Part real, part fake, all silly fun

I'm pretty sure that this isn't what Philip Dick had in mind when he wrote "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw


(Extra points if--- without Googling--- you know what movie was based upon "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" It's one of my all-time favorites. )

A "Computational Knowledge" Engine for the Web

Wow. This could be major:

"Stephen Wolfram is building something new — and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose...

"In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a 'computational knowledge engine' for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.

"It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as 'What country is Timbuktu in?' or 'How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?' or 'What is the average rainfall in Seattle?'

"Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions."

details: http://tinyurl.com/ctrpz3

background: http://tinyurl.com/d87ae6

Maple Sugaring In NH

It's that time of year, when the sugar shacks steam gently in the woods; and nearby, the scent of warm maple syrup fills the air.

http://www.mosscreekmedia.com/post/Sugar-Shack.aspx

Check the panoramic photo; click, and you can rotate the view.

Earth Hour

A global consciousness-raising event takes place today. It's called Earth Hour, and the idea is to get individuals, organizations and communities to turn off all nonessential electric lights and appliances for one hour: 8:30-9:30 PM local time.

The organizers are pitching this as an "election," where you vote with your power switches. They hope to demonstrate to political leaders that there's grass-roots, worldwide support for smarter energy policies. The "votes" will be tallied by seeing what happens to electric use in each time zone at the appointed hour.

No one's expected to shiver in the dark; that's not the idea. Instead, I think the real point and purpose of the exercise is to get people to stop and think about energy use in their home, especially with stuff that's normally on in their homes that doesn't really have to be.

It's a project that can't hurt anything and that might actually do some good. Check it out:
http://www.earthhour.org/home/

Roomba Wrap-Up

OK, it's time for Roomba wrap-up!

Those of you with kids and pets might wonder how they react to Roomba. In fact, one reader (Rogers George) sent in this:

(Click to enlarge)



I'm sure there's a huge range of reactions, but here's a brief sample:

Roomba and...

...Child (46 sec clip): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfsr52ocYlQ

...Cat (46 sec): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-jv8g1YVI

...Dog (45 secs): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRFd2QYiEg8

Roomba also gets along very, very well with other appliances. Maybe too well! If you have young appliances, you might want to send them out of the room. (12 secs):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yuWCFpQWYQ

Because Roomba is perhaps the cheapest "real" robot available, people interested in robotics have gravitated to it as a platform for experimentation. Herewith, some Roomba hacks, some of them very funny:

Roomba Cylon:
See this (21 secs):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRRLJ-v0KwM




Roomba with laser-guided airsoft (soft pellet) gun:

video of above(1:57):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4LBQqQGipg


Roombutla:



Roomba Pacman:

Video of above (1:37; the action stats at 44 secs):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wsP_nmk_iw

Hamster-guided Roomba (really!) 36 secs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaOGcrtUrxU

The all-singing, all dancing Roomba:
http://hacknmod.com/hack/roombamidi-make-your-roomba-dance-sing/
video (1:59):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtR4fZLmXJA

Mow your lawn, Roomba-style:
http://hacknmod.com/hack/howt-to-hack-a-roomba-into-robot-lawn-mower/

There's even a book and web site:
http://hackingroomba.com/

It was mostly hard-core geeks in the above projects, but there are gentler Roomba mods, too, including Roomba cozies and costumes:

Here's a hand-made Roomba costume:

http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/03/horny_toad_roomba_cozy.html

There are many commercial Roomba cozies:
http://www.myroombud.com/


And of course, there's also some Roomba-inspired utter silliness:

Roomba Wars! (3:29, but skip forward to 1:30)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkXtliMtqhs

Roomba deathmatch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMaRyDYTUQA

Roomba jousting:
http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/09/roomba-lego-jou.html

Roomba Frogger:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9ZnClqyVjE

I, Roomba:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbyLzfz9NoY

OK, I'll stop now. 8-)

Several of you had questions.

One was what do I do about cleaning different levels in my house, and what about stairs. Roomba has a handle and it weighs 5-6 pounds (+/- 2.5 kilos). I just carry it to where I want to clean next. To clean my office, for example, I'll carry Roomba upstairs at the start of the day or during a coffee run or whenever I remember to. When I'm done for the day in the office, I hit the Clean button, close the door, and depart. Roomba does its thing while I'm elsewhere, and the next morning I return to a freshly-vacuumed office. I'll carry Roomba downstairs on one of my regular up/down trips, empty the debris bin, and drop Roomba on the charging stand.

For stairs, I do what I did with the upright: I use a small hand vac. Neither the upright nor the Roomba are much use on stairs. The Roomba can clean landings between flights of stairs, though, if you want it too.

How well does it clean? Very well. Better than I thought it would, in fact, given its light weight. The "multiple passes from different directions" programming does a surprisingly thorough job. No one pass picks up as much as you might get with one pass of a large vacuum, but who's going to vacuum each area of floor 4 times from different directions? (Not I!)

Another indicator of its thoroughness is that the Roomba can lift the knap of even a fairly dense berber rug. You know that "freshly vacuumed" look when a good vacuuming erases footprints and visible traffic paths in a rug? Roomba does that on my rugs, which means it's mechanically interacting with the rug fibers, not just passing over their tops.

Plus, the little beastie get under things that I wouldn't. Add in its infinite, mindless patience, and I have to admit it's a better vacuumer than I.

iRobot suggests using Roomba a lot, even every day. They talk about "routine" cleaning rather than major "let's tackle this mess" cleaning. I don't run Roomba every day--- it's just me here, and I'm not *that* big a slob. Um, most of the time.

But I understand what iRobot is trying to do: to get you to stop thinking of vacuuming as a once a week (or whatever) task. If you have a robot, let it work before the messes on the floor reach the Grand Mal, Toxic Alert, Break Out The Moon Suits stage. I can imagine that families with pets and young kids would love a Roomba. (And yes, iRobot even has a floor *washing* robot called Scooba.)

