A year or two ago, I had my washing machine stop working and I called someone out, only to have them tell me it wouldn’t be worth it to fix it. I had to pay a $60 or so trip charge, then another bunch of money for a new machine. So, when my girlfriend Kristian told me her washing machine wasn’t working, it seemed like a waste of time to even have someone come out and take a look. We entered the symptoms into google, though, and found a possible fix that was pretty cheap if you do it yourself.

The washer was making grinding noises and wouldn’t spin or agitate, so apparently that is common if you have a broken “motor coupling”. This guide I found online was very helpful. With that in hand, I decided to tear the thing apart. In the worst case, it would have to be replaced, so it was worth a shot. Plus, it would be fun to take it apart.

Apparently, most top loading washers are pretty similar in design. Hers is an Estate TAWX700JQ2. Estate is a cheaper line that is made by Whirlpool. Looking through the guide, I found that the first step is always to loosen the control panel and flip it back. There are a few different ways to open the control panel, but none of them seemed to work. Finally, I found a guide that mentioned removing screws on the back of the machine. I took out four screws per the instructions and everything came loose. It turns out, you only need to remove two, otherwise you’re removing the whole panel from the little hinge things that are supposed to support it. Here’s a picture with the screw that needs to be removed pointed out. It’s kind of at odd angle, facing upwards, but that makes it easy to remove without even pulling the washer out of its spot. There are two of these screws, one on each side.

Once you have the control panel loose, you need to disconnect a wiring harness that plugs into the lower part of the cabinet, then pop out two clips, which appear to be exactly the same as in the guide I linked earlier. Once that is done, you can pull the cabinet off easily. At this point, you can see the whole guts of the machine, and it’s pretty exciting.

Next, you need to get access to the motor coupling, which is a little plastic part that connects the motor to the transmission. The transmission is what drives the spinning of the drum and the agitation. To get at the coupling, you need to remove the pump, which is attached the front of the motor with some clips. This is really easy to remove. Here’s the pump removed, with the motor exposed (the pump is the white thing with hoses attached):

Next, you unplug the wiring harness from the motor (there was only one on this model, contrary to the instructions). You remove some screws from the motor, pop off some clips, and it pops right out. When you remove the motor, you want to be careful because it’s pretty heavy. I put a bunched up towel under it, so it wouldn’t bang up the floor, but getting the clips off required some screwdriver prying, so I remove the towel for better access, and then ended up dropping it on the floor. Oops. With the motor removed, you end up with something looking like this.

Here’s a picture of the transmission, where the motor was attached. In this picture, the coupling is removed, so you can just see the shaft.

From what I’ve seen online, the motor coupling can fail in various ways, but as soon as I pulled out the motor, this one popped out and you could see it was just cracked in half. There are three parts to the coupling, and just the part connected to the motor was broken. I’ve seen stuff where it’s a lot worse.

At this point, I had to stop and get the new part, but I think it probably took less than an hour to get everything taken apart.

The next day, I picked up a part from this place, which had a location in Tempe. It was $14.99+tax, and I didn’t need to give them a model number or anything. Apparently this part is common to all direct drive washers.

As I mentioned before, there are three parts to the coupling. The next day, we removed the rubber ring, and the part that attaches to the transmission (we needed to use a pliers to pull it off), then put all the new parts in. The new parts didn’t mount on the shafts of the transmission or motor very easily, so we had to use a rubber mallet combined with a wooden dowel to pound them in. After the new parts were mounted, it is slightly tricky to line everything up when you put the motor back in, but otherwise everything went very smoothly. After everything was back together, the washer worked again! Hooray!

After this experience, I think the mystery of fixing a washing machine went away, and I wouldn’t be hesitant to attempt more complicated repairs. It’s pretty easy to take apart, and the internals seem pretty simple. Another funny thing to mention is that this was all done without removing or turn off the water supply. I wouldn’t recommend doing it that way, but in this case, the shutoff valves were not working, and it would’ve taken much longer if we had to replace those first.

To recap, here’s what you have to do:

• Remove two screws from the back of the control panel
• Flip control panel back
• Remove wiring harness
• Pop out two clips holding cabinet
• Lift off cabinet
• Remove clips holding pump, and pull pump to the side
• Remove wiring harness and screws from motor
• Remove motor clips and pull out motor
• Remove coupling parts
• Put new coupling parts in place
• Line up couplings and put motor in place
• Replace motor clips
• Screw in motor clips and attach wiring harness
• Replace pump and its clips
• Put cabinet back on
• Put cabinet clips back in (just push down to snap them in)
• Attach wiring harness from panel
• Flip panel down and replace screws

One of the advantages of working from home is that I have complete flexibility in my work area. Over the past year or so, I’ve been experimenting with using a standing setup for part of the time.

