The incantaion of kitty-litter removal

As I, for the third time in seven days was sweeping the floor of the living-room for kitty-litter and wads of fur I happened to look at my wristwatch.  To my astonishment my wristwatch was a digital watch! As any one in my generation will tell you digital watches are from the future!

If this is the future surely magic must be invented by now? and surely there must be an incantation to get rid of kitty-litter and cat dandruff?! Firm in my belief that this must be the case I went to consult great sage of Si-ba.The great sage of Si-ba told me that such an incantation did indeed exist but that it would cost me 14 days of my mortal life. Since the alternative was spending a life-time sweeping thisfelt like a small sacrifice to make and I uttered the strange incantation "I would like to buy a Neato XV Signature Pro robotic vacuum-cleaner". The sage gave me a big black box and told me to bring it home, put it on the floor and feed it the universal sustenance of all magic beings called el-ec-tri-city.

At first nothing happened but with a howl it suddenly sprung to life and started meticulously licking the floor. As it is more thorough than I would ever bother to be it takes it quite some time to go over the entire apartment. It is about as noisy as a vacuum-cleaner set to something like half-power so the cats don't like it and it is something of a pain to be around, but since the little beast will happily make its rounds while I am out of the house it is not that much of an issue.

It will negotiate most carpets and thresholds without problems, it even managed to clean most of the area under my kitchen table, despite the fact that it is a jumbled mess of chair-legs.

But you will probably want to be home the first time you set it free as you  will probably have missed something that will be a hindrance. I found that if it manges to eat a loose cord or a washing label from a carpet it will get stuck and complain that "My brush is stuck, please free me :(". It will also detect a bowl of cat-food as a threshold and carefully navigate over it to get it clean, this makes an interesting rattling noise, but is a waste of cat-food.

All in all, not that much change was needed to get the apartment robot-friendly. The hallway carpet will probably have to be replaced since the robot sometimes manages to crumple it to lunar-landscape of impassable folds


I also need to get better at picking up cords from the floor, because even after I picked up "all" cellphone-chargers, laptop-chargers headphones, outdoor-thermometers and so on it still managed to find one cellphone charger and one probe of an outdoor-thermometer to get stuck on.

It came with some magnetic tape that works as a "wall", I will have to add some of that around the cat's food bowls.

It is not quite as smart about the path-finding as the advertisements might lead you to believe, it misses spots and sometimes traverse the same spot many times, but all in all it does a pretty good job.  Cleaning-wise it is comparable to manual vacuuming. While the suction is lower than my monster of an Electrolux it makes up for that by having a higher coverage than what I can bother to have manually. I suspect that I will still need to vacuum about once per month but no more bi-daily sweeping.

Vacuuming my 3room+kitchen apartment takes about three hours or so, which is divided in to 3 iterations of 25 minutes of vacuuming, and 40 minutes of charging.

Google Cardboard button for Z3 (compact)

The new Google Cardboard supposedly works with "every phone" I guess that means they have moved the magnet in so that it is harder for the magnetometer to just filter out the button. As is the case with for example my Z3 (compact) which just plain out ignores the button on my knock-off Cardboard and supposedly on a few other cardboard owners phones. There is at least one person that has bothered to make a hack to get it to work, but it is not very pretty, requires access to copper tape and looks a bit fiddly if you remove and re-insert the phone. So here is my attempt at adding a touch-button to my Google Cardboard.

Using the Google Earth demo I made a piece of aluminium foil that exactly covered that area of the
top half of the screen (if you touch the lower part of the screen the button-bar will pop up). If you do this you might want to cover your screen with a sheet of paper or some plastic so you don't scratch it up

My phone completely ignored touch on this, even if I extended it to cover the entire width of the screen.

This was how ever apparently not a problem with the use of aluminium foil as such, since it detected a click when I removed the foil. Apparently the phone is doing some kind of palm-detection or similar, so using a blunt-tip non-conductive manipulation-rod (aka whiteboard-pen) I retracted the foil until it consistently detected clicks on the other end of the foil.

After that I cut some card-stock to the same width as the foil and eye-balled it to be slightly wider than one of the eye-pieces. I then pulled the card-stock over the edge of a table to give it an arch-shape, and trimmed it down so that it would be a millimetre or two longer than the right eye-piece, in order to assure that the foil would be held firmly against the screen.

Most paper-glues wont adhere to metals, and I wanted something flexible so the usual cyanoacrylate super-glue would not quite do. Wrapping the foil in a single layer of clear tape is an easy fix, also reduces the risk that the foil will scratch the screen.

Please note that the foil is not quite taped on all the way. this is so that the card-stock can be better affixed to the cardboard.

To avoid that the added force of the finger-adapter would dislodge the flimsy mid-piece of cardboard I reinforced it with some more tape, if it still gets dislodged I guess I will add a blob of heat-glue

 I made it slightly S-shaped to provide the most pressure around 1cm from the end of the foil and taped it on on both side, note that the tape on the out-side goes under the foil- connecting the card-stock and the cardboard, since the foil is a bit flimsy, and I wanted to reduce the risk that having a layer of tape between the finger and the foil might interfere with the workings. Instead I just taped the tip of the foil to the side of the box, leaving a few millimetres exposed.

It doesn't look  very pretty, but it works.