Tech – Page 12 – Tech, writing, and tech writing

Accessing Geographically-Restricted Web Sites

So – hot on the heels of yesterday’s post on TV-less TV, here’s something I coincidentally discovered yesterday, courtesy of a post by Graham Linehan on an episode of the Daily Show that couldn’t be shown on UK TV.

Modify Headers is a free Firefox add-on that allows you to edit the HTTP request headers you send to web servers while browsing. Ostensibly, it’s intended for testing web sites to see how they respond to specific requests, but it is possible to use it to access some geographically-restricted content, such as on-demand TV programming.

Note: This worked on some sites I tried, but not on others, so results aren’t guaranteed. Maybe I was picking bad IP addresses, or maybe the sites in question have a way of checking if this add-on is in use.

To use the Modify Headers add-on:

Install Firefox if you don’t already have it.
Download and install the Modify Headers add-on.
Restart Firefox.
In Firefox, select Tools | Modify Headers.
In the dialog box that appears:
1. From the Select Action drop-down, select Add.
2. In the Header Name field, enter X-Forwarded-For.
3. In the Header Value field, enter an IP address appropriate to the country you want to pretend you’re from (12.13.14.15 worked as a US address for me).
4. Click Add.
  Your header is added to the list area.
Repeat step 5 as many times as necessary to set up headers for each country you want to pretend you’re in.
Before browsing to restricted content, turn the appropriate header on and the others off.
Enabled headers have a green dot at the end of the row in the list area; disabled ones have a red dot.
To change a header’s status, double-click that header’s row.
Leave the Modify Headers dialog box open! Your modified headers are only sent while the dialog box is open.
Browse to the geographically-restricted content you want to view, and away you go (hopefully!).

TV Without a TV

BBC’s Global iPlayer app for iPad launched today – hooray! It’s a free app, but requires an in-app subscription to access anything beyond demo content. Subs are €6.99 per month, or €49.99 for the year. A nice touch is that you can download episodes to watch later when you’re offline – handy for commuters, holiday makers and the like. The selection is good, but could be, and hopefully will be, improved. Most noticeable gap for me is the dearth of good children’s programming – virtually the only channels we watch on traditional-format telly these days are Cbeebies and CBBC, and it would be great to be able to stick a few of their programs on the iPad for the kids to watch when we’re on the move. BBC iPlayer can be accessed through a web browser on a regular computer here – TV programs aren’t accessible outside the UK, but many excellent radio programs are.

Note: I tried accessing the BBC iPlayer Radio site through Safari on the iPad and iPhone, but on the iPad got an error that I had to switch from 3G to WiFi for it to work (3G wasn’t turned on), and on the iPhone got an error that I was outside the UK, although that’s not a problem when I access from my laptop, so I guess the site doesn’t play well with iThing browsers.

While I was enjoying the BBC iPlayer app, I decided to install the 4oD Catch Up app too. Although the blurb says it doesn’t work outside the UK, I’m watching an episode of Spaced (comedy gold) through it as I type and it’s working fine. You can watch 4oD in a regular web browser here.

ITV don’t have an iThing app yet, but have a web-based player here. (Doesn’t work from Safari on iThings.) Content is only available in the UK, though.

And last, but not least, RTÉ also lack an app, but have a web-based player here. (Again, doesn’t work from Safari on iThings.) A limited selection of their programming is accessible internationally. Aside from News programming, I’ve barely looked at RTÉ live since they launched their Player. It must be getting popular, as they’ve started including ads in many (/all?) of the programs now, which was a rarity when they launched.

So there we go – welcome to the future – TV on demand, without a TV – hooray!

Roomba

It was the Cheerios that broke this camel’s back, and after the bazillionth morning in a row of scraping the damn things out of the carpet after getting back from the school run, I decided to succumb to the lure of Roomba’s robot-y goodness. We’d recently discovered that not one but two of our friends had already gone over to the robot side and couldn’t speak highly enough of their pets, so we decided to give it a go.

A bit of online price comparison, and my order was in by lunchtime. I ordered a 555 model – a few of the bells and whistles that might make a difference, but not too fancy. Two days later, Roomba had arrived, and an overnight charge later my life transformed forever.

