eviljim.com: the mac days

Every time I make coffee I look at the Espresso machine, which is a “Rumba,” and think of my Roomba.

The best thing of a Roomba is that if I ever have kids, and they buy my a Rosie the Robotic Maid, I can be indignant and say: “Ahhh, whippersnappers. I’ve had robots cleaning up after me since back in the summer of aught 7.”

Meanwhile my Xbox 360 has once again died, the trick only lasting a few days after all.

Elsewhere in my mind, I had the following idea: iterate through every word in the english language and do a search for it. Create a list of every word whose first result is a dictionary page.

For most cool words (like aught), that’s the case.

My 360 died.

While playing a delightful game of Catan, the game froze. Upon reboot I received the dreaded 3 rings of death. I blame it on the overworked processor due to those fully rendered sheep (how is that in any way necessary? Pretty though)

Anyway, after a fruitless call to 360 support, I realized I was on my own for this one. So I looked up tricks.

The first, almost sure fire trick seemed to be replacing the “X clamps.” I don’t know what an X clamp is and I don’t want to know. It seemed to involve drilling and washers. Maybe a cactus. Those I have.

The next one involved wrapping your 360 in a towel.

Clearly, this is a solution I can handle.

I was about to run upstairs when I realized in a twist of cosmic fate I had several towels already at hand - Google had provided me 3 or 4 “Google” towels. Perfect.

So I wrapped my Xbox 360 in 3 Google towels, and powered it on. In retrospect I should have turned it on first, because I had to unwrap it to push the power button. Of course, of course, I later, later realized I could have turned it on with a controller, too.

Anyway. I let it run for about a half hour, then take the towels off and let it sit for an hour. Conveniently the “Heroes” season finale was on.

Carefully, I approached the controller and turned it on.

Three red lights were gone. In there place were fully rendered sheep and wheat and that dancing robber dude.

Being a religious man, I only expect this to last 3 days, so I’m getting my Catan in while I can, before its glorious ascension back to from whence it came (China?).

Contains Heroes spoilers, here, so, yeah.

Can someone who watches Heroes give an answer to the following questions:

1) Why didn’t Peter fly himself up into the sky?
2) Why didn’t Clare just shoot Peter? Then Peter would have just died, instead of both him AND his brother.

For those that are curious to see my new vehicular transportation device, you now can do so, in picture form.

Click the thumbnail below for more pictures.

More Pics

Right now, Google’s logo is “Mother’s Day” - click on it, and you do a search for Mother’s Day.

Makes sense, okay.

But at the same time, it’s almost like a giant ad for everything Google can do inside search, too. Almost too much so, maybe, to be a coincidence.

For example, you get an instant answer onebox (mother’s day is on …).
You also get integrated inline news results (fairly new), related searches at the bottom, an ad with a Google Checkout badge, and of course, a YouTube video is one of the top results.

Take a gander over at live search and you get a pretty plain old results page - you get news results at the top, and one related search that makes no sense (”Monologue S For Mothers Day” - wtf? Is monologue R for Memorial Day?)

Ask.com has a nifty “MOM” tattoo heart thing going on, but the result of a search is pretty much as bland as live.com.

The winner? Google, because their related searches include apostrophes in “mother’s” - grammar is important.

Follow me here - this is pretty neat.

So there’s a service I mentioned earlier called Jott which lets you call an 877 number, talk, and have it emailed to you automagically transcribed. Since I don’t like listening to anyone talk - myself included, it’s quite a nice feature that it’s just text. Much easier to process, too.

You can also Jott to other people - you add them to an address book and it’ll just email them whatever you said, transcribed. Again, pretty nice, since I am not yet important enough (apparently) to have an assistant.

These two combine to an obvious idea - a short voice message transcribed to a short text message would be perfect to post things automatically to Twitter. I already set up a iGoogle Gadget to post from my Google homepage, now it would be super nifty to post from my phone, too. And not just through text messages, which are slow.

The desire was compounded since I also recently acquired a new car with Bluetooth and voice dialing.

So I was thinking of how to hook an email address up to post to Twitter (it wouldn’t be that hard), and decided this time, I’m going to see if the solution exists already first.

Hey, what do you know, it does exist in a service called EgorCast. EgorCast takes a Jotted message and will post it to Twitter or a variety of other services.

Easy to setup despite Egor’s best attempts at making things difficult (once you login, you stay logged in, but there’s no link to your account page. So in order to do anything, you have to log out then log back in, or remember your usernumber and link to that specific page… ick). Here’s what you do, assuming you already have a Twitter account:

1) Sign up for a Jott account - it’s free
2) Sign up for an Egor account - you just enter your email in
3) Once you login to your Egor account, give them your Twitter login credentials (this sucks, however, I put the blame on Twitter here - come on, an API is not ONE CALL which lets you post a status message using http auth… get with it!)
4) You’ll be shown your unique Egor email address, note this down
5) Log in to Jott and set up a contact; I called mine “Twitter” - have it forward to the email address you got in step 4
6) Call Jott, and Jott to “Twitter” whatever you like
7) Amaze friends and family alike that you can twitter with your VOICE

One note - Jott can be kind of slow to transcribe your text, so don’t be surprised if you wait a minute or two before your Twitter page is updated. Be patient.

The beloved Nissan Sentra, long-time friend and companion, is gone.

He has been replaced.

More information will follow at an appropriate time.

My Roomba has arrived. Anyone without a Roomba is wrong.

My mom was scared at one point when it started - on its own - to vacuum up. When we were leaving she asked, “Are you just going to leave it here, going?” When I said yes, she responded, “You trust it?” like it was going to steal my precious precious jewels. (DVDs)

Though in all and complete honesty I’m a little glad it can’t climb stairs - it gives me a safe place to flee to when it inevitably turns against me, per evidence in “I, Robot.”

Also for the sake of honesty I’m not sure it saves time. While I can push a button and vacuum and then, say, watch some TV, I inevitably end up watching the Roomba instead.

Jott is a nice free service - how it works is you call an 877 number and talk. It then emails/text messages you a transcription of your text.

This is cool in that it’s a quick way to take notes without having to listen and process that information later (beats a voice memo hands down). Plus it collects and organizes them, and if a transcription is poor, you get an online audio recording as well.

I’m not sure that many people would find it useful, but I do.