Two years have passed and now the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania with development by KMel Robotics have miniturised the same basic concept to produce nano quadrotor helicopters.

As you’ll see in the video, a lot has changed and they possess some amazing built in technology, such as being able to right themselves when thrown into the air, along with clever algorithms to control moving between obstacles, flying in formation and much more.

I think this is absolutely mind blowing, least of which because they’d make an amazing toy but mainly because it represents a huge leap forward in robots and sensing, a lot like the self driving cars that Google have developed.

Amazing.

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I’m grumpy!

After checking with Claire about why he might be grumpy, it turned out it was because the computer kept freezing when he was trying to watch one of his favourite shows via ABC 4 Kids.

Claire tells me that it did it a few times and that at some point, the computer was giving her a temperature warning – which I haven’t seen since the days of overclocking CPU’s.

A quick investigation shows that the fan & heat sink for the CPU are covered in dust. The photo probably doesn’t do it justice but the heat sink is completely filled in with dust and the fan blades are coated as well.

I clean everything up with a small stiff bristle paint brush, which Claire graciously let me use and we’re back in business. Claire walks past the computer and on the way to the bedroom tells me that the computer is making a weird humming sound.

Further investigation shows that it isn’t anything usual except that the CPU fan can actually spin properly now as it isn’t being restricted by the dust between it and the heat sink and the additional weight of it caked on the underside of the fan blades.

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Fast forward a few years and I found myself in a position where I need to use the HP Laserjet to print onto some fancy paper that the Canon MP610 ink jet isn’t all that compatible with.

Following is the driver installation process I have just used in Windows 7 to get the HP Laserjet 1010 working. Your mileage may vary to mine, depending on the year of your printer or computer setup but it has worked for me.

HP Laserjet Driver Install Process

1. Click the Start button and open Devices and Printers
2. Click “Add a printer”
3. Click “Add a local printer”
4. Click “Use an existing port” and select DOT4 from the dropdown list
5. Select HP from the Manufactuer listbox
6. Click “Windows Update” button to download the latest set of drivers from Microsoft
7. Browse the Printers listbox and select HP Laserjet 1015
8. Give the printer a name or use the default
9. Finish the process

At this stage, you should have installed the Microsoft provided HP Laserjet 1015 printer driver. Coincidentally, I think that same driver will also work for a HP Laserjet 1010, HP Laserjet 1012 and obviously a HP Laserjet 1015.

If the above driver installation process doesn’t work for you, HP provide a Windows Vista 32bit and Windows Vista 64bit driver for the HP Laserjet 1010 that it states works with the 1010/1012/1015. I don’t know if the Windows Vista drivers are compatible with Windows 7, though it might be worth a shot – keep in mind though that it would of course be unsupported by HP; then again so is what I outlined above.

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For the last couple of years we’ve wanted to upgrade from a pocket sized digital camera and add a digital SLR into our photography arsenel but for whatever reason – we never got around to it. Conveniently, Harvey Norman happened to have a 20 month interest & repayment free promotion on at the moment – so we figured now was a perfect time to jump in with both feet.

My original plan was to buy a Canon EOS 550D digital SLR, as they’ve recently been superseded by the Canon EOS 600D and figured that it’d offer a good bargaining chip for me, as they’d want to clear their old stock.

After talking to a really helpful older staff member at Harvey Norman, I’m quite sure that plan would have worked swimmingly – up until he said that they have virtually no stock of any make or type of digital cameras as a result of the March 11 tsunami in Japan. He’d said that within a day or two of the tsunami, they’d been contacted by three or four of the major camera manufacturers and told that their orders had been cancelled and not to expect new stock until September at the earliest.

Instead of Harvey Norman having dozens of Canon digital SLR cameras in stock of various models, with a plethora of lens to boot – they had four – 1x Canon 550D and 3x Canon 600D. I thought I was still going to be in luck, until I realised that they had no lens kits availabile for the Canon 550D -which after talking to Andrew last night, he recommended getting a second larger lens.

In the end, we opted to pay a little more and go with the latest model – a Canon EOS 600D digital SLR twin lens kit. The Canon 600D packs some pretty kick arse figures – 18 megapixels, 3″ LCD screen, shoots full 1080p HD video, does 3.7fps continuous shooting with 9 point auto focus and 100-6400 ISO. The two lens that come with the kit are an 18-55mm and a 55-250mm, which seems like a good spread at this stage. We’ve now got to learn how to wrangle it – but what I know without knowing anything, is that it takes a mean photo by just point & clicking!