Once a day may be overkill. But there's also no need to leave vacuuming as a once-a-week-or-so task, because it's time consuming. Think about it this way: Some 500 years ago, a man was considered fastidious if he bathed once each season. That's because bathing was a major hassle--- you needed to borrow or rent a tub if you didn't have one large enough, carry lots of water (it's heavy!), get lots of firewood (also heavy, plus there's the cutting, splitting, drying of the wood, etc), spend hours getting the water to temperature, and then scrub yourself inadequately clean with bad soap that you bought or made. Meanwhile, someone else was washing and drying your clothes so you could put them back on when you were as clean as you were going to get. Bathing was a big, costly (in time and/or money) PITA that you had to plan for.

Today, with automatic ("robotic," in a sense) water heaters and washing machines, you take a shower and wash your clothes whenever you need or want. You don't have to think much about it. The machines are always ready. You don't have to plan ahead; it's just not that big a deal.

That's the kind of shift in thinking iRobot wants to make. Saturday morning doesn't have to be "Aw, sh*t, I have to vacuum" anymore. With a robot vacuum, you don't have to think about it. The machine is always ready. Run it mid-week while you're at work. Do a floor a day. Whatever. You're pretty much just pushing a button, so do it whenever you want or need to. There's almost zero hassle to it.

Roomba is currently too expensive for mass-market acceptance, but so were the first cars, TVs, computers, etc etc etc. And even now, you can get a basic Roomba (Model 400) for $129 at full retail. That's not too bad. iRobot and others also sometimes sell refurbished Roombas for about half list price. (examples: http://www.google.com/search?q=refurbished+roomba )

And Roomba knockoffs are coming: http://tinyurl.com/d3csge. There are others, too, including some crappy late-night infomerical things that look like a Roomba but have no on-board computer. They're basically battery-powered toy bumper cars with brushes. Caveat emptor.

So, even if you're now saying "I'll never get one of those things," remember that lots of people said that about the early computers, too. (And look where *that* got us. :) )

I'm happy with my Roomba and glad I got it.

Maybe I should name it, but what? Dusty? Sucka? Unspot?

Ideas?

Bad uninstalls leave trouble behind

Don't you hate it when you uninstall software only to find its left behind files, code, and Registry entries that clutter your disk and can interfere with other software?

"Cleaning Up Messy Uninstalls" is the subject of the lead item in my column this week at Windows Secrets.

I also discuss three other topics:

• Theft-Prevention Software: How does it work? Is it worthwhile?
  
• PC "forgets" disk drive: Why? And how to fix it.
  
• Curing audio and video "Skipping"

Access to these items is by a kind of honor-system principle: You decide what the content is worth, and whatever you decide to pay lets you in to *all* the paid-edition content (not just my columns) for a full year.

Full info (you start by signing up for the spam-proof free version) here:
http://windowssecrets.com/

Thanks for checking it out!

Roomba Anatomy (part 3 of 4)

I won't repeat stuff that's been covered in the last few posts; so if something doesn't seem to make sense here, please look at the last couple days' entries to understand unfamiliar terms. etc.

So, without further ado, I present you, dear readers, this brief tour of Roomba's anatomy.

OK, OK.

Here's the non-Vitruvian view. (As always, click for larger versions):


In the above photo, you're looking straight down at the little beast. Its normal forward direction of motion would be towards the top of the photo. The large semicircular leading edge (also towards the top of the photo) is the contact bumper. Four IR photoeyes built into and behind the contact bumper shine ahead and to the sides of the Roomba's forward motion to detect obstacles.

In the middle of the bumper, at the 12-o'clock position in this photo, you can see a round protuberance. This is a separate IR detector that the Roomba uses to find the recharging "Home Base" and to navigate by "lighthouses."

The smaller semicircle inset from the edge of the device (again, towards the top of this photo) is a folding carrying handle. The beastie weight maybe 5-6 lbs (call it 2.5 kilos), so it's easy to carry around or over stairs.

Here's a closeup of the central control panel:


Normally, you just press the center "Clean" button, and Roomba does its thing. But it also has a built-in clock (including day of the week), so you can automate your cleaning and have the robot fire up on its own at set times on given days. It can be somewhat amusing the first time it fires up when you're not expecting it. ([1] Roomba starts. [2] Human brainstem generates primitive message: WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!)

Ahem.

The "Dock" button lets you manually instruct Roomba to scurry back to the recharging base, if you want or need it to, although it will do so automatically if the battery runs low or if when it's finished cleaning.

The "Spot" button starts Roomba in it spiraling cleaning mode, if you want it to pick up a specific spill or concentrate in an area.

If you're using the Home Base to dock the Roomba, it recharges itself. But you also can use a standard plug-in recharger, which goes here. All the Roombas come with a standard recharger; only some come with the "Home Base" gizmo (mine did):

This model Roomba recharges in no more than 3 hours (usually a lot less). A full charge runs it for about 90 minutes, or three average rooms' worth of cleaning. It runs down faster on rugs and carpets (more friction for the brushes). I haven't had any problem with run times being inadequate for the job.

The onboard brain tracks battery use and will periodically do a "deep recharge" when it thinks the battery needs reconditioning. That's never happened with my unit, so far. It also tracks battery temperature, and won't recharge if the battery's too warm. That too has never happened with mine.

Flipping the Roomba over reveals the working parts. I'll show them to you in a moment, but I have to say that when I first saw the bottom, I was pleasantly surprised in an unexpected way.

Let me explain: You see, as a computer guy, I've been waiting for younger engineers to affect PC design; not the outer cases and cosmetics, but the way PCs are physically assembled.

It's obvious that the first PCs were built by guys who had played with Erector Sets as kids. The PCs they designed went together with nuts and bolts and stamped steel parts: mechanical assembly techniques and philosophies that those engineers were totally comfortable with, having played with them as kids. They took the ideas and even aesthetics of what looked "right" to them at a subconscious level and applied them to the very grown-up things (PCs) they were (and still are) designing as adult engineers.

