What’s that? You thought there were only three laws? Well check out SomethingAwful.com’s excellent additions in their 30 Laws of Robotics list. I especially like:
23. A robot must shut up around girls and let me, Isaac Asimov, do the talking; however, a robot may bail me out if things start to go haywire.
I wonder if my Roomba is three laws safe?
It looks like my experience of awful customer service from iRobot’s UK service center, Domotec, was an anomaly. Either that or the spotlight of publicity, combined with my emailing a number of iRobot’s senior management caused someone to ensure policy - and warranties - were being properly applied.
I called Domotec’s service number this morning, after checking by email that they were definitely the authorised warranty centre for Roomba’s sold by the iRobot UK store. A very helpful and friendly lady answered the phone and on hearing my description of the problem offered to send out the replacement cleaning module for me to fit. No quibbles, no fuss, just an immediate acceptance of the problem and offer of an entirely satisfactory solution.
So I can recommend the Roomba again. Just be sure to clean it after EVERY use, not just every 3 times like the manual says!
I’m lusting after the new Sony Vaio Z Series which doesn’t come out in the US until mid-August, and I’ve no idea when it comes out in the UK. Annoyingly, while the US site allows you to configure your system from scratch - including putting in dual solid state drives - Sony UK limit us to choosing from three prescribed models, none of which contain quite the match of processor and storage I’m looking for. Continue reading ‘Sony Vaio Z Series’
If you have ever enjoyed any of Joss Whedon’s output, be it Firefly, Angel or especially the musical episode of Buffy, you owe it to yourself to see his new musical project: Dr. Horrible. It stops being free to stream on July 20th, so hurry! There’s no way to download or buy it legitimately in the UK at the moment so this is your only chance to see it until a (we hope) DVD release.
It stars Neil Patrick Harris as the eponymous horrible Doctor. You may recognise him as the awesome Barney from How I Met Your Mother. Those of you with longer memories will recall him as the precocious Dougie Houser MD.
He is excellent as Dr Horrible, a sorry excuse for an evil genius with grand plans to get into the Evil League of Evil and a hope to one day work up the courage to talk to the girl of his dreams. I’ll leave it there because I don’t want to give away too much but trust me: it’s laugh out loud funny and tuneful to boot - I had no idea that he could sing! Go and watch it!
Continuing the theme of past computers and consoles, I found this post about the Atari Jaguar, and specifically Jeff Minter’s contribution to it: Tempest 2000, arguably the finest version of that game on any platform.
I first discovered the trippy weirdness of Jeff Minter on the Atari ST, playing Llamatron, a bizarre game starring a futuristic Llama that shoots white energy in whichever direction it is moving. I remember being horribly addicted to it in the early 90s. It was unlike any game I’d ever played, not least because of the weird array of enemies and powerups that populated the game - from Rizla papers to cutlery and burgers. Continue reading ‘Console Nostalgia: Atari and Jeff Minter’
Three handy sites for people who need to manage the volume of email coming in.
Don’t want to be included on the latest “funny” forward, let your correspondent down gently with www.thanksno.com.
Or do you have a contact who doesn’t know how to use BCC and reveals your email address to everybody else they’re sending the message to? (As one of Lindsay’s contacts did this weekend.) Send them a link to bccplease.com for a quick lesson in email etiquette.
And finally, if you’re getting swamped with the amount of email you have to reply to, why not instigate a five sentences rule to speed things up a bit. See five.sentenc.es for more information.
I can’t remember when I first played with a ZX Spectrum. I know I must have come to the party relatively late since I was only 4 when it was released, unlike Chris who was old enough to have one at launch. This weekend he rescued one from his mum’s rubbish bin, complete in the polystyrene box it originally came in and with mint condition manuals. It even has the guarantee certificate, an unopened demo cassette and the 1982 Edition of the Sinclair Software Catalogue! Continue reading ‘ZX Spectrum nostalgia’
What do we buy the birthday boy who has a no-media policy?
That’s what Phil asked me before my birthday last month. He was referring to the fact that I have no CDs, no DVDs no optical media of any description cluttering my living room. All our TV and movies are stored on a variety of redundant storage and accessed over the network. Be it full VOB rips of DVDs to Xvid or x264 encodes of movies and TV it can all now be played back by the new HTPC. Of course with as much digital content as we have, we need a decent system to manage and search it. Read on for the best solutions I’ve found…
Having ditched Freeview for signal quality reasons, it’s time to talk about getting the satellite cards to work under Vista Media Centre - something that until MS release the “Fuji” update is not as trivial as you’d think! Vista’s tuning architecture doesn’t understand DVB-S (or -S2), so can’t natively tune satellite cards, so we need to “trick” Vista into believing that the satellite card is actually just a standard DVB-T (Freeview) card, albeit with many more channels. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: Freesat with Vista’
When I originally built my HTPC, I used 2 Freeview cards. Each Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T500 has two Freeview tuners in one PCI card. By installing two of these (and with some registry tweaking) it is possible to build a device that can record/watch 4 Freeview channels at once.
Out of the box the Vista Media Centre GUI is only capable of setting up 2 tuners at any one time. This is odd since the underlying tuner architecture is actually quite capable of using as many tuners as you can fit in the machine. Your limiting factor, really, is the speed you can push the data to your hard drive. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: Multiple Freeview Tuners’
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