Virtual Reality

Inspired by the apparantly untrue tale that eBay was invented to let founder Pierre Omidyar’s then fiancée trade Pez dispensers, one of the first things I used the site for was to track down a beloved toy from my youth: the View-Master. And despite how the world and technology had changed in the intervening *cough* couple of years *cough*, it was still a bit magical to look at those 3D images again.

Roll on another *cough* couple of years *cough* (it’s very dusty in here, isn’t it?), and View-Master has arrived in the 21st century with a virtual reality (VR) compatible version of their iconic viewer – complete with a little clicky lever on the side for interaction/navigation. 🙂 You’ll need an iPhone/Android phone and apps to do anything with it: it’s pretty much a plastic version of Google Cardboard, but has springs and latches and a wriststrap to keep your phone that little bit more protected (though they do call out that the View-Master is not designed to be a protective case).

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Screenshotting

A quick roundup of how to screenshot on various devices.

  • iOS: Power button and Home button – image goes to your Camera Roll album.
  • Android (4.0 and up): Power button and Volume Down button – image goes to the Screenshot album of the Gallery app.
  • Mac: CmdShift4, then drag the crosshairs that appear to section of a rectangular area of your screen – image goes to your desktop.
  • Windows: CtrlAltPrint Screen to grab the active window, or Print Screen to grab the whole desktop – image goes to your clipboard, so open a graphics program, or Word, or mail, or … and paste it in.

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.

Bin Lid Repaired with SugruMy 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

The Joy of SodaStream

In the last few years a reincarnated SodaStream made an appearance on the Irish market. What a blast from the past! Back in the day, mine was one of the families lucky enough to own one of these fancy devices, but thrilling though the process of fizzing the water was, we weren’t mad about the resulting drinks.

At that time, the drinking of fizzy water would have been something of an oddity, so the main aim of owning a SodaStream was to recreate commercial fizzy drinks at home for a fraction of the cost. But the range of real fizzy drinks we were familiar with was somewhat limited: Fanta, Coke and Pepsi, TK Lemonade, Club Orange and 7Up would have been about it.  As a result, SodaStream’s offerings tasted funny to our limited childhood palattes and the novelty wore off quickly.

Nowadays, we’re used to a much wider range of weird and wonderful flavours in our fizzy drinks, from the big name producers, to the sometimes weird and wonderful imports in the smaller ethnic shops around town, and homemade fizzy drinks using an ever increasing range of cordials and juices. Fizzy water is a proper drink in its own right too now.

Chez Murphy-Malone, we’ve been largely making our own fizzy drinks at home for the last few years using cordials, juices, and bottled fizzy water bought in bulk from the supermarkets. We’d treat ourselves to pre-prepared fizzy drinks every now and then for a bit of novelty/variety, but mainly stuck to the mix-it-yourself solution. The bottled water, though, took up a sizable amount of valuable space in our kitchen and didn’t hold much aesthetic value.

But what bothered me more than the storage issue was the amount of plastic waste we were generating. It’s become less noticable in the last couple of years now the fortnightly green waste collection includes plastics, but it used to be a bigger deal when we had to transport one or more sacks of empty (and crushed) 2L water bottles to the bring centre every month.

SodaStream comissioned a report on the impact of soft drinks on the enviroment which can be found here. It doesn’t actually go into the details of the impact of producing a SodaStream machine, but provided you’re in it for the long haul, I reckon it must balance out relatively quickly.

Cost-wise, if you’re buying cheap fizzy water and paying ~50c a litre, 180L will cost €90. To buy a SodaStream and refill the cylinder twice at Argos prices is €91. For the extra euro, you’ll save yourself schlepping around and recycling 45 plastic 2L bottles.

Note: At the time of writing, Argos are selling the white SodaStream for 1/3 off at a mere €43.32, if you feel like breaking even a bit quicker.

When SodaStream relaunched here a few years back, the only place I could find them was in the Argos catalog, which sold starter kits, but not refills, so once you’d fizzed your first 60L, you were done. I briefly looked into the logistics of exchanging cylinders by post, and contemplated bringing them back as hold luggage from holiday destinations, but it was all a bit messy and awkward so I just wrote it off as a nice but impractical idea. In the latest Argos catalog, though, they included a listing for refills/canister exchanges, so my interest was revived. On checking the store locator on their website, I discovered that there are actually a few stores in Ireland now stocking SodaStreams and doing canister exchanges, so having paid a visit to a couple to make sure their listings weren’t outdated/fictional, I decided to look into swapping pre-fizzed water for the DIY kind.

I picked up a lead test for our water for a tenner on eBay, just to make sure we weren’t going to poison ourselves. That was negative, so when we finished our last bottle of fizzy water I took the plunge and swapped the large chunk of floorspace we’d been using to store bottles of fizzy water for the small patch of countertop space which now homes our shiny white, fizzy water and fart noise making toy.

In principle, a canister provides 60L of fizzy water (fizzed 1L at a time these days instead of 250ml). I’ve not been monitoring the actual volumes we’re getting, but we’re still going strong on the original canister 6 weeks later and no sign of it giving up. When it does expire, there’ll be considerably less hassle involved in transporting the expired canister and shiny new refill than the number of large bottles of sparkling water it would’ve taken to keep us busy in the meantime!

Of course, the real eco-friendly solution would be to stop drinking fizzy water already, and I’m sure I’ll get there eventually, but for now, I’m enjoying my SodaStream and the reduced environmental impact of my fizzy drinks habit.