But the children those engineers had--- the next generation--- didn't play with Erector Sets. They grew up with snap-together Legos and brightly-colored Fisher-Price toys. I've always wondered why Lego-style, Fisher-Price-style ideas and the mechanical aesthetics had never really shown up in PCs.

But when I turned the Roomba over, I knew that at least some of those kids had grown up to be robotics designers:



That's not to say Roomba is a toy any more than a PC is a toy. (OK, they both can be toys, but you know what I mean.) Roomba design is clearly an industrial vision from a post-Erector Set mind. I think that's kind of cool.

Below: A closer view of the beater bar, main brush, star-shaped side brush, driving wheels, and debris bin (with the yellow vacuum filter visible inside).


The entire device is extremely modular (http://tinyurl.com/cmcrsd) --- another hallmark of Lego-influenced minds at work.

Below: the star-shaped side brush. It's very flexible, so it can get into corners and into the wall/floor intersections. In this view, it would spin clockwise, sweeping debris into the path of the main brush.



The Roomba is a tricycle design with two powered rear wheels and an unpowered, free-spinning/pivoting front wheel. All the powered parts (wheels and brushes) have force-sensors so the robot can tell when it's stuck or caught on something. The unpowered front wheel has no motor, so force-sensors won't work. Instead it's two-toned so a photoeye can tell if it's still freely turning or not.




Here (below), I've removed the front wheel so you can see into its socket:



And here (below) is the same photo, but annotated. Click to enlarge:


This, below, is a poor photo (sorry!); a closeup of the front bumper. To the right, you can just see a glinting reflection of one of the forward-looking IR eye assemblies behind the translucent plastic. The plastic is a deeply tinted red, and I had no good way to photograph through it.



Here's the Roomba's back end, where the small vacuum fan exhausts:

The round button above the exhaust port is a latch. The whole fan/dust-bin/filter assembly pulls out.

Here it is, removed and swung open (below). Chunky debris gets caught in the top compartment. The vacuum fan draws fine debris and dust into the lower compartment, and the filter keeps the dust from entering the fan and being blown back into the room:


Here's a peek into the brush assembly. This is where the dust bin/fan/filter assembly plugs into:



The dust bin houses the electrical vacuum fan, so it's not immersable, but the filters are washable.


iRobot recommends cleaning the brushes every third use or so. They're very easy to get at. You lay the beast on its back:



Lift the brush guard...


... and the brush and beater bar just lift out in tool-less Lego fashion. The guides and bearings for these parts are also very Lego-like, and (although iRobot doesn't say this) they're washable too.


With the brush and beater-bar removed, you can see the dime-sized shielded microphone that "listens" for grit and tells Roomba to start its spiralling spot-cleaning mode.


It only takes a minute to clean Roomba's guts. I let the parts air-dry, and snap it back together later.

Tomorrow is Thursday, and I'll break from our Roomba coverage to tell you about a new Windows Secrets column. (I have to pay my bills somehow!) Then, on Friday, we'll wrap up this informal "Robotics Week" with some Roomba miscellany. If you have questions, this'd be a good time to ask.

The Roomba came with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and at first I didn't know if I'd keep the little critter. But having used it a while, I have to say I like it a lot.

It's not this, for sure:

but it gets the job done well. I'll keep my Roomba for the foreseeable future, or at least until something like this comes along. ;)

Fred's New Roomba (part 2 of 4)

There are actually many models of Roomba. Here's little beast I got:

It's the size of a large dinner plate, or one of those giant "professional" Frisbees; approximately 13.4 inches (34 cm) in diameter and less than 3.5 inches (9 cm) high.

It uses counter-rotating beater-bars and brushes, a circular side-brush, and a vacuum to get the dirt out: http://tinyurl.com/affsrj

It operates more or less autonomously, scooting around your rooms on its own: You don't guide it. It has several forward-looking infrared emitters and receivers so it can tell when it's getting close to an obstacle; the onboard computer reduces the Roomba's speed to a slow crawl when such an obstacle is encountered. The slow-moving robot then edges forward until a rubber bumper gently makes physical contact with the obstacle. The bumper is mounted with contact switches that are carefully calibrated so the robot can push drapes, cords, and such out of the way without treating them as impassible objects; but gentle enough that the Roomba doesn't bash its brains out running into solid walls, doors and such. (Click the "Light touch bumper" link here: http://tinyurl.com/affsrj )

Several downward-looking IR sensors scan the floor underneath the robot's edges. The iRobot company (makers of Roomba) calls these "cliff sensors." If the cliff sensors detect that the Roomba is approaching a void where the floor drops off--- say, the edge of stairs--- the on-board computer stops the Roomba and has it carefully back up the way it came, away from the "cliff."

The Roomba also has force sensors that can tell when the unit's wheels or brushes have gotten tangled in something--- carpet fringe, cords, etc. There again, the computer stops the unit and runs everything slowly in reverse to untangle itself.

iRobot is a Massachusetts company founded by a guy from MIT. The company actually modeled the Roomba's "intelligence" on insect behavior, where just a few very well developed patterns of action can result in complex behavior.

For example, the Roomba has three main modes of travel. The most obvious is straight ahead: The Roomba uses this to clean the open areas of a room and to gauge the size of the room its in--- the longest straight run it achieves "tells" the Roomba the room's largest open dimension, and it adjusts its cleaning time accordingly. When the Roomba encounters a wall or other obstacle in straight-line mode, it will gently rebound, heading off in a new direction. It changes its angle of deflection so it heads in a slightly different direction rather than using a simple complementary angle: Mathematically, this is known as a "drunken walk" or "random walk" (really!); this and other algorithms are at the heart of the Roomba's behavior.

