On Monday, April 8th, I will be at the PDQ in Carrollwood for one of their Family Fun Night fundraisers. When you place your dinner order, mention the FunWithBots Robotics Camp and they will donate 10% of your bill to help fund a scholarship for underprivileged children to attend camp.

In addition, if you sign up for any of our camps during the Family Fun Night, I will add another $10 into the fund per child. To make it easier on your own budgets, I’m also extending the early bird discount one more day so that all registrations on the 8th can take advantage of our reduced camp pricing.

The scholarships will go towards children selected by either Bayshore Baptist Church or Messiah Lutheran Church. I’ll have a little voting booth setup at PDQ so everyone can vote for which church to support. Whichever church has the most support will receive the first scholarship. If enough money is raised for more than one scholarship, I will divide them evenly between the two.

Here is our camp schedule for the summer:

Jun 10-14 North Tampa (Messiah Lutheran Church)
Jun 17-21 South Tampa (Bayshore Baptist Church)
Jun 24-28 Lutz (Lutz Prep)
Jul 15-19 Trinity/NPR (Longleaf)
Jul 22-26 Lutz (Lutz Prep)
Jul 29-Aug 2 Brandon (Location TBA)
Aug 5-9 South Tampa (Bayshore Baptist Church)
Aug 12-16 North Tampa (Messiah Lutheran Church)

This is great chance to have a fun night out with your family and help others. I will be there from 5:30 to 7:30 and PDQ will continue to accept the mentions for the 10% contribution until 9:00 PM. PDQ is at 12650 N. Dale Mabry Hwy one block south of Fletcher Ave.

I hope to see you all there!

This looks like a really fun event. I haven’t participated in any sumo competitions but I’ve heard they are a blast!

This one is open to two person teams (one adult, one child). Robots must be 100% LEGO with one brain, no limits on sensors or motors. Robots must weigh in at 1 KG or less and must be no larger than 8×8 inches at the start of the match.

If you don’t have a MINDSTORMS kit, I would be willing to sponsor kids currently enrolled in any of my robotics programs who want to participate with their parent by loaning them a robot (subject to availability).

Stuart Lego Sumo Tournament
Saturday, June 9th – 2012
@
Grace Presbyterian Church
1875 NW Britt Rd, Stuart, FL
From 8:30 – 4:00

Schedule of Events
• 8:15-8:45 – Registration and Weigh-In
• 9:00-11:30 – Individual Rounds
• 11:30-12:30 – Lunch
• 12:30-3:30 – Tag-Team Rounds
• 3:30- 4:00 – Awards Presentation

I find myself in possession of two dead Irobot Scooba Battery Packs and no working robotic floor mops. I decided it was worth doing the tear down on one just to see how tough it could be to rebuild it myself. It took about 30 minutes only because I tried to be careful not to break the clips I knew I would find just inside one edge. I was not entirely successful in keeping those clips intact despite my best efforts. The extra glue inside the case is an evil “feature.”

You can see the pics of the battery pack guts on G+ here.

Next step, test the cells under load and find affordable replacements.

For a couple of months, I’ve been plagued with errors trying to update Quickbooks. I’m greeted with various errors during the installation that point me back to pages on the Intuit website that describe lengthy procedures for modifying registry permissions. Naturally, these are “last resort” options after trying to repair my Quickbooks installation, reinstalling Quickbooks, disabling various services, etc. etc. The errors seem to indicate that I have problems accessing keys in the hive UNKNOWN with event id’s 11402 and 1024.

After hours of monkeying with registry key permissions, I finally gave up and decided to leave the update alone and suffer through the update reminder everytime I start Quickbooks.

However, yesterday, my daughter asked me to update Itunes so she could sync her ipad. Lo and behold.. Windows Installer errors with event id 11402. What’s worse, the install FUBAR’d the Itunes installation so that Itunes would no longer start. I uninstalled it, Bon Jour, and all the related stuff Apple foists off on us as part of their installation but could not get it to reinstall.

After much googling, I had a little brainstorm which calls for a minor digression to explain. I am often called upon to remove fake AV software from client computers. To ensure it stays gone, I usually find it on the drive in safe mode and remove all permissions except delete so that on reboot, the bug is neutered and I can safely delete the files. Sometimes, I have to recover ownership of the files before I can edit permissions.

