Greg In The Desert

It’s hard to believe but as much effort as I have put into my home automation system I have not had an automated vacuum cleaner. I have always been skeptical of the Roomba’s ability to clean floors adequately. That mostly came from a few friends and reviews I read online.

I have been considering trying one out for myself for sometime and when woot.com had a refurbished Roomba 530 model for $129 I decided it was time give it a try.

My skepticism was unfounded. The Roomba 530 does an excellent job of cleaning my floors. I have been amazed at the amount of lint the Roomba has picked up (no more lint tumbleweeds floating across the floor). It also cleans up all the pieces of plastic and twist ties that the cat uses as toys. I am also impressed with how well it handles itself across uneven surfaces and untangles itself.

It probably helps is that my floors are all solid, no carpet or rugs and my house is pretty small. So far I have been able to have it clean the living room, kitchen, part of the hallway and bathroom in one cleaning session, or mission as the Roomba users call them. I think that the Roomba could also clean the guest bedroom across from the bathroom but so far it has some difficulty finding it’s way.

I have an automatic cat that kills all the bugs in the house and now I have an automatic vacuum that cleans up after the cat. Since the Roomba 530 model doesn’t have scheduling capabilities, I plan to purchase a serial port bluetooth module that will allow me to remotely control the Roomba from my home automation computer. The computer can keep track of how often the Roomba cleans and send it off on cleaning missions when the house is unoccupied.

I have a love/hate relationship with Quicken. I love it’s features and capabilities, I hate it’s bugs and UI and poor quality from Intuit. Looks like they are addressing these issues. ArsTechnica visited the Intuit booth at Macworld and found a whole new Quicken like application called “Quicken Financial Life for Mac”.

The 1.0 release will focus on core features: cashflow, downloading, taxes, budgeting. It will not work well with investments, being limited to tracking your holdings. As an example, I own 1000 shares of Apple (I wish), and that’s worth $180,000 or whatever it is at the end of the day after downloading security info. Why the feature retrograde? Because QFLM is a whole new application—Cocoa from the ground up. It’s a Universal Binary that takes advantage of Leopard… though I forget to ask if it is Leopard only. I’ll update on on that. Intuit is currently looking for beta testers, so now is a good time to sign up… somewhere. You can do it here. It’s your fault for not being here.

They say it’s not feature comparable to the current version of Quicken, but it seems to have the features I’m interested in. I would sign up to be a beta tester if I could figure out where. I’ve signed up many years before but they have yet to ask me.

When I heard the rumors that Palm was going to release some magical, wonderful, world-changing device I was excited. I’ve owned several models of Palms and I carry my Palm TX with me everywhere. In fact, I’m not sure I’m ready to give up my Palm TX to switch to a iPhone. I was really hoping Palm was going to have a new kind of PDA.

Then I see this Foleo thing and wonder: WTF? From what I can tell, it’s a sub-laptop that’s designed to sync with your Treo. This has been in development for a few years?

It is not meant as a Laptop replacement, but more of a large screen, full keyboard companion to your smartphone’s capabilities and email functionality. While initially the product is not meant as a Laptop replacement, as time goes on and more developers create unique solutions Hawkins sees its utility as a laptop like device expanding.

I obviously don’t get it. I don’t know who is going to buy it. Everyone has a laptop. People, my mom has a laptop. Your suppose to carry your laptop around and this thing just to read your email? Oh, and carry your phone.

I thought the writing was on the wall for Palm, but if they have been putting their R&D into this instead of improving the Treo, then I would say this is the beginning of the end.

Lindsay Lohan – You’re killing us
May 29th, 2007
Please bear with us as we address a number of issues related to server problems and lag. A huge surge in Lohan readership is pushing our servers capabilities. We will update here when we have additional details.

The Sitemeter Team

Sitemeter is a website tracking service. I have one of their free accounts. This is funny.

PalmInfoCenter is celebrating 10 years since the original Plam 1000 by giving away a Palm LifeDrive and a Palm 1000 (new in it’s box). To enter to win the LifeDrive simply make a comment in this article about your first Palm. Here’s my entry:

I bought my first Palm (a 1000) on ebay, which was the first thing I ever bought on ebay. In the excitement of things I ended up paying way too much for it. To add insult to injury I ended up dropping within a few weeks, forcing a upgrade to the next version of Pilot (the 2000? don’t recall). Since then I owned several versions of PalmOS computers including the IIIx, Prism and Sony CLIE. I “upgraded” to most of them after I broke the Palm that I had at the time, keeping each model for a year or two. Currently I have a T3 which I have managed to own longer than any other Palm (and did have to replace a broken screen). I’m looking to upgrade to a TX sometime in the future mainly for the WiFi capabilities, but a LifeDrive would do quite nice too!