Category: Life

I’ve been wanting to get a robotic vacuum cleaner for a while now. This has not so much to do with reasons of practicality, but more to do with my inner-child finding it a super cool toy.

Anywho, I found a decent model for cheap from a local electronics surplus shop last week and went for it. I’ve run it four times since purchasing it. Not a bad little cleaner – it does in fact do quite a decent job at picking up dust off of my hardwood floors.

That said, unless you pick up your socks/cables off of the ground, the little bugger might get something all tangled up in its wheels. The unit I got comes with two “virtual walls”, a small contraption that tells your Roomba not to go into a certain spot. I set one up by my computer cables, so that it doesn’t accidentally get tangled and tear my monitors off of my desk. The other is by my washroom entrance.

Is it worth it? Hard to say. For now, I’m still treating it as a toy more than anything.

There’s a passage in the Rice Tea novel that goes like this:

Seth typed some more in the terminal window. The computer reciprocated the action by displaying a rudimentary chart, made up of blocks of blues and reds. “And there we go. The blue represents what’s the same between the two files. The red is what’s different. It’s pretty much all blue, except for these blocks here.”

Now the problem going into making the film adaptation of Rice Tea, is that no such tool exists. So over the last few weeks I’ve been writing one, which I completed today. This is what it looks like:

This is not a fake interface – it’s a fully functional tool. You can download the program yourself below. You’ll need Linux with the development ncurses package to compile it. Simply run “make” in a terminal to compile.

Download Hex Comparison Tool:
hexcompare.tar.gz [8KB]

Today we learned about the value of properly setting white balance, how zooming is bad, and how CRTs love to flicker.