// Hendryx

My nabaztag hasn’t been alive for quite some time, mainly due to the fact that it got damaged in my last house move about a year ago, but today I finally got round to repairing it. Checking out the current state of the nabaztag community got me thinking - time for me to re-wire my rabbit.

For those of you who don’t know what the nabaztag is, it was a little wifi enabled robot with two little moving ears that make it look like a bit like a rabbit. Current method of interaction with the rabbit currently consist of a button on the top of it’s head, 4 separate lights that can display multiple colors, and RFID reader, speaker, and microphone.

Normally the rabbit receives instructions on what to do via signals via wifi from the nabaztag website. The current problem seems to be that the nabaztag crew have never really delivered on what they promised. Exciting new features promised years ago are still missing, partially implemented, or full of errors. The fact that the company’s own development blog has been deleted, and that most of the fan sites in the community are ether closed or haven’t seen an update for a very long time seems to suggest that the future for these little robot rabbits is not looking good.

While I’ve managed to repair my rabbit enough to re-connect to the service website and thus receive instructions, currently the rabbit’s ears do not work correctly (they’re supposed to move as well. This means that this little device now falls into what I see as the prime hacker spot. The area where a gadget still has some use, but is for the most part now pointless with no foreseeable future unless you upgrade it.

From what I know about the rabbit from past research, its not really something I could simple install linux on and have an uber-nabaztag, so I’m planning for something a bit more extreme. Soldering iron, and new components will be needed. I’m essentially looking at turning the rabbit into a mini-PC with a lot more processing power, memory, and a custom linux kernel. It will be a long project and if you know of anyone that had actually got round to doing this (and not just talked about it) please let me know via email.

If I get to do what I want - then the software should be obvious. Real internal voice recognition and speak synthesis. Internal AI that responds to data on the Net, instead of just being fed instructions from the. This should be fun! :)

After my personal website being in a heavy state of flux for quite some years, I can now officially announce that the site is back and active. There aren’t many public posts viewable right now, but that’s for the same reason that my personal site has not really existed for some time - mainly the fact that almost all of my posts in the last few years have been private and introspective.

Old visitors will also note the change of domain name for the website. If you’re wondering why, I guess I’ve just hit that age now where I live more in the real world and less in my dreams. Does sometimes mean I feel old though. :)

I’m now using SocialThing instead of FriendFeed, and using Pownce more than Twitter.

I posted that a few minutes ago on twitter but I wanted to expand a bit more on my reasons, 140 characters might be good for helping you get to the point that you’re doing something - but it’s not so great at giving you the freedom to talk about why you’re doing it.

I first signed up for Pownce a while back when Kevin Rose was talking about it sometime on Diggnation. Signed up. Thought it was great, but didn’t really use mainly due to a lack of friend currently using it, but partly due to the fact that I dislike the way AIR applications run on macs.

I ended up moving to FriendFeed since it let me follow peoples tweets when the twitter site was down, as well as read posts in other social networks. I have 2 problems with FriendFeed though.

1. I find the user interface to be dirty.
2. I really wish you could hide the comments for everyone but your friend.

I recently gave SocialThing another try and I like where it’s going. It doesn’t try to be a social network like FriendFeed, but instead it is just a site that seeks to help you cleanly read the content from social sites, as well as to post to them. It’s still young and in invite only mode - but it all looks very promising.

As for Pownce/Twitter - well like a few I’ve just started to get a little fed up with twitter. So I’ve been considering the options and I’ve decided that I’m going to be using Pownce as my primary social network from now on. Thanks to SocialThing I’ll still be replying to friend in twitter, but I don’t plan to post much there any more.

Like a lot of people I really wish there was a native OSX desktop client, instead of the AIR client - but for now I’ll just drop that on my Someday/Maybe list of software to write.