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.

Decorating

I was sitting around at home, thinking how I can improve the lounge. I wanted to bring in autumn leaves, and I wasn't sure how - I can google, but I can't draw.



I wanted something a bit like the David Jones bronze leaves swirling up from behind my lamp.

Drawing was out, so what about stickers?

It turns out that vinyl stickers are all of the rage these days. Eventually, I changed direction; and have just bought tree story.

I think it's going to look quite good.

Nutrition, Food Standards and Copyright

I have a simple wish: build a really simple calorie counter backed with some common products; so that I don't have to manually count calories.

I should be able to type "Rosella Condensed Tomato Soup", and it finds the right product for me and tells me that it has:

Energy 78.87189kcal
Protein 1.5g
Carbohydrate 16.8g
Sugars 12.3g
Fat 1.0g
Saturates 1.0g
Sodium 1,125.0g
Serving size 245.0g
Servings per package 4

... and I ate a whole can, meaning I ate 4 servings.

So, I set off looking around for things which already did this.

Nothing.

Update: Bigfoodlist is almost exactly what I want.

Apparently, you can get information from a bunch of sources, like Foodstandards.gov.au or the USDA; but after just a little bit of clicking my eyes bled from the web 1.0 of it all.

Finally, I find where I can get information in CSV form - by emailed request.

This work is copyright. You may download, display, print and reproduce this material in unaltered form only (retaining this notice) for your personal, non-commercial use or use within your organisation.

Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ).

Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction and rights should be addressed to the Information Officer, FSANZ, PO Box 7186, Canberra BC, ACT 2610 or email info@foodstandards.gov.au

I feel so very backwards that there isn't a simple, universal product database which stores this information.

This is the kind of thing I want from the semantic web - government data I can query so that I can control my calorie intake. Why is this idea so foreign to government? Why are all licenses by default set to "no".

We'll see how far I get with my can-I-have-information email, but past experience has led me to disappointment.

Update 2: Success! USDA SR21 is a bunch of data you can download and stick into a database. It would not be hard to RDFize this.