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Like most males, I’ve tried a whole swag of different razors from cheap disposable razors, various Gillette, Schick and electric razors. For my skin, I find that a razor gives me less irritation then an electric razor and for quite some time now I’ve settled on the Schick Quattro Titanium as my razor of choice. It is sharp, a nice flexible head and it gives a close shave.

After trying the new Schick Hyrdo 5 razor, I’ve now found a replacement and my new favourite razor. While the head of the razor feels a little bigger than the Quattro Titanium, the razor glides through stubble and over your skin. I was particularly impressed with the closeness of the first pass as well, it was nearly completely smooth and I had even less irritation than I normally would with the Quattro Titanium.

Schick are suggesting that the new Schick Hyrdo 5 is the best shave for your skin and I whole heartedly agree. I really do think it is the best men’s razor I’ve ever used, certainly for my skin. If you do use a razor, I’d recommend you pick on up next time – if for no other reason than to see what the latest shaving innovation is – it might surprise you!

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One bloke in particular, I’m quite sure takes great pleasure in parking his car, his motorbike and his jet ski – spread across two car parks.

For those that don’t recognise what is in the picture, the motorbike is a new Ducati which start at about $25,000. Next we’ve got the Mercedes SL63 AMG, which packs a 6.2L V8 producing 385Kw and 630Nm of rubber melting goodness and will lighten your wallet by about $440,000. To cool off, of course you need a Seadoo jet ski and they are about $25,000.

Amazingly, the guy that owns these three happiness creation devices is under 40 years old and if I ever get a chance to have a word – I think I’ll feel compelled to ask him what the hell he does!

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If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, it’s the same sort of technology that provides the super slow motion footage of a tennis player striking a ball from the Australian Open tennis championship or similar.

However, the Phantom Flex isn’t just any run of the mill high frame rate camera, with enough light it can shoot at over 2,500 frames per second in 1080p! If you can ‘tolerate’ a less than full high definition picture – you can capture a speeding bullet at 10,000 frames per second – wow.

That sort of video camera isn’t the sort of thing that videographers ’just have access to’ like a normal high megapixel digital camera. So while Tom had access to the beast, he thought he should make the most of it and shot a whole raft of cool footage from within his hotel room in Las Vegas Nevada.

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1. High Quality Screen
   While using my Blackjack mobile phone, I thought the quality of the screen was actually quite good. Of course, as soon as I bought my Apple iPhone, it highlighted just how poor the screen quality was by comparison.
2. Kick Arse Interface
   Probably a little subjective, not everyone gels with the iPhone OS user interface and usability. Fortunately for me, it fits with me just nicely and I find it really efficient to move around and the user experience of multi-speed scrolling lists, varying length touch sensitivity and more make it a joy to use.
3. Richer Applications
   My Samsung Blackjack had a really good spread of applications and was really, quite a capable phone. The difference with the iPhone is that the market place is open and thousands of developers around the world are investing their energy building applications for the Apple App Store – which means that there is probably an existing application to do what you want and it’ll be free or low cost.
4. Photos
   While I did take photos with my Blackjack, it was generally an after thought. The quality of the images weren’t that fantastic and viewing them on the phone using such a mediocre quality screen just compounded the issue. Fortunately the iPhone 3GS has a 3.5″ screen with a resolution of 480×320 pixels and provides good quality colour reproduction – makes viewing photos that much nicer.
5. Video
   Over the 2 or more years that I owned the Samsung Blackjack, I think I used the video feature less often than I used it to take photos – which means basically never. Compare that against my ongoing use of the video capturing on the iPhone and it is a stark contrast. The single greatest thing about having reasonable quality video and audio recording ability on the iPhone is that you can capture a lot more things than you could normally. While the video quality certainly doesn’t rival our full HD camcorder, the iPhone is infinitely more accessible – in that you have it with you nearly all the time – which makes it great for capturing impromptu moments.
6. Ubiquitous Web Access
   The Samsung Blackjack was a 3G capable phone with internet browsing capabilities. However, I virtually didn’t bother using the internet as the user experience was so poor. The physical screen was small, screen quality and colour reproduction wasn’t that great and the compatibility of the web browser itself wasn’t fantastic. Since buying my Apple iPhone, I now use the internet regularly – often more than once per day, I have my various personal and work email’s delivered to it as well and because the uses the Apple web browser Safari, which is standards compliant – virtually all web sites just work out of the box.