Second is an edge-following mode. The Roomba uses its guess about room size and the number of obstacles it encounters to decide how much time to spend in straight-line cleaning, and when it should follow edges. It uses its IR and touch sensors in edge-following mode to clean along walls, into corners, around the legs of furniture, and such.

Here's an owner-created time-lapse video of a Roomba in action; you'll see its basic behavior--- straight line, contact detection, random walk and edge following. But (trust me on this) turn down the audio, which is a dubbed-in techno version of the song "Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnJUnCfh9Ow

Roomba also has a spiral "spot cleaning" mode, which is triggered by a grit detector; a small shielded microphone above the Roomba's brushes. When Roomba "hears"that it's picking up something more solid than just dust, it aborts whatever mode it was in and starts a widening gyre, spiraling around the area where it heard the grit. When it hears no more grit, it goes back to straight-line or edge-following cleaning.

Here's a video of someone running their older Roomba on a tabletop to show its spot-cleaning spiral and "cliff sensor" behaviors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9VGzoiNXN0 At least, that's what I hope they were doing--- I sure don't put mine on the table! 8-)

The different behaviors are governed by some very clever probabilistic programming: The robot doesn't map a room or learn where the furniture is, but instead switches among all three cleaning modes according to what it "finds" by way of room size, number and frequency of collisions, and amount of grit. Eventually, it passes over each floor area an average of about 4 times, usually from different directions. As such, it's a lot slower than a human pushing a vacuum around: Roomba takes about half an hour to clean an "average" room. (But who cares? You can be off doing something else.)

Because it's probabilistic, it's not foolproof. It can get itself stuck. (It beeps a little sad tune to tell you it needs help.) It can sometimes miss small areas (but will get them the next time--- that the nature of probabilistic programming). It's generally very thorough and good, and once you learn where to start it in a room and what what places give it trouble, you can more or less leave it alone to do its thing.

For example, I have air registers in my floors for heat and A/C. Although the registers have metal grates, Roomba sees them as cliffs, and won't go over them. I have one spot in my office where a bookcase and some table legs are near a floor register. If Roomba works its way into that corner in just the wrong way, it'll detect the "cliff" and back up into the table legs, and then turn and bump into the bookcase, and then head forward and detect the "cliff" and start the cycle over again--- table legs, bookcase, cliff, table legs, bookcase, cliff... etc etc etc.

The way around that is to start the robot from the danger spot, placing the "home base" recharger there. The Roomba will back away from the recharger, clean the room, and then return to the recharger when it's done, using its onboard IR sensors to "see" the IR beacon on the recharger and guide itself in properly, without starting the bump/avoid cycle. iRobot calls this "docking." You can watch a Roomba dock here; its first try fails, so it backs up and gets it right the second time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5UoHi7kcf4

iRobot also sells these hand-sized things, called "lighthouses."

They're freestanding, battery-powered IR and radio beacons you can place where needed. The Roomba uses radio (RF) to remotely turn the lighthouses on and off, and then uses IR to actually locate them as it trundles around. The lighthouses have two modes. In "virtual wall" mode, they tell the Roomba not to pass. You can use them this way to create a "forbidden zone" or otherwise confine the Roomba to a given area without having to create a physical barrier.

In "lighthouse" mode, the device helps the Roomba clean from room to room. You place the lighthouse in a doorway to tell the Roomba that that is, in fact, a door: The Roomba won't cross the threshold until it's finished in the first room. When room #1 is clean, the robot trundles past the lighthouse and cleans room #2 beyond.

My Roomba came with three lighthouses (you can buy more) so it can clean up to four rooms consecutively. If the Roomba's battery starts to run down before it's finished cleaning, it uses the lighthouses to reverse course and find its way back to the home base/charging station.

It took me a couple tries to figure out the best placement for the lighthouses, but now that I know where to put them, I can drop them in the best spots, hit the "clean" button on the Roomba, and walk away, knowing that the mindless little gizmo will clean whatever rooms I've told it to, then return and recharge itself for the next cleaning. (The site at http://www.robotreviews.com/chat/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11048 has incredibly detailed info on how the lighthouses work.)

The video called "Lighthouse" here ( http://tinyurl.com/affsrj ) shows the room-to room operation, and also includes an actual time-lapse showing Roomba's navigation in an interesting way: The video traces the Roomba's movements in blue, letting you see exactly what is and is not covered in each room. You can see that the coverage isn't perfect (and kudos to iRobot for not over-hyping the Roomba), but it's very good. And when you add in the fact that the robot goes under furniture and into places where an upright can't reach, it's actually better overall than manual vacuuming--- at least, *my* manual vacuuming. 8-)

Tomorrow: Roomba anatomy!

Fred Gets Robotic (part 1 of 4)

I'm a single guy, living alone. Housework is not my favorite activity. Some tasks--- dish- and clothes-washing, for example--- aren't too bad because I can start the process and walk away, doing something else while a mindless (and boredom-proof) machine does the actual work.

But other tasks that require full bodily involvement are way down on my list of Fun Things To Do. For example, vacuuming, if you'll pardon the phrase, really sucks.

And my ancient vacuum *really, really* sucked. No, wait, it *didn't* suck--- no, that's misleading too. What I mean is: My vacuum sucked at sucking. It was time for a new one.

When I used to have a large house, I'd joke that my dream was to own a riding vacuum, like an indoor lawn tractor. I'd ride around, chewing up dust bunnies and small rugs, taking care not to spill my adult beverage as I negotiated the not-so-treacherous terrain. Obviously, that dream never came true. (Though I suspect there is a niche market opportunity there!)

My current place is a smallish three-floor condo with a mix of floor surfaces; carpet, rugs, wood, vinyl. I wanted a vacuum that would handle all the surfaces well, and that would make the job as painless as possible; that didn't suck at sucking; that would be my last vacuum for a long time; that wouldn't need bags; and that wouldn't be a hassle to move from floor to floor.

