Roomba Experiment

It's been a while since the Roomba was brought on to the market, and the price point for a Roomba 530 is between $250-$300 - not to mention numerous competitors are now in the market place.

That tips it over the threshold for me, so I'm certainly getting one. Plus, this video kind of implies I can have my own 'ferret vs robot' gladiatorial competitions.

The other thing I was looking at this morning was home automation. You know my thoughts on killer industrial robots, but I haven't looked at home automation for a long time.

What's really quite interesting to me is that everyone I know seems to have an XBMC setup, and that zwave home automation gear is specifically target at the Australian market.
Add in LinuxMCE, the fact that everyone has an ipad, iphone or android phone; sites like IFTTT and the open source equivalents exist, people making smart devices like the Nest, and IPv6 meaning everything in the universe can have an IP address if it wants, things start to get interesting.

Right now I can:

• Use IFTTT to syndicate this blog post to twitter, facebook by adding certain labels.
• Use IFTTT to SMS/notify me ("Ensure the dog is wearing its rug") when the temperature will go below 10 degrees C, or the opposite ("You have a hot dog, it's 35 degrees C!")
• Use my galaxy s2 to add torrents to my xbmc server, while Christina watches a seperate program on the iPad.
• Pay nothing on my power bill for any of this, given the solar power being generated

The roomba will add self-cleaning to my house to some degree - only a 10-20 minute saving per weekend, but it's about the same as paying $5.77 per time I don't have to vacuum.

My lawn mower is electric, which means it performs terribly in the winter wet conditions, but I've yet to have to fight against it to make it start, and it's got trivial running costs (again, solar power).

Pretty soon, I could

• Add enough motion sensors and lighting to have climate and ambient light follow me around the house. 
• Add in dimmers for side lamps fairly cheaply ($99 is alright, but it could be better!), so when I stop moving around and settle in to watch TV the lighting fades to nothing.
• Add security sensors on the doors/windows; plus alerts to my smartphone if I leave the house and forget to close one properly.
• In winter, switch on the heater at sunrise until 9am.

Right now the biggest things I think stopping this from taking off are the lack of "starter kits". For instance, a USB stick, LinuxMCE and a few light dimmer switches would be the perfect $200 package to get you started on this stuff, but no one tends to sell that in one kit.

My Kingdom for a Bug Fix

At my new work, the wireless keeps flaking out.

This wouldn't matter much if it wasn't for https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-applet/+bug/912702 - every day I'm closing ~50+ network authentication prompts.

Usability niggles, Ubuntu

Ubuntu's next release will have one hundred paper cuts as a focus - fixing usability issues for users.

Here's my best pet peeves.

1. On windows, if I paste in a URL in an "open file" box, windows will fetch it for me, write it somewhere temporary, and give me that temporary path. Gnome is inconsistent - I can put a URL into a the 'Run' dialog, but gedit doesn't let me open it. However, if I start gedit from the command line, it will open it - gedit https://edge.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/
2. 'Choose another application' when opening a file from firefox gets me to try and look around for the path of an application. As a newer user to linux, I often have to fall back to the terminal, and use things like 'which gedit' to get the right path. If the run dialog can work out which application I want, why can't firefox.
3. With gedit, if I open a file which does not exist, it does not let me create said file - it just errors at me.

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bug/18995

Howto: import your allconsuming.net content to alexandria

So I have a problem right? Alexandria is a nifty little application for listing the books you have as a digital library. Allconsuming used to fill that niche, and I've invested a lot of time into it.

So, this should be easy, right? Web 2.0 should mean webservices are exploding out of every possible port... right?

Not so! The information that is there isn't very useful - not even the RSS feeds really allow you to get structured data out.

But there is a way, be it quick and dirty.

First, check you've got Alexandria

sudo -s apt-get install alexandria

Next, go to your Allconsuming javascript setup page. Make sure you've logged in.

You see the script tag mentioned there? Grab it, and change it.

My original one was:
http://allconsuming.net/person/CloCkWeRX/js/all/3

and I now change it to:
http://allconsuming.net/person/CloCkWeRX/completed_js/all/300

Next, I visit the url in my browser, firefox.

I choose to save the page somewhere - call it `export`. We don't care about this page, really, but about the images attached. All of these images (in a handy fashion) are stored as an ASIN, and a file extension. An ASIN is an amazon product code, which handily defaults to an ISBN for books.

Firefox will put this saved page somewhere, like ~/, so whip open a terminal.

cd ~/export_files/
ls > export.txt

Open export.txt in gedit or similar, and replace all of the '.jpg' with '', then save.

Finally, open up Alexandria, and choose 'import'. Select a type of 'isbn list', and navigate to ~/export_files/export.txt

Done! You'll get a few importing errors, no doubt, and Alexandria isn't the best to give you informative errors... but you've just got your library into your library manager.

Ubuntu is fighting me.

Rrr.

It's not Ubuntu, per se, but gnome.

Here's what I want to do.

• Add Songbird as a menu item


• Make a new menu, called 'fucking awesome things which are handy I do not wish to place on my toolbar thing'


• Make a shortcut key that doesn't hate me

Is it easy using the gnome menu editor? NO!
Windows: you grab the icon you want, drag it to a toolbar, and drop it. If you want to put it into your start menu, you hover over the button and the menu appears.

Instead I must do battle.

• Applications menu


• Pick up the songbird icon


• OH SHIT, THE MENU HAS GONE. I JUST WANTED TO PUT IT IN "Sound & Video"


• How do I cancel the drag drop action? ESC! ESC!!

Lazyweb, file the bugs in the right places to make this not a pain in the ass.

Me vs. Ubuntu (Dapper Drake)

Gripes:

• Why is it so hard to set up dual monitor support? I need a GUI to prevent me from screwing up; and the option to 'preview these settings'.
• I want tortoisemerge. tkdiff, and others... suck.
• It would be really, really handy to have an option to 'copy windows shortcut keys'; straight off the bat. It took me a while to work out how to set up ctrlD (show desktop), ctrlR (run something).
• I wish gedit had the tab increment/decrement plugin enabled straight off the bat
• Gaim 2.0.0 and firefox 2.0.0 are nowhere to be seen
• Setting up an application to run with wine should be easier
• Give me a get started guide that points me to very similar to windows truetype fonts.

No other major hiccups in swapping.