I could probably go on and on about why I think the iPhone is a great phone, but I honestly think it transcends a simple phone handset now. It is positioning itself as a hyper mobile personal computer, as the raw device is very capable, quite feature rich and with a staggering ecosystem of applications just a click away – there isn’t a lot it can’t do.

Without a doubt, it is the best mobile phone I have ever owned and it wins by a significant margin.

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Since that time, we’ve managed to find a few little gremlins within the vehicle that needed to be addressed, some more severe than others:

1. Accelerator Stopped Working
   Claire, Hugo & Lucy were driving along on the M1 motorway when the accelerator stopped working. The majority of people aren’t aware but the Ford Falcon was one of the first cars to offer drive by wire throttle or in plain terms, an electronic accelerator with no direct connection to the throttle body on the car.
2. Rattle
   When you start the car and it is either idling or at low RPM, there was a periodic rattle that sounded as though it was coming from the engine bay somewhere. You didn’t hear it when you were driving, either because it wasn’t there or was masked by road and wind noise.
3. Break Shudder
   For the first couple weeks we had the car, the breaks were working as you’d expect. However after taking a trip out to Chinchilla we noticed a severe break shudder on the way home while driving down the Toowoomba Range.
4. CD Player
   When I took the car for a test drive, I had the radio on for part of the drive just for something to do. I didn’t have a CD with me, who does that really, so I didn’t think to check and assumed that the CD player was working.

I dropped the car into Hinterland Toyota Nerang at 7:30AM on Thursday before the Easter long weekend and Jacob met me there to chauffeur me to work. Only about 10 minutes after we arrived at work, I got a call from Nerang Hinterland Toyota to inform me that while they can service my car, they were unable to do the repairs under a statutory warranty claim as it needs to go back to the place of purchase – which was Hinterland Toyota Burleigh Heads. I told them that was horribly inconvenient and to see if there was anything they could do for me and they arranged to handle the warranty work on behalf of the Burleigh Heads dealershsip which was great.

The afternoon rolled around and I had expected to get a call to pick up my car, however instead the call informed me that they had taken the disc rotors off the car and had them machined to resolve the shudder but it hadn’t fixed it. I needed the car for the long weekend, so picked it up anyway and the shudder was in fact worse than when I took it in which I didn’t understand. On Tuesday after the long weekend I dropped it back in again and they again took the disc rotors off and inspected everything but didn’t find anything wrong, so put the brake discs back on the machine to recheck they were smooth and they were. After putting them back on, still a sever shudder when breaking at any speed and in the end they replaced the disc brake rotors and pads – no more shudder.

When I first arrived home with the XR6, Claire immediately noticed a burble in the exhaust and mentioned that she is now a bogan mother. Well it turns out the rattle at idle was in fact the catalytic converter, which should have been an easy replacement. However when the new catalytic converter arrived, it didn’t fit because the exhaust on the car isn’t standard – so they had to take it to an exhaust specialist to have it refitted – but now no more rattle.

The throttle stopping was weird and I’d never heard of that happening before. A combination of dash lights turned on when it happened, so it was a known fault in that respect – which is good. The strangest thing is though, after pulling over, turning the car off and back on – the start up checks all passed without any warnings and the accelerator was working again and we haven’t had the problem again. Nonetheless, Hinterland Nerang hooked up the equipment to the onboard computer but it wasn’t registering a fault at the time – so there was nothing for them to fix as far as they could tell. If it happens again, I’ll have to take it back down to them as soon as possible so they can investigate again.

The last remaining thing to get fixed was the CD player which appeared to have a CD stuck in it, though the display didn’t indicate that there was a disc in there at all. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get that repaired while it was in with Hinterland Nerang as it isn’t covered as part of the statutory warranty claim apparently but I’ll give the Burleigh Heads dealership a call and see what they can do about it.

While it took three days with Hinterland Nerang to resolve the brake shudder and the rattle, they were really helpful and kept me in the loop which was good. The only thing that was an inconvenience about it was that they weren’t able to supply a courtesy vehicle because they were booked out – so unfortunately Claire and Hugo were home bound for a couple of days.

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Over the weekend my super fast Western Digital 74Gb Raptor hard drive that Windows is installed on decided to give up the ghost. It passes the POST on boot up and attempts to load Windows but never succeeds and reboots on its own. I suppose I should be happy that I managed to get over two years out of that Western Digital hard drive, the Raptor series of hard drives spin much faster than a standard hard drive and provide superior performance but do tend to wear out sooner as a by product.

Now if only the cost of a solid state hard drive technology had come down far enough that I could afford it without feeling guilty, I’d never have to wait for something to load again!

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