I looked at the standard canisters units. Nah. Too bulky, and a pain to carry from floor to floor, what with the long hoses, wands and such.

Standard uprights didn't appeal a lot: I had a standard upright--- that's what I was replacing. Also, standard uprights wouldn't get very far under some bulky furniture I have; for instance, a large and very heavy bureau/dresser thing that hasn't been moved since I bought this place, and that probably won't be moved until I depart. It's even hard to see underneath it, but I suspect that the dust bunnies there have probably evolved into something worthy of Jurassic Park. (Must... dust... faster...)

The high-tech uprights at least were interesting, with cyclonic action, unusual wheels and steering, and a range of adjustments such that they could handle different floors without having to stop and change attachments. But they were expensive, and still were, well, plain old vacuums: I'd still be spending part of a day pushing them around the house. And they still wouldn't slay the Dustoraptors breeding under the large furniture.

I finally realized that what I really wanted with this:

Alas, Rosie the Housecleaning Robot doesn't exist. And I couldn't afford one if it did.

But one upside to the down economy is that many electronics vendors are slashing prices on their products. I caught a sale, and it was my birthday anyway (so I didn't mind a small splurge over what I would have spent on a good, albeit more normal vacuum), and I bought a Roomba.

It's an autonomous vacuum, guided by an array of sensors and a built-in computer. You start it, walk away, and some time later return to a cleaned floor.

And I do mean "a built-in computer." This is the motherboard for the thing--- yes, a vacuum with a motherboard:

Over the next couple days, I'll dissect my Roomba for you and tell you how it works. Even if you don't hate housework as much as I do, the tech is pretty interesting.

More tomorrow.

(Want a jump start? Here's the propaganda video from iRobot, the makers of Roomba: http://tinyurl.com/de98br The video is accurate, but the market-speak on the audio is a bit over the top. 8-) )

1000 MPH (1600kph) Car

I enjoyed driving the Autobahns in Europe, motoring along at a pace that would have meant jail time in the US. I even flirted with some, shall we say, higher than normal speeds on long, straight, dry, desert roads in the empty parts of the US Southwest.

But this is a whole 'nother thing:
http://tinyurl.com/6hyuup

Godspeed, Spacebat!

Have you heard about Spacebat? He's real--- honest!

Here he is in closeup, clinging to the side of the Space Shuttle's external fuel tank, just before liftoff a few days ago:



And here's the brave, plucky devil at the actual moment (inside circle towards bottom of tank):


In the time it took those NASA images to be processed, Spacebat caught geeky imaginations everywhere, leading to posts like this:

At some point during the countdown, Spacebat—a Free-Tailed Chiroptera—was spotted latched to the foam of the external fuel tank, occasionally moving around but never letting go. Wildlife experts deduced that he had injured his wing and shoulder, leaving him with little chance of survival. He remained on the tank until launch. NASA's cold report.

The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery's climb into orbit.

True! But here's how it should have read:

"Bereft of his ability to fly and with nowhere to go, a courageous bat climbed aboard our Discovery with stars in his weak little eyes. The launch commenced, and Spacebat trembled as his little mammalian body was gently pushed skyward. For the last time, he felt the primal joy of flight; for the first, the indescribable feeling of ascending toward his dream—a place far away from piercing screeches and crowded caves, stretching forever into fathomless blackness."

Whether he was consumed in the exhaust flames or frozen solid in the stratosphere is of no concern to us. We know that Spacebat died, but his dream will live on in all of us.

Almost instantly, Spacebat became a meme.

People began creating memorial images:



Some wrote haiku:

an ode to Space Bat
surly bonds slipped, stars in his
windblown little eyes

Some rewrote old songs:

Out of the Blue, into the Bat

My my, hey hey
Flown before. Will fly today.
It's better to burn out
Than to fade away
My my, hey hey.

Out of the blue and into the black
Space bug bit for this here bat.
And once you're gone, you can never come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black.

Jacked me some wings. Maybe more'n I can handle.
What the f*ck. Baby, light this candle.
It's better to burn out than it is to rust
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky.

Hey hey, my my
Spacebat's name can never die
There's more to the picture
Than meets the eye.
Hey hey, my my.

Some started faux-reminiscence threads:

Hey, remember that time he got caught in that girls hair?

Some compared him to other similarly iconic heroes:



There's even a Youtube movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibq2IwznCgc

In fact, there's a ton more: search for Spacebat.

Poor little guy, a mammalian hero. R.I.P

Spacebat, 2009-2009

Clearly, he had The Right Fluff.

Pretty sure the photo's incorrect

I guess Fox News needed to add a little zing.

Test and improve your Internet speed for free

Test and improve your Internet speed
for free!

Is your ISP delivering on its speed promises?

Online throughput is a very complex thing and is affected by many factors. There's the basic bandwidth of your connection to your ISP, but your own hardware and software configuration plays a part, too. Plus, your overall throughput is affected by every single router between you and whatever server you're trying to communicate with. Most Internet connections hop through 10 to 30 intermediate steps between you and the final destination. Add in the distant server's own hardware and software, and you can see just how many variables are in the mix.

But the right tools can help you see what's going on with your connection and maybe where the problem lies. The better tools can also be used to tune or tweak your network settings to ensure that you're getting all the speed your ISP has to offer.

That's the subject of the lead item in my column this week at Windows Secrets, including info on the sites I rely on to tune my own connections. I also discuss three other topics:

• Old Windows still OK on old hardware? (And a Linux recommendation!)
  
• Vista virtual-memory tweaks
  
• Using Microsoft's free SyncToy utility for backups
  

Access to these items is by a kind of honor-system principle: You decide what the content is worth, and whatever you decide to pay lets you in to *all* the paid-edition content (not just my columns) for a full year.

Full info (you start by signing up for the spam-proof free version) here:
http://windowssecrets.com/

Thanks for checking it out!

