Yeah, whatever did happen to my personal robot?

The idea for this post has been shamelessly stolen from the BBC.  I'm sure Tomorrow's World was predicting we'd all have our own personal house robot slaves by now.

Personally I can't imagine a robot like this being developed for the domestic market. It'd just cost way too much money for something that's probably cheaper to employ a human to do anyway. If we do ever get useful human robots I can't see it coming out of anything other than military research or from the development of a Japanese sex robot. 

A friend of mine (yes, I know you won't believe it's not me) wants a Cameron (from Sarah Connor Chronicles). I'm not sure for which purpose he wants it. Probably to do the hoovering.

I should probably get a robot to do my blog posting for me.

Monkeys control robot arm with their brains

This is just awesome. The era of the cyborg is upon us. Those crazy scientist folk have inserted probes into a monkey brain and got them to control a robotic arm.

I reckon this means that within months we'll have Stephen Hawking's brain embedded in a fully robotic moving life support system much like the drug crazed psycho who gets transformed into RoboCop 2 in the film of the same name. Or the robotic Richard Nixon from Futurama.

The prospects for the lazy are brilliant. Imagine having actual workable arms and legs that you could control just with your own brain. You could actually lift yourself up off the sofa and go and do something. Yeah, ok I have that already but these would be robot legs and arms which is better!

Google Calendar

I finally got fed up of always having to ask my girlfriend if we were free on a certain day to do something, so I decided to try setting up a google calendar. Well, what happened was I thought "there must be some kind of shared calendar online, I bet google have one..." so I put google calendar into google and found it.

Google are going to run the world if they carry on like this aren't they. I am already virtually helpless without them.

Anyway, I set it up (trivial if you have a gmail account, you just put in your password) and started entering dates. Shared it with my girlfriend and within quarter of an hour or so we'd got everything set up and entered. It was very quick and easy to use. You can even synch it with Outlook apparently.

And now I'll get an e-mail a week before our anniversary and her birthday. Woo!

State of the Robot

In case you didn't notice, I love robots. I love the very concept of robots. I love vacuuming robots. I love car building robots. I even love the stupid robot that came with the original nintendo. Gyroscope or something like that. How the fuck am I supposed to remember? That was 20 years and a whole lot of beer ago. Anyway, how could you not love robots? Servents who don't care about being servants and will do whatever they're programmed to do, sounds like heaven and/or the porno I watched last night.

According to this article I'll have the chance to make that love physical soon, or about 400 years. Depending on who you believe. Clearly, anyone who knows anything about mankind (as I do as one of the base members of the group) already knew that Sexbots were always the logical conclusion to this research path. Let's try and work on that 400 timeframe though, robot nerds. You dorks need Sexbots more than the rest of society and I don't think you want to wait 400 years to get some.

Also of note, this article isn't just about banging robots, that's just the part that got my attention. It also gives quick rundown on the state of robotics in the world like cooking robots, nipple-ous robots, and good old robot dogs. Hmmm, nipples, cooking, and bitches...sounds like women are about to be replaced.

Want to live a long time?

Great news for us lazy people! If we want a long life, we just have to start exercising in our 70s! See this article for details.

Of course, that's assuming the beer and fast food don't kill us long before we hit 70...

Battery Revolution

Who out there is tired of charging your phone after making 4 calls to the phone sex hotline? Tired of barely being able to watch a single movie on your laptop on the plane? Tired of lugging a damn charger with you every time you travel more than 5 hours from home?

Someone out there has finally figured out a way to make it all better. And they're not using alcohol and empty promises.

See batteries are one of those sneaky lazy technologies. The Lazy Enablers I call them. They don't really make life any easier on their own, but take anything powered by batteries, imagine a power plug on it, and see how annoying your life becomes. Cell and cordless phones? Useless. Laptops? Useless (although lighter). Remote controls? Really useless (although harder to lose in couch cushions).

How are these super batteries begin made? They're made by using special nanotubes grown directly on the blah-de blah-de blah, and now by brain hurts. Let me break it down for you, they're using magic. That's what this nanotechnology stuff is. Magic. And it's awesome. It can make everything lighter, faster, stronger, better, etc. Soon it will be popping up in spam e-mails for a nanocream for your cock. M4ke ur grrl SATISFIED!111!!

This is going to result in 2 things 1) Super Expensive batteries and 2) better robots. My sex robot won't need to be recharged for 40 hours. That should be good for 1600 uses according to my calculations. Bring forth battery revolution I say!

They've done it again

Those divinely winded samurais have pushed the limits of robot power even further. This time they've teamed up two robots in order to serve people drinks! That's one less reason I have to get off the couch.

If the Japs aren't building a toilet robot right now, I'll eat my hat.

