We've had our iRobot Roomba robot vacuum cleaner for over a year now, so I thought that I should post an update. We're using the iRobot Roomba 531.

We still think it's brilliant and use it virtually every day. One day it goes round downstairs and the following day it does the upstairs. So our house is fully vacuumed every two days.

Battery life still seems good after a year of use. Maintenance is easy (it's good to regularly do a little 'service' to remove hair and fluff from the mechanism). Things that come apart for cleaning only go back in the right way round, which makes it simple to do. Apart from changing the filter we've not had to replace any components in a year of use.

Occasionally it gets snagged on a cable or tangled by a rogue sock left lying around, but it stops before any harm is done.

So if you can afford one, why would you buy a vacuum cleaner that has to be pushed round? The price of the Roomba is pretty similar to top-end manual vacuum cleaners anyway.

We have bought a Dustbuster to do the stairs, which is something that the Roomba cannot do though.

We've just found a supplier in the US who sell HEPA filters for our model of Roomba, so we're going to try those out next.

... and I never did get round to hacking it, partially because it's become so important to us, we don't want to risk breaking it. So the wife says that if I really want to hack a Roomba then I'll have to buy another one :-)

...also during our holiday, we experienced quite a spectacular thunderstorm.  When the storm was in the distance (over Naples) we went onto the roof of our hotel and tried to take some photos.  The chances of clicking the shutter at *exactly* the right moment were remote.  But you don't know unless you try.  So I was delighted to get this shot:

Wow, nice one!  I was really happy to have gotten that.  But we saw loads of similar strikes, at one point we saw two at the same time, one either side of Mount Vesuvius - impressive.

During our recent holiday in Sorrento, we took this photo:

...because it really made us smile.  But you could probably make it right with the addition of some punctuation I suppose.

Since I have gotten Podd running again, I have been going through the actions, reminding myself how they looked. Currently, the one I like best is 'drink' ... this gives you an idea:

Nice! I think that I used monochrome sprites, which I recoloured as they were put on screen. Although some stuff was just drawn directly to the screen. I think there was double-buffering too. It was all written in C on RISC OS. Ahh, those were the days...

As I have previously reported here, I have been trying to better archive my author's copy of Podd (a piece of educational software that I wrote way back). It would be nice to keep it on a more permanent type of storage.

My plan was to get my copy running in an emulator, but that wasn't easy since the floppy disk it came on was protected by the publisher. My theory was that I could write a Windows driver to install a virtual drive, then run an Archimedes emulator and tell it to get a disk image from my new virtual drive. This would give me the ability to implement some virtual flakyness to keep the protection routines happy.

Well that was the theory. I didn't know if it would really work. I knew I'd be getting somewhere if the Podd program prompted for registration details. If you just make a copy of the original floppy, the program just refuses to run. But I did indeed get it going, look at this:

Yay! It works! Well... at first, it failed because the emulator (Arculator) cached the disk image, making my virtual flaky sector code useless. Enter the Red Squirrel emulator, which does not cache the disk content. After some tinkering to get the precise collection of bytes to be flaky we were away.

It has been a nice little challenge. I'll post some more Podd screenshots when I get time.

My wife gave me this book for our anniversary this year.  It's brilliant.  At the moment my favourite page is the periodic table of the condiments:

A couple of weeks ago I bought a Roomba 531 robot vacuum cleaner from John Lewis with the idea of letting it do the vacuuming whilst we're at work.

This means that we can vacuum every day; and hopefully that will help my wife's asthma.  This little device is *brilliant* - it does a better job than I do.  We just press the button when we leave for work in the morning and whilst we're on the morning commute the robot is working away.  It makes an excellent job of the edges.  It has a side brush and detects the edge of the room, using the side brush to go right into the edges.  It also goes under things - so under the TV cabinet, wardrobes, etc.. all gets a clean.

It won't fall down the stairs, thanks to sensors that find any drop in the surface level.  There is also a 'dirt' sensor, so it concentrates more effort where it is really needed.

It even has a serial port, so you can access it from your computer.  There are a lot of commands that can be used on the serial interface. How long will I be able to resist hacking the vacuum cleaner?  Maybe I should get one of these Roomba USB boards on order...

When we visited Sorrento last week, we snapped this rainbow that appeared at the end of the main street, nice!

It's here!  Finally, Lenovo have sent my upgrade.  It installed without a hitch and I'm very pleased with my new OS.  They never did answer any of my recent e-mails chasing it up though.

OK, so I thought that I was finally making some progress with my "free" Windows 7 upgrade that comes with my new Lenovo PC.  It took a very long time for them to validate my purchase - they check to see that you really have bought a Lenovo PC that qualifies for the free upgrade.  I have no problem with that, but why did it take so long? In the end they validated my purchase 44 days after I registered for the upgrade.

So now they have actually taken my money, yes that’s right there is a £16 "shipping" charge.  Don’t get me started – it does not cost £16 to send out a piece of software.  Anyway, I have paid, they have taken the money off my card.  In fact, they took the money 12 days ago.  Their e-mail confirming the payment said: "A notification email with the shipping details will be sent to you when your order has been shipped".  Guess what?  Nothing.   So they have taken my £16 and not shipped anything.  So I thought that I would drop them a line via their Windows 7 Upgrade website.  So far all I have got is an automated response: "This is to acknowledge the receipt of your enquiry and you will hear from us within 10 business days".  Whoa! Two weeks to answer an e-mail?  What’s interesting is that before they took my money their responses said: "This is to acknowledge the receipt of your enquiry and you will hear from us within 1-3 business days".  Fascinating how they lose interest in you once they have taken your money, eh?