Buffini's Blog

… Has been ordered and awaiting it extremely impatiently. A very short post to say that I think this thing is a masterpiece of engineering, and cant wait to lay hands on this juicy AV Receiver beastie. Here are some pics to keep you occupied in the meantime.

Last week I went and bought myself the very pretty Iomega Screenplay Pro HD. Very nice piece of kit, comes with a 1TB drive, HDMI output, and both USB and network streaming. It also does recording, which is a very nice bonus, though in fairness it does only do this based on whatever is currently being displayed.

And wonder of almighty wonders, this is the first time I’ve ever come across a box that actually had all the bits in it, namely cables. This beastie actually came with  both a HDMI cable and an AV cable. Unusual methinks. Tested out the interface and it loads up nice and fast, very simple and easy to use. Haven’t had a chance to try it across the network or using the USB.

The drive doesn’t appear to be too noisy, the load times are fairly fast, and the image quality is good. All in all I’m pretty happy with it, and its turned out to be a decent investment.

See:

• Iomega’s site for full specifications
• CNet for customer/site reviews

Oh this would just be so cool…. The hours and hours of fun to be lost on trains, buses, planes, everywhere….

Quick test using the fancy new PostBot app on my shiny G1. I’ll be well impressed if it works…

Have to start doing some real work on this thing, had all these great intentions, buy hosting, buy a domain, setup Wordpress, post like a bastard. All worked out well except for the last part…

Have to see if can put a decent captcha on the comments as well, now at 300 odd spamments and pissedoffness is climbing.

Image via WikipediaI love the way that there are so many other people out in the world who love to dig in to a beautiful piece of tech, in this case the LEGO Mindstorms RCX kit, and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things with it.

I got a set a couple of years ago from my girlfriend for Christmas, and at the time, because the bundled software wasn’t the may west, I wasn’t able to do a lot with it. Since then I’ve branched out a good bit into the wilds of open source code and custom hacker y and discovered LeJOS (lejos.sourceforge.net). At it’s core its a tiny JVM, based on (drum roll please) TinyVM . There are versions available for both the RCX, the older model that I’ve got, plus the NXT, the oh so wonderful beautiful shiny, fandiddlyastic new one that comes with aaaaaaalll sorts of goodies. There also other packages available in other languages, such as C#

What this gives you is the ability to write your own Java code to make the funny wee robots do damn near anything. The new version gives full access to the bluetooth commands (I think..) , so if you went with this OS, you’d be able to do fancy stuff like construct a motion detecting robot that looks like Johnny5 (God bless this woman, she is a LEGEND), that fires off lego rounds and chases people around the room. (I think I’m drooling on my keyboard…)

There’s also a handy wee Eclipse plugin for both the RCX and the NXT that will do all of the interfacing between the machine and the brick for you, meaning that all the programmer has to do is write the damn code.

I’ve gotten all of the underlying basics up and running on my home system, or I had before it presented me with a delightful BSOD. Luckily I run an Ubuntu dual boot, and all of the shiny bits run under that too so I can just shift over. Whenever I actually get around to creating something useful is a whole other story. See related articles for other fun.

Note: Google just handed me this lovely little snippet of Lego-like goodness. Oh the fun we could have…..

We’ve all heard the ads on TV recently about work life balance, about how everyone should take time to ensure that their work doesn’t overshadow their personal life. For a lot of people this can be a major struggle. The average person gets up early, goes to work, spends the bulk of the day there, and then returns home through another painful commute, to find that there is really only enough time to have dinner, crash out in front of the TV, and go to bed.

Obviously in these cases measures are needed to redress the balance, whether it be working shorter hours, working closer to home, or just structuring your days better to avoid the feeling of living a life that consists of work-bed-work-bed… For most people this is the case and with a little effort it can be done. But what about the people who don’t feel any such problem, the people who, instead of having a job, have what can only be termed as a vocation?

Take, for example, programmers. As a group, especially the nerdier of the bunch, we tend to have an almost obsessive desire to learn more about our chosen profession, its no hardship or effort to take some of our vanishingly small amount of personal time to do something work related, because its not just work related, it is, in a very real sense, who we are. The typical nerd/programmer will think nothing of taking the time or effort after work, or on the weekends, to play with some new technology, or language, or just do something that’s fun. I recently got it into my head that it would be a great idea to program my LEGO Mindstorms kit using Java, and try to find some way of adapting it to be accessible over the web. This could take days, if not weeks, of work, but it doesn’t matter because its part of who I am.

So, in this case does the work life balance matter so much? Or is it in fact a case of the balance being reversed, where the old impression of nerds (“You need to get out more!!”) applies? Its a subject that could probably do with some investigating, and more than likely already has, but its still interesting to think about.

Preferably inside, where I can get a good solid WiFi connection