HD-TV

Last night I went to a friends house to watch the football. At first we were going to to go to Friend A's house. Friend A is currently a bit of a LazyView hero or someone we hate and are jealous of. He quit his job and decided to have a few months off working and go on a massive holiday in the US including blowing all his money gambling in Vegas. Sadly he came back with more money than he left with. The utter bastard.

We were going to watch the football at his house but he had a power cut. When I phoned him to see whether the power was back on, he was in the casino. I'm at work and he's galavanting around the casino. Told you he was a bastard.

Anyway, this meant we had to change location so we went to Friend B's house, and Friend B has a HD-TV box with the BBC HD channel. This meant we could watch England's players be extremely shit in extremly high quality. My first thought was "it's like watching Half-Life!" (or any other recent high resolution game with relatively realistic sets...). It's definitely very odd at first having PC level resolutions on a TV, but it is very good. Especially for football. If I could afford either an HD-TV or a Sky HD box and subscription I'd definitely want to get one. It's the future.

Anyone want to give me a few grand?

You Facebook slackers

Apparently UK employees are wasting 233 million hours a week poking each other on Facebook. Unfortunately, their Facebook friends aren't real friends.

I don't know whether this is good or bad. Employees have been using the internet at work for as long as it's been available to them. My job involves web development and the internet is invaluable for learning about the latest technology or techniques, or even as a reference. It's quicker to google search for something than it is to look through a book I've got sitting on my desk, and the information is more up to date.

Facebook might be the current demon in the eyes of employers but if they cut one head off and they'll find 3 others to take it's place. My view is that part of the time at least this 'time wasting' is people socializing. Rather than the old 'water cooler' moment, where co-workers stand around chatting during work hours you get people chatting on e-mail or facebook or internet forums to blow off steam. It's just less obvious if people are slacking off online. As long as you get your work done on time, to a high standard, who cares?

Just remember, your Facebook friends aren't really your friends, and even if they are they will still just upload and tag you in highly embarassing drunken photos that they took on your mobile phone one night. Then everyone will be able to see, what a drunken mess you are. Especially your workmates if you are stupid enough to add them.

Download BBC content to your X-Box

Only days after we talked about the future of TV the BBC announce that you'll soon be able to download BBC content for free on X-Box Live. People in the US have been able to do this for a year or so by buying content to download, but we've already paid for the BBC stuff so it'll be free. Good news!

Is there anyone in the world who doesn't want to be Spider-Man?

I saw this story on the BBC earlier about scientists who say they'll soon be able to create a Spider-Man costume that'll allow people to actually climb walls. This sounds really good until you realise that just having a suit with hooks on the fingers just means that you'll have to haul your fat arse up the building with your own muscle power. Sure, it's an interesting discovery but unless it comes with web slingers, superhuman strength and a nicely toned body that requires no exercise to maintain I'm really not interested. Oh and spider-sense, superhuman agility and some witty one-liners would also be useful. Get on it scientists!

Speaking of scientists, some brilliant people have just achieved what could be one of the greatest Lazy Science breakthroughs ever. They've succesfully found a big fat load of nothing.

The Future of Laziness....Er Skynet has detailed files on human anatomy

This doesn't really tie into laziness, but I'm blogging it anyway because we like to cover robot news here at Lazy View.

Our previous robot articles have been many (here, here, and here, or even here). There's probably more but I've already put way more effort into this than I intended. Now I add one more robo-article as a cautionary tale.

Behold....the first generation terminator!

Once again the Japs lead the way in frigthening robotic technology. This time the sake drinking Kamikazes have created a robotic video game that will pwn you by breaking your arm. Now robots know how to hurt us. They've got a taste for blood, and we're one step closer to Domo Arigato Mr Roboto taking over the world.



I included the image just because that robot is awesome in a creepy way and because everyone is having a good time except the guy about to get fucked up by a mannequin that looks like a pedophile.

A TV Revolution

So far my Sky TV experience has been absolutely brilliant. I called them to order TV on Tuesday and it was installed on Sunday. They could have installed it earlier, but that was the earliest I could manage. An extremly professional and helpful installer turned up at about 2:30pm, adjusted our dish a bit, installed our box, downloaded some updates and I was all set up to watch the last 10 minutes of the Manchester derby on Sky Sports and the whole of the Liverpool Chelsea game. The installer commented that he'd never seen a TV like ours before and asked where it had come from. I assured him it wasn't foreign, just really old, but I don't think he believed me. It still works fine though, we'll see how all your fancy plasmas and LCD screens are doing in 15 years time (yes, I'm jealous... wait until I have some money!).

The Sky+ box itself is an exceptional bit of kit. It's incredibly fast and easy to use. The 'pause live TV' feature that we all know from the Sky adverts is going to change the way I watch TV. Desperate to urinate? Need another beer? Pizza man arrived just as your team wins a penalty? Girlfriend urgently needs to talk about curtains in the middle of your favourite show? Just pause it and continue a few minutes later. Someone arrives late for the football? Pause the kick-off and fast forward catch up to live during the half time adverts.

