ with some interesting information about Time Machine and how it does what it does.

Restore entire disk with Time Machine on OSX

Today another disk in my system crashed. This time the freeze trick did not work, so I bought a new disk for restore. But I then wondered how to copy the backup data to the new disk. You can see the new disk in time machine view, but not the old one. Where has the old disk gone you might wonder?

Here are the steps to follow:

1. format the new drive (if you bought an external disk; it’s FAT remember
2. Open time machine and look under your machine name folder (mine is Mac Pro) to see the name of the old drive. The old disk is displayed as a folder.
3. Rename the new disk to the old name
4. Open timemachine again and perform the restore of the files under DVD. They will be copied to the new drive and you’re done.

Drobo FS and GMail problem (solved)

As Stephen writes on his blog it’s easy to configure Drobo to work with GMail. However I had problems getting it to work because I changed the TO: address to someuser@somedomain.com in stead of the someuser@gmail.com.

So set all mail addresses equal to someuser@gmail.com and it will work!

High pitched noise from Drobo FS power adapter (solved)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the power adapter of my Drobo FS has a high pitched noise alternating in frequency. It sounds electrical Today I phoned support and they will send me a replacement.

Update 29/06: I received the replacement unit and it makes a lot less noise than the previous unit; almost none at all. So this issue has been solved

The adapter make and model are: EDACPOWER ELEC. EA11001E-120

Google Powermeter

Wanting power meter information available to me for a long time I recently read about Google Powermeter. A better way of registering power usage than waiting for NUON to give me access to smart metering data. I hope I can refuse their smart meter if they come up with one

So I decided to buy me an energy meter from Current Cost. Since there are no resellers in the Netherlands I bought it through amazon.co.uk. Shipping charges are for each package and thus added up a lot. After mailing with Current Cost they promised me they would see how they could cut shipping cost. I ended up getting 27 euro’s back. Great job Current Cost!

Drobo FS write performance around 25MB/s

My Drobo FS uses 5 SATA2 3GB/s disks running at 7200 rpm. You can see the layout below.

Using the activity monitor I watched the network performance from my Mac Pro to the Drobo FS over Gigabit ethernet. I transferred 2 files (.m4v)  of around 1 GB each. The graph was more spiky than transferring to my previous Mac Mini file server setup and was a little less as well. It averaged around 27 Megabyte / second and spiked to max 29MB/s.