Even More Robots (with lasers!)

Looks like the Neato Robotics XV-11 is shipping (review sites are getting their preorder units, Amazon lists it as "2-3 weeks" but is taking normal orders.) This is the first real competitor to the Roomba - while iRobot has been doing an excellent job of evolutionary/incremental improvements to their flagship consumer robot, the only really significant change since it came out in 2002 was automatic docking for charge - I now have one unit that runs in my bedroom every single day, and it handles that quite well with minimal attention - the switch from IR to RF for control didn't really do the end-user any good. The XV-11 appears to be going all the way in an attempt to leapfrog it - actually mapping the space, keeping track of what it's done, appearing to follow a plan - basically behaving like a smart robot, instead of a cleverly-dumb one. (Roomba's random walk is effective in simple spaces, and was a clever bit of engineering optimization back when CPU actually cost something... but I have a large, cluttered, "open plan" space that the Roomba generally gets lost in which will be the XV-11's first challenge.)

Of course, one of the secondary advantages of the Roomba was that it encouraged keeping a space uncluttered - but it'd be nice to have that as a choice, rather than a limitation.

Emergency Chai Flashbacks

The (long gone) Someday Café in Somerville is noted for having been the reason Chai escaped from Seattle - somewhere I have a Time Magazine blurb about it, we're talking early 90's here. I used to be "that guy" who showed up with a hat and a beat up Tosci's mug (once we determined that it wouldn't melt, they were happy to steam directly in it - yay for having Real People behind the counter :-) Especially in early winter, when Davis Square was entirely composed of slush, I'd use the subway tunnel to cut across the square and back to my office. I still have fond associations of Oregon-style Chai with miserable New England weather :-)

The *reason* these 15 year old images are flashing back to me now is that my local grocery store (Crosby's) stocks K-cups, and I got a K-cup machine as a gift (I'm not sure K-cups are what you want if you *like* coffee, but if you just need a cup some mornings - self-medicating, if you will - so you can rush out the door instead of lingering over a proper cup of tea - the low end machine is a nice thing to have tucked in a corner of your countertop somewhere.) Today I saw that they had Chai Latte cups, and on a whim, I picked up a box.

Much to my surprise, they're *perfect*. Good enough to inspire the flashbacks above (ok, perhaps it helped that I was out shopping in the rain - I'm still in New England after all :-) I really didn't expect that. I mostly figured I'd use this once in a while for have-to-get-up-at-7am-for-a-concall-with-dudes-in-Berlin coffee emergencies; that was how I convinced myself that the ludicrous amount of packaging per serving was acceptable. These Chai cups may change that...

Model M Keyboards

The old and the new: I'm typing this on a Unicomp Model M (modern construction of the classic IBM/Lexmark keyboard) hooked through the Camera adapter (ie. "the USB port that should have been there all along") on my iPad. I did get a "The attached USB device is not supported" message, but that's because this particular Model M is the version with the ThinkPad-style trackstick, which shows up as a normal mouse; the keyboard itself is working fine.

If the camera adapters weren't (a) so expensive (b) so scarce and backordered, I'd just leave one with the keyboard...

Continuing with the iPad

Picked up a bluetooth keyboard today for use with the iPad; not all that much more to say than "it works" although emacs bindings don't work the way they do in normal Mac apps, and least things like keyboard-oriented cut and paste are there. (I also picked up the two "real" SSH clients, iSSH and SSH Terminal - as much to encourage competition as anything :-) I do use the iPad for work email as well as personal, and now that I have a keyboard, well, there have been occurrences in the last two or three days where I'd have logged in to work remotely rather than waiting... it's not that I have any shortage of laptops, but waiting for one to boot, and the extent to which I get "sucked in" once I've done so has led me to avoid working on things from home if I'm trying to head in anyway (now, if I can do something at home that lets me *avoid* going in, that's another story, but a much less common one.)

And as you can see, I type significantly more (and less visibly, significantly faster) with an actual QWERTY keyboard in front of me. We'll see if that leads to more blogging, or promoting this to a "more real" blog, instead of continuing to pretend it's a playground for mobile client use...

Next round of mobile toys

Finally picked up an iPad for myself, now that the 3G ones are out. (I was going to wait for a model with built-in webcam, but the weight of my normal laptops is bothering my knees - and the iPad totally handles reading/viewing without compromise, and that's the larger part of my computer time.) Continuing the mobile client tradition, I am composing this on the iPad using BlogPress and the on-screen keyboard. However, I actually want to write about cameras...

I've been carrying the dSLR with a big lens - either the 500mm mirror lens, or the 55-250mm zoom. I can't really snap off shots with it, like I did with the SX-10IS, it really needs to be aimed, and even in live view the auto focus isn't enough. I missed three shots on Saturday for this reason alone - a deer browsing above the retaining wall on route 2, a flipped over car on the outbound side of Belmont hill, and my car's mileage hitting 88888 (I did get a bad phonecam shot of it, but not really suitable for my gallery of numerologically interesting mileage readings.)

The end result is that there is a shiny new Canon, the SD4000IS, which has 320fps video, a backlit CMOS sensor with allegedly awesome low-light modes, which is now going to be my close-in/impromptu camera. I'm still going to carry the Rebel XSi with something long mounted, but that may go back to being an "event" camera. Who knows, I might even start taking pictures of people, instead of "things with wings" and architecture...

Even more "differently" mobile

There's a free blogger.com client for the I*phone* called blogwriter lite; it runs as a scaled up portrait only app on the iPad. This also means that it uses the iPhone soft keyboard, not the native iPad one, which is usable but not nearly as good as the real thing. It does provide offline writing, though, which is probably enough reason to use it anyway; I haven't checked to see if writing in Notes and pasting works with emulated apps or not, though it really should.

In the end I've done more testing of mobile blogging tools than I've done actual mobile blogging; seems that when I'm mobile I don't actually have time to sit down and write, even if I have the tools...

An unexpectedly usable mobile client

Since I temporarily have an iPad, it made sense to add it to the mobile tests, even if it is wifi-only at this time... Mobile Safari just works with the web ui here, and in landscape mode I can type surprisingly quickly with one hand (rather faster than with two, actually - resting your fingers lightly on the keys is healthy with a physical keyboard and fatal with a touchscreen :-) although if I watch carefully some of that is because the auto-correct is quite good. Still not "out of the way" enough to do lengthy essays, but good enough for captioning and tagging, certainly.