Killing time

Well, it's been a while, but I'm one of those "don't feel like sharing" kicks. So instead of actually updating anything about my personal life, I will tell you about other things to kill time:

First, on the "holy crap I'm bored to death" front, signed up on Twitter. Add me to share in my boredom.

Second, and most importantly, I got a Nabaztag for Christmas. Its name is Spipi (you can send a message from the site). It's a fun toy, but it has its share of problems. It's quite easy to get it working if you have an open wireless network, but who does that? Getting it on a secured network took some doing; the bunny's instructions themselves weren't complicated, but it didn't want to play nice with our network. I did notice that there is a mistake in the instructions (the advanced settings tell you to only enter an IP address if you're using DHCP, when clearly it should be the opposite). What's been most annoying, though, is the lack of documentation: you'd imagine that, since these have existed for a while and they're such a nerd thing, there'd be lot of documentation out there; but most of what you find is half-assed reviews where people say "wow, looks cool, kind of pricy, though," and very little actual facts (like the fact that the RFID "sense of smell" isn't implemented at all, or that Violet's services can be somewhat unstable). You can subscribe to most features for free; Violet used to have some subscription plans, but by the time I got my bunny, all mention of them had been removed from their site. There's no really good communication from Violet to their users (their blogs are infrequently and poorly updated--much like this one, but then I'm not selling anything); quirky things happen--my bunny, for example, reads the title of all my RSS feeds with a French accent, but the headlines themselves, with an American accent--and there's no good explanation for it. But, for all the annoyances, it is a really cool toy; it's nice to just have it read stuff to me, and if it's interesting, I go check it out. Plus, the weather forecast makes me giggle.