Ness' Outpost

Jay put me onto this website called monoprice.com for all my cabling needs. With a new home theatre system I can upgrade my Wii’s output cable to the Enhanced Definition which will give me 480p instead of 480i (which is the standard cable) on my LCD HDTV.

I also have signed up for a free trial on Zip.ca which sends me DVD’s and bluray discs that I have on an online list when they are available. The problem is that I got a BSG season 3 disc 1 DVD that wouldn’t play properly in my Samsung BD-P1500 blu-ray player. I don’t know what was going on, so I returned the disc as damaged – wouldn’t play. I upgraded the firmware on the player through the USB port and when a new disc arrived (that looked like it had the same watermarked damage as the original disc) it still wouldn’t play. It wasn’t until I put it in my laptop and it played that I started to suspect the up converting blu-ray player.

It’s not a big deal, I can watch the older format DVD on my laptop, but Lauren likes BSG too so I’d prefer it to be on the big screen. Our new TV has a VGA connection that laptops can hook into all I needed was a cable.

To make the long story short, I got a 15′ SVGA cable with audio plugs for $6USD and the Wii cable for $3. Shipping was more than the cables at $10. The cables run here at tigerdirect for about $30 each so I’m saving money and I don’t have to go to the store to pick it up. If you need cables, check out monoprice.com before you go forking over too much money to a big box store.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written here but I have been plenty busy with packing, moving, unpacking plus the daily grind on top of that.

But all work and no play makes me a dull boy — that’s where the Wii helps. I was in a race with Chris at work to see who could accumulate > 2000 points in Wii Tennis. On Sunday night I won a game which put me at 2011 points. Just enough to edge Chris out before he could get there, but he’ll stick to his story that he had tennis elbow and couldn’t play as often as I could.

On Tuesday this week Lauren and I picked up a vacuum cleaner from Canadian Tire. It’s a Roomba Discovery created by iRobot. iRobot is a robotics company that just happens to have a hugely successful robotic vacuum. From the outside it looks like a pretty neat company with some very interesting software challenges.

Now for the neat part. You can control the roomba’s motors and read the sensors through the serial port. There is a published serial port (hardware) hack that puts a Bluetooth radio onboard the device which allows the radio to connect to any other Bluetooth device that can talk the serial port protocol. Now I need to build some hardware so I can write some software.

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/how_to_roomba_bluetooth_interf.html