I guess this is one of the more odd items in my collection. A USB powered cold-cathode florescent desk lamp. The price was at $16 bucks a bit more then I usually would spend on a useless item, but the interesting design and the question on how bright 500mA (the max output of an USB port) can be made me buy it.

The light is a bit more solid and heavy then the picture made me expect, but to answer the 500mA question - not that bright. The thin cold cathode tube does look pretty cool tho, but unfortunately so is the light it gives off - cold with a slight blue/purple tint.

Overall I still think this light is pretty cool, especially in connection with my notebook - I can setup my desk anywhere!

So a few days ago we noticed that Quoth's ear was all ballooned up and it turns out that a blood vessel in his ear had ruptured. Not entirely uncommon, but did require some surgery and may still leave his ear permanently disfigured. Luckily, Quoth has to this day not figured out what a mirror is, so I have a feeling he will be just fine.

Anyway, to at least get some fun out of my almost $500 vet bill, here's the Quoth Fail Cat picture (click on the picture & vote for him!):



moar funny pictures

Ok, so the future has finally arrived (mostly because the future was less then $50) in my household and I purchased a floor cleaning robot on the Internet for $46 bucks. If you ever looked into the matter, you may have heard of the Roombas by iRobot, which start in the above $100 range, but have gotten reasonable good reviews.

My "Robotic cleaner" is a cheap knockoff made in China (although so is the Roomba), the packaging is branded as "Tchibo", a German 'Starbuck style' coffee roaster that sells all kinda of stuff and knockoffs (supposedly with very little regard for intellectual property; I wonder how iRobot feels about this thing) in their stores. This item was on sale for 89 euros about 2 years ago and it appears like that the US power supply was just kind of thrown into the box - guess we're looking at overstock here.

Together with the cleaner I found a manual, branded "SupportPlus", the power supply and a couple replacement particle filters for the cleaner. The cleaner actually looks pretty good but feels a bit shaky, but that is just due to the fact that both the cleaning mechanism and the wheels have their own 'suspension', so can move freely. The cleaner has two independent drive wheels, which are large and have a rubber tread for traction, a spinning cleaning brush for the main dirt that feeds into the dirt container and a sqweegy style vacuum rubber lip behind the brush. The brush runs along a comb in the dirt container, which turns out to be pretty effective when picking up hair. The dirt container also has a seperate department in which it collect the fine dust from the sqweegy vacuum, which does have very little suction power, but works effectively due to its unique sqweegy design.


I want to point that I have hardwood floor and tested the unit on those. A quick run at a friends apartment showed total failure on normal carpet, so I would consider this unit only on hard floors.

Initially I was a bit disappointed with the unit; the cleaning power appeared to be ok, but it only had a battery life of 15 minutes. After some investigation I noticed that my power supply did not meet the specs on the unit (15v@300mAh vs. 17.5V@230mAh power supply). A quick trip to my local electronics surplus store SurplusGizmos.com (check it out! it rocks!) yielded a 16V@300mAh power supply for $3, less then it would have cost me to ship the robot back to the ComputerGeeks.com. With the new power supply the unit is able to complete 3 cleaning programs with a total run time of over an hour, thanks to the 14.4 V 2000mAh Nickel-hybrid battery.

- wall cleaning, in which the unit uses its IR sensor to run along the wall and together with the rotating side brush does a decent job of getting close to the wall.
The movement doesn't seem very intelligent, the unit constantly runs into items and does not seem to remember any obstacles - resulting in things like several minutes of 'wall cleaning' mode in which it runs in circles around a table leg. Beyond that, however, the unit does cover most of the floor it has access to and cleans underneath furniture as well, while rarely getting stuck for longer then a few seconds (cords are its enemy!).

The unit itself is a bit of a pain to clean, but at least permits easy removal of the rolling brush and cleaning of the vacuum chamber. It is also a bit noisy, as the plastic body amplifies the noise of the 5 (!) electric motors inside, provoking a bit of animosity in my feline pets, especially because it enters their holy space below my bed to clean.

I wish the unit had a longer program then 20 minutes and a bit more professional sounds (it beeps little melodies), but for the price I payed I am pleasantly surprised, if I ignore the annoyance of the wrong/defective power supply. The unit has become handy for a quick cleanup of a room and manages fairly well even under the 'extreme' pet hair conditions, caused by my personal zoo.

I have been known to be slightly directionally challenged at times and I had been thinking about getting a GPS navigation system for a while. After a bit of research I decided on the Mio DigiWalker C310x, because of the below $200 price tag, good design/features and the fact that the device has been completely 'hacked' already, enabling me to install my own software on the unit.

The unit comes with street level maps of the entire US preloaded, however, the map data seems to be from 2005 and a new subdivision close to my home does not appear on the maps. The routing is called MioMaps, which seems to be a rebranded iGo software and works great, has a good user interface and fast calculation of routes. The voice prompts are clear and well timed but the unit does not say the actual street names, just the direction ("In 300 ft turn left."). Out of the box the unit has 3 routing options - shortest, fastest and economical. They all work as expected, the shortest route usually requiring you to zig-zug thru residential streets and the fastest trying to get you on the freeway at all cost. The unit has a build in database of points of interests which is basically a searchable yellow pages, type in 'Taco Bell' and the unit shows you a list sorted by distance.

The device also has a build in MP3 player to play MP3s from the SD card slot on the unit. The player sounds good and has a decent feature set including playlists and while the player can be playing in the background while using the routing capabilities (including automatic pausing of music during voice prompts) , once you are in the MioMap application, you are not able to skip songs or control the MP3 player at all.

In regards to the 'hackabiliy' of the unit, I was able to install a media player on the device and enabling it to play video files in virtually any format (including DivX and XviD!). There are also different skins available for the MioMap application and I was able to unlock additional routing options, 'easy' route and more in-depth settings. I was also able to place a map file for Canada on the SD card enabling the unit to route in Canada as well.

Overall I am very pleased with the unit, it works great and has all the features I wanted. The internal battery only runs for 2 - 3 hours while using the GPS, but it did come with a car charger for use while driving. I got the GPS for just under $200 bucks at my local Circuit City.

Here is the manufacturer site.
Here is the Circuit City link.
FAQ on hacking the Mio