How Roomba Changed my Life

Roomba can be programmed to run automatically once on each day of the week, or be left to manual kickstart as and when needed. I’ve set ours to run when we’re doing the school run during the week, and left weekends to a push of the button so he doesn’t get in the way of breakfast or play. (Actually, the manual weekend runs are more for his good than ours, since the smallest person in the house loves to follow him round and kick his bumper to make him change direction. This way, we can wait till there’s no one who wants to play around before letting Roomba out to do his thang.)

The joy of the automatic weektime clean is that after rushing around delivering everyone to where they should be for the day, I arrive in to a spick and span living room and office, and can settle straight away to my work without fussing over the state of the place. It might only save minutes of labour each day, but the mental wellbeing and clarity is worth a lot to my productivity.

Everyone has been warned that any toys or papers left on the floor are liable to be eaten by the robot and won’t be coming back (no, it won’t really eat your stuff, but don’t tell my kids that), so everyone joins in a quick 2 minute pickup of “stuff” before Roomba springs into action, and even that daily contribution means that the house is neater and more organised than usual.

Also, since the place is generally clean, small spills/messes seem worth cleaning up, since the tidy patch left behind no longer draws attention to how dirty the rest of the floor is. He even gets underneath the furniture, so no mounds of dust festering and waiting to surprise us the day we relocate the bookcase in 5 years’ time.

Finally, as someone pointed out in a review I read on another site – having the downstairs clean on an ongoing basis means less dirt dragged upstairs on the bottoms of shoes, so upstairs needs less cleaning too.

Every little helps.

But is it Eco?

Our upright cleaner uses ~1200Watts. Before Roomba, I would use this anything from once a day to once a week (depending on how mess-sensitive I was feeling), for anything from 5 to 20 minutes at a time. Let’s take a ball park figure of 45 minutes a week, so 900Wh/wk used.

Roomba runs once daily and keeps going till it’s used up its battery reserves, then it recharges. The charging station uses 30W and the battery charges fully in ~3 hours, so 90Wh, 7 days a week = 630Wh/wk.

That leaves me 270Wh of regular vacuum time per week for top-up cleaning. Though since Roomba’s arrival, the regular vacuum cleaner has been sitting forlornly in a corner being ignored, so I reckon that on balance we’ll be using less electricity annually for our daily clean with occasional top-ups than the sporadic vacuuming we were already doing.

What does a Roomba Cost?

Refurbished series 500 Roombas go on eBay for ~€250, but all seem to come from the US. By the time you’ve added shipping, waited weeks for delivery, potentially paid duty on the lot, and bought an adapter for the plug, it’s tempting to just buy locally and know that it’ll be less hassle to get support if you have a problem. We bought direct from iRobot’s Ireland site who throw in free shipping, which is nice. The 555 cost €370.

Cleaning the Roomba

Of course, it’s not all happy happy joy joy. Roomba needs to be emptied and cleaned too. His bin is small, so the emptying is daily (in our home at least). The silver lining is that this gives you a chance to admire just what a good job he’s doing – he easily picks up as much fine dust and fluff as a Dyson, which I wasn’t expecting – I thought it would get the bigger dirt only. You’ll want to tap the fine dust out of the filter periodically to keep suction levels up, and maybe even give it a gentle wash (there are videos on YouTube). The brush and beater need to be de-haired and de-fluffed at least every other day if you’re running the Roomba on carpet. It comes with a tool to comb stuff out of the bristles, but you might need a tweezers or decent finger nails to get the stuff that wraps itself around the ends. The first time we cleaned the brushes, hubby and I both took turns picking bits out of different parts of the brush and beater over about an hour, but every time we popped them back in Roomba would complain they needed cleaning again immediately. Eventually, Dave figured out that hair had snagged behind the bearings, so popped them off and cleaned in the crevices, and everything was dandy again. Since that first day, we’ve got the knack and now it takes ~2 minutes to clean both brush and beater thoroughly.

Take Home Message

The Roomba’s a good little guy to have around. He won’t do all the work, but his presence encourages me to spend 5 minutes a day doing my bit to facilitate him doing his bit, and the overall result is greater than the sum of its parts.

Finally, I’ll leave you with an earworm: Roomba mm mm Roomba doobie doo doo Roomba oo oo ye-e-eah… to the tune of M-bop by Hansen. Enjoy the rest of your day! 😉

Sugru!

Sugru is great stuff. It’s like plasticine for grownups, but with a noble purpose.