To get started with pretty much zero investment, I set something up on top of the bar between my kitchen and living room. The height of the bar was pretty much at elbow height, which is ideal for the keyboard/mouse. I had the awesome mStand from Rain Design, which I’ve used off and on with my main desk, so I set that up on top of the bar, which elevated my laptop screen closer to the optimal height (some info on that here and here). I eventually ended up adding some books under that, so the screen was even higher. Initially, it was hard to stand all day and my legs would get pretty tired. I also noticed that it is critical to wear shoes of some sort while standing for long periods of time, otherwise your feet get sore pretty quickly. I’ve also seen several blog posts that recommend using a pad of some sort to stand on. I haven’t found the need for this, but I imagine it would make standing a bit more comfortable. Pretty quickly, my legs got used to standing all day, and I was able to make it through a day. I still found, however, that on some days/parts of days, for example after running the night before, I wouldn’t want to stand all day. The other disadvantage to this setup was that I had only my laptop display to work with, which isn’t quite as nice as using my external monitor. Here’s what that setup looked like:

After using the setup for a while, I think I like it. I can’t say it’s dramatically improved the way I feel or anything like that, but given how sedentary the life of a programmer is, I think anything that burns more calories and causes you to move around more is good. I think desk workers also have a tendency to hunch over and mess up their posture, and standing up seems like it helps avoid that.

I used the bar-top setup for a year or so, but it’s a pretty ugly thing to have sitting there in my kitchen all the time. I had seen the infamous $22 Ikea standing desk a while ago, but ideally I’d like something that can move up and down, so I don’t have to always stand. I think the GeekDesk would be just about perfect, but I already have a nice desk that I bought a few years ago, and I would hate to get rid of it. So, finally, I bit the bullet and built the $22 Ikea desk, and now I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks. I have the monitor set up on top of the desk, with the mStand below for those times when I need to sit down. Now, when I sit down I just have the small laptop display, which hopefully motivates me to stand more often. If I really want to, it is feasible to move the monitor down below, although it’s a bit of a hassle. Enough talk, here’s what it looks like:

So, here are a list of some of the main things I learned in this experience:

• Don’t expect to stand all of the time. Maybe you will be able to, but it’s nice to be able to sit down from time to time
• Wear shoes when standing and/or use some sort of mat
• It’s pretty easy/cheap to experiment with a standing desk, so I would definitely recommend it.
• Putting the monitor at a height that lets you look straight ahead seems to provide the most comfortable position for the neck.

I have been fiddling with iOS lately, and I was working on a project which used a TableView with static cells.  The project uses Core Data and a Master-Detail View Controller, and when you create such a project in XCode, it populates the project with a bunch of code to do the Core Data interaction, which in my case was completely useless.  As I started to rip it out, my app started crashing with this error:

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSUnknownKeyException',
 reason: '[<MasterViewController 0x725ea00> setValue:forUndefinedKey:]: this 
class is not key value coding-compliant for the key staticDataSource.'

After much searching, I found out that this error indicates that something in the NIB/Storyboard has an outlet called “staticDataSource” in the MasterViewController class. I looked through all of the outlets in my storyboard, and found nothing.  I grepped every file in the project for “staticDataSource” and found nothing.  I randomly tried adding a property to MasterViewController called staticDataSource (I made it an NSSet), and the app stopped crashing, but didn’t show my static cells.  Finally, in a random effort, I changed MasterViewController back into a UITableViewController subclass (I had changed it to a UIViewController), and everything worked perfectly.  So apparently, despite what you may read, static table views do in fact need a data source, and making your controller a subclass of UITableViewController automatically provides you with the needed property.

There are quite a few apps I use regularly that I find really useful.  Here’s a list:

• 1password – this one is huge.  It’s expensive, but worth it.  It keeps track of all of your passwords and allows you to stop using the same password on a bunch of web sites.
• Adium – obvious, but worth mentioning
• Dropbox
• Evernote – free and great for keeping track of notes from meetings, etc.  Also an iPhone app with very good sync functionality
• Meerkat – SSH tunneling.  Works great, but is a bit pricey.
• Mental Case – great flash card app with iPhone support.  The syncing is a little clunky, though.
• Reeder – RSS reader
• Wunderlist – To do lists.  Also an iPhone app, but the syncing seems a little buggy right now.
• DBVisualizer – Database client.  Works on pretty much every database.

Yesterday, Apple released an update to Java for OS X.  I had trusted a self-signed cert with my old java installation, and it stopped working with the update, so I had to figure out how to add it again.  It’s not very hard, but kind of tricky to figure out, so here you have it.

First, export the cert using a web browser or whatever.  I used firefox, because it is easy, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it in chrome.  You should end up with a simple PEM encoded file.  Then here’s how you import it:

$ cd /System/Library/Java/Support/CoreDeploy.bundle/Contents/Home/lib/security
$ sudo cp cacerts cacerts.orig
$ sudo keytool -importcert -file your_cert_file_here -keystore cacerts

you’ll be prompted to trust it, then you are done.

Update:
In recent versions of OS X (at least 10.9 and 10.10), you can use this command to find your Java home:

$ /usr/libexec/java_home

…then, the cacerts file is located under there, in jre/lib/security.

Also, as Evan T pointed out in the comments, the password is “changeit”. This is pretty much universal for all JVMs I’ve used (including Linux/Windows).

And one more thing. It’s a good idea to specify a -alias parameter when adding the certificate, otherwise it gets added under the alias “mykey”, then if you try to add another one, you get an error, since it’s trying to add another “mykey”.