True stories told in one sentence

Strange, funny, oddly affecting:

http://www.onesentence.org/

Making money out of shells

Automated Google searches turn up odd things when the name "Langa" is added on a web site:

http://tinyurl.com/awmbdq

Catalog of Exoplanets

Did you know there are now over 300 confirmed planets orbiting suns other than our own?

That's the number as I write this, but the tally goes up on a regular basis. Also, the detection-level goes down, and we're close to the ability to detect earth-sized planets. The first planets discovered were huge, hot gasballs (insert your favorite Rush Limbaugh joke here). Those worlds are incapable of supporting life as we know it. But more recently, large rocky planets have been identified, so we're getting closer to being able to "see" other potential earths.

The trick will be to find a more or less Earth-sized rocky planet in the so-called "Goldilocks Zone" (really!). It sounds like a joke, but that's the casual name scientists use for the very real "sphere of habitability" around a star where an orbiting planet would be not too hot, not too cold, but just right for Earth-style life. (See? Scientists can have a sense of humor!)

The Planetary Society put up a web page that keeps a running tally of all known planets:
http://www.planetary.org/exoplanets/list.php. The list represents a ton of work collating the raw data and lets you click your way to learn more about everything there.

It's fun to be an armchair interstellar explorer, and especially fun to check the site every now and again to watch the totals grow.

It seems to be turning out that planets are actually quite common. It may even be unusual for a star NOT to have planets.

And someday soon, in the next few years, someone will announce the discovery of the first truly earthlike world in its star's sphere of habitability--- in the Goldilocks Zone. And then, with some real data instead of just educated guesses, we'll be able to pin down some of the hardest variables in the famous Drake Equation, and come up with a more refined estimate for whether there's life out there, or not.

But as of now, with every new discovery, the odds get better and better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Sagan's video on the Drake Equation (his estimate of the number of planets is probably way low, due to newer data that wasn't available to him when the video was made):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ztl8CG3Sys

Mmmmmm.

There'll always be an England

Motorist stopped by police for laughing

http://tinyurl.com/czc5yz

Triskaidekaphobia

Triskaidekaphobia is the generalized fear of the number 13, but the specific fear of Fridays the 13th is called paraskevidekatriaphobia or friggatriskaidekaphobia. I can think of other, less polite names, too, but I'll refrain.

The fear of the number 13 goes way, way back in time. For example, the Code of Hammurabi (of "an eye for an eye" fame) enumerates the laws of that long-ago day, but skips the 13th law, jumping straight from law 12 to law 14. Since then, many cultures and religions have co-opted this "13 is bad" thing as their own and woven it into their mythologies. EG Some Christian legends say 13 is bad because Judas Iscariot was the 13th diner at Jesus' "Last Supper." Alas, the Code of Hammurabi predates Jesus by almost 2000 years, so the "unlucky 13" thing was going on way before then.

Even today, you've probably seem similar silliness in elevators that omit a 13th floor, or at race tracks where there's no number 13 gate for the horses or dogs. (Oh yeah, that'll fool the laws of probability!)

OK, so the "13" thing goes way back, and no one really can say why. But what about Friday being a bad day?

The earliest written evidence for a fear of Fridays in general goes back to the 14th century's Canterbury Tales, but here too, there's been lots of back-filling in religions and cultures to claim bad Fridays as their own. For example, another Christian myth says Fridays are bad because Jesus was crucified on a Friday. But the calendars in use then were completely different from today, and no one can really say even what year it happened, much less what day.

So we have a very ancient "bad 13" thing and a somewhat newer "bad Friday" thing. Who put "bad Fridays" together with "bad 13s" to come up with a really, really bad "Friday the 13th?"

Oddly, there is no written evidence at all for a "Friday the 13th" superstition before the mid 1800's. As a codified thing, it's a brand-new myth.

But there are many oral traditions that vaguely indicate the older roots of a "Friday the 13th" superstition. One explanation that seems plausible to me is Viking mythology, where the 13th Norse god was Loki; among other things, a murderer who once showed up as the 13th guest at the funeral of one of his victims.

Loki was actually an interesting character. One of his best tricks was the ability to transform himself into a salmon: Imagine, a god who's also rich in Omega 3s! Lots of gods care for your soul, but Loki is also good for your heart!

OK, that's the Norse "bad 13" thing. Another Norse god--- actually goddess--- named Frigga adds in the "bad Friday" thing. In fact, our word "Friday" comes from her name. "Friday" is a contraction of "Frigga's Day":

Friday is named for Frigga, the free-spirited goddess of love and fertility. When Norse and Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, Frigga was banished in shame to a mountaintop and labeled a witch. It was believed that every Friday, the spiteful goddess convened a meeting with eleven other witches, plus the devil - a gathering of thirteen - and plotted ill turns of fate for the coming week. For many centuries in Scandinavia, Friday was known as "Witches' Sabbath."

And if you're wondering, yes "Friggin'" as a substitute for the other F word does come from Frigga, "the free-spirited goddess of love and fertility."

So, you take the Norse "bad 13" (murderous Loki as the 13th god; and who showed up as the 13th mourner at his victim's funeral) and combine it with Frigga's "Friday" (including her own association with an evil 13th guest) and you have Friday the 13th as being a bad, bad day. Especially, I guess, if you're a nympho goddess or a part-time salmon.

Anyway, in addition to the above links, these sites may help your water-cooler conversations today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraskevidekatriaphobia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friggatriskaidekaphobia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_the_13th
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammurabi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigga

And even if you don't buy any of the above, you have to admit that Loki is pretty cool. A salmon god: Take that, Charlie the Tuna!

Sorting Out Setup Disk Mixups

Sorting Out Setup Disk Mixups:
How to stay sane while juggling
different setup CDs for different PCs.

Have you ever ended up with several setup CDs in your hands, but can't remember which CD goes with which PC? I have, and so have some readers, so the lead item in my column in the WindowsSecrets newsletter this week is geared to help. The answer may surprise you!