Looking at this typical error:

Log Name: Application
Source: MsiInstaller
Date: 10/20/2011 10:42:02 PM
Event ID: 1013
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
Description:
Product: iTunes — Could not open key: UNKNOWN\Components\7ABFE44842C12B390AF18C3B9B1A1EE8\83AC89C9A1C48CA45BC56149798C28B6. Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel.

I opened regedit with administrator permissions and I decided to try changing the ownership of all the affected subkeys to the Administrators group to see if it would fix the key in question. All of the wonky keys appear to be in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components.
I right-clicked on key 7ABFE44842C12B390AF18C3B9B1A1EE8, selected permissions, advanced, owner tab, and then checked the box to “Replace owner on subcontainers and objects.” Click OK. Regedit complained, “Registry Editor could not set owner on the key currently selected, or some of its subkeys.” I ignored it and discovered I could now select subkey 83AC89C9A1C48CA45BC56149798C28B6 without tripping the permissions error.

A right-click on this subkey showed that there were no permissions set. I added the account SYSTEM and gave it full control.

I found a total of three keys with corrupted permissions in the process of fixing Itunes. I found two corrupted keys in the process of updating Quickbooks to 2009R13.

Both applications are now updated and working without further incident.

A short collection of keywords and phrases that might help others find this solution:
Windows 7 64-bit
Error 5
Error 1401
Error 1402
Error 1403
Could not open key: UNKNOWN\Components
Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel.
MsiInstaller
Apple Mobile Device Support — Error 1920
Apple Application Support — Error
Error code 1603.

According to RJMcMamara.com, if you are in possession of an NXT Intelligent Brick with a faulty display, LEGO Customer Service will now replace them at no charge.

Do you own an NXT ‘Intelligent Brick’ with a flickery or non-working display? Steven Canvin, LEGO’s Community Manager for LEGO MINDSTORMS, has asked us to pass on this message –

“Unfortunately, some of the NXT Intelligent Bricks manufactured in-between 2006 and early 2008, may have a faulty display, resulting in a flickering or non-working display.

“LEGO Corporate Management has decided that any NXT Intelligent Brick manufactured with this malfunction of the display will have an extended guarantee beyond the standard guarantee. The LEGO Group offers to replace NXT Intelligent Bricks with the above-mentioned faulty display.

“The NXT Intelligent Bricks would be found in:

• Retail set 8527 (version 1.0 and 1.1)
• LEGO Education set 9797
• Item 9841 NXT Intelligent Brick (or similar sold through LEGO Education distribution)

“If a user wants to have a NXT Intelligent Brick replaced based on this quality issue, please ask [them] to contact LEGO Consumer Service, contact information available on the web for your country. Please note that the display needs to be defect[ive].”

Steven has asked that if you think your NXT suffers from this problem, please check the battery first before contacting LEGO customer support, as similar issues are seen when the battery is running low on power. Only NXTs with a genuinely faulty display will be replaced.

Previously, this replacement policy was only available for bricks purchased through LEGO Education.

This is great news considering how prevalent reports of this defect have become. Apparently, there are a few surface mounted capacitors under the buttons that lose their solder connections over time as the buttons are pressed on the brick. Rough handling probably accelerates the demise of these displays. Until now, the only other remedy available to users out of the regular warranty was to reflow the solder on these capacitors.

We added a particularly interesting aluminum liftarm today. This beam has one flat end and is threaded on this end. This lets you attach it to any standard Technic-compatible part at a perpendicular direction to the existing beam. Using this new part, we can now build L and T beams of varying lengths.

The other really neat thing you can do is fasten the end beam at any angle of rotation with respect to the original beam. Because the end is threaded and the main beam is not, the included low profile cap screw captures the main beam between the screw head and the threaded hole in the end beam leaving you free to leave the end beam at any point of rotation you desire.

Finally, if you attach it at through the hole in the apex of an existing L-beam, you can build a three dimensional corner with liftarms extending on the X, Y and Z axes.

Here is an example of a gear box build from two of the end beams and a few standard LEGO™ parts.