A few weeks back I got a Roomba Robotic Vacuum (http://www.irobot.com/consumer/product_detail.cfm?prodid=9) as a wonderful gift. Shipped with it was the optional remote control. The Roomba is fully automatic, but it's programmed to pick up dirt not to chase the cat -- you need the remote for that.

However, long time readers (you poor bastards) will remember that I try to maintain a strictly one remote coffee table (https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00022.html). That meant the Roomba had to go onto the Phillips Pronto TSU-2000 Universal Remote. I thought for sure I'd find a CCF file for it, but it looks like only the people with newer remotes are getting the Roomba. Fortunately someone in the RemoteCentral forms helped out with instructions on how to back-convert the remote configuration and after a few wasted hours I can now steer the vacuum from the couch. Apparently I became a yuppie when I wasn't looking.

The tool scp, UNIX for secure copy, is a wrapper around ssh, secure shell. It lets you move files from one machine to another through an encrypted connection with a command line syntax similar to that of the standard cp, local copy, command. I use it 100 times a day.

The command line syntax for scp is at its most basic:

scp <source> <destination>

Either the source, destination, or both can be on a remote computer. To denote that one just prefixes the file name with "username@machinename:". So this command:

I've got a policy here on the unblog where I only do entries about things I've created. When I wanted to hype the Diplomacy at Sea V/Dip Con event coming up March 2005 I had to find something to do with it first, so I volunteered to set up their website.

Whenever I need to set up a quick site I head over to the Open Source Web Design site (http://oswd.org/) and pick from their vast array of great designs. This time I went with one called Evolver. It has a clean look and clean code. Rialto did a great job of synthesis and design on this one.

I added a RSS feed to the Minneapolis Security Camera Project site. Subscribers to it will see any new cameras as soon as they're posted. If you're not yet using an RSS aggregator let me know and I'll chisel the list on a stone tablet and mail it to you whenever it's updated.

The feed is at http://mpls-watched.org/map/rss.xml

History of the World is a fine game from Avalon Hill. It's distributed by Hasbro now, and it's one of the rare Avalon Hill games that Hasbro managed to improve when they "cleaned it up".

History of the World uses dice to simulate combat, and they do so in a way so as to intentionally skew the likelihood of success toward the attacker. There are, however, various terrains (mountainous, ocean straight, forest), types of attack (amphibious), bonuses (strong leader, elite troops, forts, weaponry, etc.) which can affect the success rate of an attacker.

I use the Mozilla web browser on a few different machines, and its lack of roaming profiles/bookmarks is a source of annoyance. When I bookmark a site on my laptop, I want that bookmark to be available on my desktop machine. In order to achieve that I use a kludgy network of scripts, CVS, crontab entries, and the bookmarksync application.

Bookmarksync (http://sourceforge.net/projects/booksync/) is a tiny little program that takes as input two different bookmark files and outputs the combination of the two. It works just fine in all respects, except that it converts tab-group bookmarks into bookmark folders.

Back when I started at the University of Minnesota in 1995 the course registration system was terminal/telnet based. Students would register using a clumsy mainframe-style form interface. When a class a student wanted was full or required unsatisfied prerequisites, the student come supplicant would go to the department to beg for a "magic number" which, when input into the on-line registration system, would allow him or her admission into the course.

Cheap Ass Games (http://cheapass.com) make a lot of great games which are available for very little money. A perennial favorite is Kill Doctor Lucky which is sort of like Clue, in reverse, and with a better sense of humor. It's an easy game to learn from the rules, but no one wants to read the rules. I've found that putting this turn sequence diagram I whipped up in front of a first time player augmented with a quick explanation of killing and failure is enough to get someone from zero to playing in 30 seconds. Maybe the computer geeks with whom I hang out are more into state diagrams than the general populace, but it works for us.

EtherPEG (http://www.etherpeg.org/) is software for the Mac the listens in on local network traffic, identifies any images being downloaded, and displays them. Driftnet (http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/driftnet/) is Linux software that does the same thing, but offers better command line integration. Xscreensaver (http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/) is the screen saver/console locking program I use to keep people from using my laptop when I'm getting a refill at my local coffee shop.

Xscreensaver has a display mode called 'webcollage' (http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/) that can use driftnet to show modified images from the network as the screen saver display. So when I'm away from the laptop it pops up pictures from all the websites that everyone else on the wireless network is looking at. At least in theory it does. Actually, I couldn't get it to do that at all.

I like mixing drinks, despite having no real skill for it. The commercial bar-tending courses seem to rely extensively on flashcards for the learning of drink recipes, so I though a UNIX fortune file of drink recipes would be a natural fit for learning.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good, public drink listings in a format I could parse. Eventually I found one in CVS from this project: http://drinkmixer.sourceforge.net/ It's not huge, but at least its a start and easily added to.