The other items this week include:

• Reviving a Dead "System Restore"
• When a software fix causes new problems...
  
• How to storing complete CDs/DVDs on a hard drive (so you can use them exactly the same way as if they were still on separate, physical disks)
  

Access to these items is by a kind of honor-system principle: You decide what the content is worth, and whatever you decide to pay lets you in to *all* the paid-edition content (not just my column) for a full year.

Full info (you start by signing up for the spam-proof free version) here:
http://windowssecrets.com/

Thanks for checking it out!

Win7 Test Results

Yesterday (Mar 10) ZDnet published some interesting preliminary tests results.

Windows 7 is still in beta; beta versions of software are usually skewed towards stability and bug-tracking, rather than speed. For example, beta versions usually include "instrumentation" code to collect information about how the software is running. This data is used to solve problems and tweak the final code. The instrumentation code is usually pretty much stripped out before the product ships. So, performance-testing beta software is only indicative of final performance, and usually shows the software as slower than the final product will be.

Still, the early performance testing of Windows 7 is looking veeeeery interesting.

ZDnet tested the 32-bit Win7 beta versus the 32-bit versions of XP and Vista in 31 different performance areas (boot times, file copying, opening Word documents, opening spreadsheets, etc). In each of the 31 tests, the results were rank-ordered, with the fastest OS getting a 1 and the last-place finisher getting a 5. Thus, a perfect score--- all first-place finishes--- would be 31, and a perfectly horrid score--- all last place finishes--- would be a 155.

Of course, no OS will win or lose every single test, but those are the best and worst case numbers, so you know what the range was.

XP SP3 and Vista SP1 tied with overall scores of 130 each. ZDnet also included 64-bit OSes in the mix: The speedy 64-bit Vista SP1 scored a 71--- roughly twice as fast as the standard 32-bit versions of XP and Vista.

But the 32-bit Win7 beta's total score was 53. In short, Win7 blew everything else out of the water. It was even considerably faster than even 64-bit Vista.

That's gotta make you go "Hmmmmmm.

There are a million caveats to interpreting these results. It's a beta. The tests may or may not be indicative of how you use *your* system. And the above test results were for an Intel-based system. ZDnet also ran the same tests on an AMD system and did get slightly different results, although 32-bit Win7 still was enormously faster than 32-bit XP or Vista on that system, too.

It's not definitive, but it sure is interesting. Coupled with far more user control built into Win7 (responding to complaints about Vista), it's looking like this may be the first really major leap forward for Windows in a long, long time.

Win7 may finally be what Vista should have been all along.

Results chart:
http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12554_22-277290-2.html

Full article:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3789

Great "Last Photo"

Messing with PETA

I love the Onion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ7J7UjsRqg

Awesomely cool nanotube radio

An experimental nano-sized radio is so small it reacts directly to radio waves, converting the EM radiation into mechanical energy in one step, with no intermediate steps.

And it really works! The researchers even published a recording of the nano-radio playing Eric Clapton's "Layla." (More on that in a moment.)

Look at the size: It's small enough to fit inside a single cell:



Because it's a proof-of-concept thing, it's rough, but you can hear the actual playback of Layla here: http://tinyurl.com/aqnq76

Full story:

Quick precis: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1198
Fuller article: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-worlds-smallest-radio

Guaranteed to change you forever...

... if only in a small way.

After this brief (18 sec) clip, you will never, ever hear this song the same way again. Guaranteed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_B5UrI7nAI

Blonde returns to work after 25 years

People younger than a certain age won't get this at all:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbMpCvlt790

Human fails Turing Test

I've known people who probably would have flunked, and I bet you have, too. I even worked for a few. :)

Here's the story: http://tinyurl.com/cxqpu5

It's especially sad when you see the software that's actually winning the annual Turing Test competition these days.

This was a recent winner: http://www.elbot.com/ Really!

For backups, RAID mirroring is not the answer

For backups, RAID mirroring is not the answer.

That's the lead item in my column in the WindowsSecrets newsletter this week.

Drive mirroring is a kind of continuous, real-time backup where an OS keeps a primary and a secondary drive in perfect sync. Whatever changes are made to one drive are transferred automatically to the other.

Mirroring is actually a form of RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). This ancient hard-drive technology originated way back in 1987, when MS-DOS 3.3 was king and hard drives were incredibly expensive. For example, an Iomega 10MB hard drive cost $900 in 1987 dollars; equivalent to about $1,600.00 in today's dollars. (And yes, that's a miserly 10MB, not 10GB.)

RAID capability is built into many motherboard disk controllers today, which means that lots of people are using it.

And while RAID has its place, I don't think it's on the desktop--- especially not in simple mirroring setups. In this week's issue, I'll explain why.

The other items this week include:

• A quick command restores a missing imm32.dll
  
• How to thwart port-probe hack attacks
  
• An easy fix for "USB devices not recognized" problems
  

The guys who run WindowsSecrets put my column in the paid-subscription section which operates on the honor-system principle: You decide what the content is worth, and whatever you decide to pay lets you in to *all* the paid-edition content (not just my column) for a full year.

Full info (you start by signing up for the spam-proof free version) here:
http://windowssecrets.com/

Thanks for checking it out!

Whew! It's not over yet!

LA Times:

Is bacon over? Don't think so!

Interesting page

Let it run for a minute--- it cycles through the categories.

http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

Curse you, Mike Elgan!

Curse you, Mike Elgan!

OK, OK, not really. Mike is a good friend whom I've known for--- wow--- coming up on 20 years. You may have known him for nearly as long through his various professional works (see synopsis and links at http://elganmedia.net/).

When I met Mike, he'd recently left the world of newspapers for the greener (ha!) pastures of magazine publishing. But some part of Mike has always remained connected to news reporting.

So, why am I pseudo-cursing him?