It comes measured out into small portions of colourful squishiness in foil sachets. It’s very soft and malleable when fresh out of the pack, so you can mould it to just about any shape, but it dries completely hard when exposed to air, which means it’s extremely durable once in the required form. I found it a little too soft and sticky when I first took it out of the pack, so you might want to take it out and leave it sit for a few minutes before you start working with it.

I must admit, I was predisposed to like this stuff before I even got my hands on it. I picked up a similar product in a hardware shop more than a decade ago, and it was a favourite for a while, till disaster struck. (Google suggests it might be one of the products mentioned on this Wikipedia page.) This product came as hard plastic pellets that melted in hot water, then became rigid again once cooled. I used it for a number of small repairs, and to cover sharp corners and edges on various items (for example a bolt under my bike saddle that regularly snagged skirts and coats). All was well till I replaced a missing zip toggle on a coat, forgot about the melting in hot water issue, and put it through a hot wash with disastrous consequences. I slightly went off it after that.

But back to lovely, lovely Sugru, with none of the melty issues.

My first repair with it was to the lid of a bin we keep in the garden. Probably due to weather exposure, the frame of the lid is prone to cracking, and we’d already replaced it once, but when the new lid cracked a few months ago, I was able to join it back together (somewhat inelegantly) with a nice big wodge of Sugru.

It was very satisfying not to have to buy a whole entire new plastic bin and lid for the sake of one small, though critical, crack. It’ll be interesting to see how the Sugru join copes with the weather extremes this winter, but it’s been happy enough out there for the last 6 months or so.

Dave has also used Sugru to cap the decorative “spikes” on our fire guard, to avoid accidental eye-poking-out, although the kids were less interested in going anywhere near them till they went all colourful and interesting, so I question the success of that project.

One of the niftiest repairs I’ve heard of is wrapping Sugru around a screw that’s missing its nut, waiting for it to set, then unscrewing it and hey presto, you have a new nut that’s a perfect match to the tread of the screw. How clever is that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycaprolactone

I Like Big Butts

With talk of water charges coming in next year, now is the time to be investigating options for reducing water usage, and harvesting rainwater and grey water. We’ve not figured out an ideal solution for the grey water yet (all our water-using appliances are at ground level, so we can’t divert to anywhere gravity can help us reuse the water), and the small people are cancelling out most of our water usage reduction measures, but when it comes to rainwater harvesting, we have a nice solution that’s working well.

A few years back, I picked up a 100L water butt and a diverter kit, and we hooked it up to the main downpipe at the back of the house. One decent rainfall had it filled, showers kept it topped up, and for about 2 years thereafter we didn’t have to take water from the kitchen tap once to water any plant inside or outside the house. Then we had a bit of a drought, so the veggies got tap water and the flowers were left to wilt. Given how well we’d gotten on with butt number 1, we decided to put a gutter and downpipe on the shed and to collect runoff from that roof too, so a second butt was installed. After a decent rainfall, both are full to the brim, and we can keep the garden lush for a couple of weeks of drought at least before we need to consider resorting to the inside tap.

I bought all the parts for the first setup separately, so it cost a fair amount, but by the time we were setting up the second butt, Argos were doing a complete kit for a much lower price, and at the time of writing, it’s on sale at a lower price again, so if you’re considering getting a butt of your own, go grab one quick!

I’m particularly impressed by the diverter component of the system. It’s a nifty little bit of engineering.

To install it, you slice your downpipe in two horizontally, then stick the diverter between the two halves. A ring-shaped “moat” sits between the two halves of the downpipe, with an outlet that can be connected to a short hose to join the diverter to a water butt. The outside wall of the moat is taller than the inside wall, so when it fills, it overflows back down the inside of the drainpipe.

Without a diverter (1), rain just gets washed straight down the downpipe and into the drain.
With a diverter connected to an empty water butt (2), rain pools in the moat and flows off into the connected butt.
When the butt is full (3), collected rain can’t exit via the diverter hose anymore, so pools till it overflows the moat on the inside of the downpipe and flows to the drain as usual.

For a relatively small investment, you’re set up with a reservoir that should amply water a small garden year round, and provide untreated water suitable for jobs such as scrubbing down a patio, and rinsing dirty wellies and garden tools. For larger gardens, you can source larger butts from garden centres and specialist suppliers, or do what we do and dot a few different smaller butts around the garden so that you have a ready water supply in multiple locations.