Mike is an earliest adopter: He's always among the first users of new and emerging technologies. Some people consider me an early adopter, but I can't hold a candle to Mike.

Or rather, I could, but it would be an actual candle, while Mike would have a solar-powered, high-intensity, laser-guided, eye-mounted, thought-controlled LED floodlight pointing back. Or something.

I stay current with my professional stuff, but I'm generally much slower to update my personal gear. For example, I have a strange, Luddite aversion to do-it-all phones. I want my phone to be a (gasp!) phone, and a good one. If I want to send a text message, I want to use a real keyboard, not a compromised phone-sized one. If I want to take a photo, I want to use a real camera, not a compromised phone-sized one. If I want to surf the web or watch movies, I want to watch a real screen, not a compromised phone-sized one. I want my phone to make and receive phone calls well, and not have that primary function compromised with other they-sorta-kinda-work (but-they're-oh-so-trendy!) features.

I even have my cell-phone ringer set to sound like an old, analog desk phone; you know, with the two-tone bells. I like the irony.

Then there's email. For years, I lived on email. At the peak of my newsletter business, I'd get around a million emails a month (no joke!). Many were crap, and I had an elaborate set of filters to winnow them out, some at the server level so they'd never even reach my inbox. Many that did make it through were related to newsletter activity (subscriber signups, address changes, etc.); and could be handled by bots and little custom programs I wrote. So, I never actually had to personally open and read a million emails a month, but that was the volume that came pouring in.

This was one of the happier days in my professional life:



That's a graph showing how my email volume fell off (red) when I sold my newsletter business. (It was a momentous-enough day for me that I preserved the graph.) The green line shows that during the previous month I'd had a day--- one very busy day--- with over 45,000 inbound emails.

Because of that experience, I've been averse to the various chatterbox types of communications: IMs, Tweets, and such. The last thing I wanted was to re-immerse myself in a constant flood of messages, each demanding at least a minimal amount of attention. Been there, done that, don't need to go back.

I successfully resisted for years. I did set up some IM accounts so I could understand the technology and its applications, but never used them as a personal tool. And I had accounts at Facebook, Linkedin and the like, but there too, it was to see what the fuss was, not to use them personally.

And likewise, I'd looked at Twitter so I could see what it was about, but steered clear of any real use.

But then Mike sent me an innocent-looking message mentioning a little applet he'd created to nourish his own news-oriented roots: it was a small web page that used the Twitter API to auto-refresh Twitter feeds every minute or so. Mike suggested I try it by signing up for any of the many Twitter news feeds and then using his self-refreshing page to constantly update the feeds. With the news feed page open on my desktop, I could watch news stories develop in near real-time. The news "tweets" were often hours (and sometimes a full day) ahead of the "breaking news" stories carried online by more traditional news organizations.

A few days later, Mike said he'd found a beta version of a commercial service that he liked even better than his home-brew news feeder. It's free and is called TweetDeck. (http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/) So, I created a Twitter account and set it to "follow" about 30 of the separate news sources available there:

USAT_Breaking / USAT Breaking News
BreakingNewsTDC / Breaking News TDC
techTF / tech TwitFix
Slate
CBSNews / CBS Breaking News
ForbesTech / Forbes.com Tech News
GreenTechNews
Drudge_Report / Drudge Report
Breaking_News / Breaking News
pablorueda
BreakingNewz / Breaking News
msnbc_breaking / msnbc Breaking News
iDesk / CNN iDesk
zdnett
RSS_TechCrunch
guardiantech / Guardian Tech
ondeadline / USAT On Deadline
mike_elgan / Mike Elgan
BreakingNewsOn / BNO News
bbcbreaking / BBC Breaking News
WSJ / Wall Street Journal
Reuters / Reuters Top News
foxnews / Fox News
wired / Wired
CNETNews / CNET News.com
nytimes / The New York Times
cnn / CNN.com
bbcworld / BBC World News
googlenews / Google News

I fed my news-oriented Twitter account info into Tweetdeck, and it logged on for me and started displaying the most-recent Tweets from the sources I'd followed.

Mike suggested setting up Tweetdeck in 1-column mode, and sticking it to the side of my screen. It looks like this (click to enlarge):



It updates every minute, and most minutes, something new is happening. It's not uncommon for first news reports to show up on Twitter before anyplace else. After a delay of minutes to hours or longer, the same information will start showing up on more traditional news services. I have a custom Google/News page I follow, too, and it updates every 10 minutes or so; but I don't think I've ever seen something important show up there that wasn't already pointed to, in abbreviated form, much earlier via Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck's downside is obvious: It's an attention-diverter, and can be a way to waste nontrivial amounts of time as you move from the Twitter blurb to a full story, and onward through associated links until your curiosity is satisfied.

First reports via Twitter are often sketchy, too, and sometimes just plain wrong. That's the nature of seeing the raw, first-draft info as it develops.

And I can't say that Tweetdeck has replaced any of my other news sources: It's just a kind of early-warning, headline clipping service, really. Hell, in addition to my custom Google news page, I still read two daily newspapers, several online newspapers, two weekly news magazines and a couple of weekly specialized journals. Tweetdeck just adds to the mix without reducing the need for more in-depth news reporting.

But, damn, Tweetdeck's up-to-the-minute urgency is compelling, and sometimes seeing a one- or two-sentence blurb draws me into an interesting story I might otherwise have skimmed over in a different format. Twitter/Tweetdeck exposes you to a *lot* of news.

So on balance, I'm enjoying Tweetdeck; enough so that I've kept my Twitter account alive--- something that, before Mike's email, I wouldn't have imagined happening.

If you're a mild news junkie like me or a hard-core-news-in-the-blood person like Mike, Tweetdeck might be worth a try.

And then you can join me in shaking your e-fist at Mike.

Curse you, Mike Elgan! 8-)

Don't pigeons eat nuts?

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=333&sid=5491952