I've tried to do some of this stuff on my PC, recording onto hard drive froma TV card, and it's slow and horrible. On the sky box it's so quick and silent you don't notice anything's happening. I can watch a show and record something else. I can record two things at once and watch a previously recorded program and tell it to automatically record an entire series at the touch of a button. I truly have moved from our antiquated old set-up into the 21st Century. A bit of further research also shows that I can pipe Sky all around the house using the existing RFF links, and even use one or more of these handy Sky Link gadgets to set it up so that the remotes will work in each room. Although we can't watch two things simultaneously in different rooms, unless we get more boxes.

So far, so good, Broadband is supposed to be active on Thursday 'but allow 3 days after that' so I'll let you know how that goes.

I sold my soul to the gods of TV

I feel bad about giving money to Rupert Murdoch, I really do. You only need to see his guest appearance on The Simpsons to know he's not a very nice man. If only he didn't provide such excellent Premiership Football coverage in a competitively priced package with broadband, cheap phone calls and the most excellent Sky+ box. Damn him. So I've sold my soul to Sky TV.

Originally our plan was to stick with our existing phone/broadband provider when we moved house and, as the previous occupants of the house had kindly left us a dish, think about Sky in the future. Unfortunately our previous provider, Bulldog, were useless. They originally quoted us 2 weeks to move the line, which I thought was pretty crap. Nothing happened and when we called them 2 and a half weeks later it turned out they only had a record of our cancellation and no record of a new order with them. So rather than wait another two weeks, and with very little in the way of help from them, we told them where to stick it and decided to get Sky's combination package instead.

For those of you not familiar with the Sky process, the first step is to get a BT phone line connected. I phoned BT after work on Thursday and our phone line was connected by the time I got back from work on Monday. I thought that was excellent. Today I called Sky, signing up was easy and their engineer is going to come and fit the TV on Sunday afternoon. Hopefully he'll be here in time for the Super Sunday double bill of the Manchester derby and Liverpool vs Chelsea. Fingers crossed the installation will be one of the easiest the engineer has ever done. The previous inhabitants of the house have left us a Sky dish fully connected with 2 cables into the house for Sky+ so theoretically all he has to do is plug the Sky+ box into the cables and stick our card in the slot.

I will update you with how this process goes. Sky are don't have a reputation for great customer services and any of us who've dealt with big companies like this before know that it's always very easy to sign up with them but can be much more difficult to get Customer Services to resolve issues. I had absolute nightmares with NTL a few years ago

Cost wise? Well our old combination phone + broadband cost us £30 a month, the new package, which is virtually the same phone and broadband with the addition of all the Sky Digital channels and Sky Sports will be £53 a month, including the BT line rental. £17 of the extra cost is the Sky Sports Subscription.

So in summary, I'll still be watching way too much TV, but I'll have a bigger selection of crap to watch, will be able to record so much stuff that I never have time to catch up on it all and can see so much football I'll get totally sick of it. Brilliant.

Too lazy to do myself a favor

I'm too lazy to make good plans. Plans that will pay off in lazyness in the longterm. If I wasn't I would have bought these babies ages ago: cleaningrobots!! They do all the work while you are FORCED to sit on the couch with your feet up, in order not to disturb the little working friends.

There's also one that mows the lawn. I want them, I must have them, and I will. Some day.

Need a word for your new Superstring Theory? Use the Simpsons

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS REFERENCES TO VERY HARD PHYSICS I'LL DUMB IT DOWN BUT IT COULD HURT YOUR BRAIN

Shamit Kachru, a Stanford University physicist needed a word to describe how one type of superstring changed into another type so he decided to use the word "embiggens" which was first used in the Simpsons episode about Jebidiah Springfield in the following passage:

Jebediah: [on film] A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
Edna: Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield
Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Very Hard Physics is always discovering things that it doesn't have words for and it's very good at just picking something arbitrary. Quantum particles have properties called things like Charm and Colour for things that are barely understandable and most likely just made up to get research grants. I actually did a Physics degree... well, when I say I did it, I sometimes attended the place where the degree happened and barely scraped through with a drinkers degree in the end, anyway, the opening sentence of our opening Quantum Physics lecture was "nobody understands Quantum Physics" so I gave up trying. Anyway, stealing a term from The Simpsons is very clearly in the LazyView spirit so we salute you Shamit.

If you want to read the story about what kind of strings embiggen into what other types of strings then you can read the full story here, but see the big red warning above first.

Cyborg!

"Imagine a jetline with a pilot that never makes a mistake, never gets tired, never shows up to work with a hangover." Dyson, Terminator 2

I just watched a BBC report about a soldier back from Iraq has just been fitted with the world's first commercial bionic arm. If we can't have fully automated robot slaves doing all the stuff we want to then isn't the next best thing being a cyborg? You'll be stronger, faster, have no lactic acid build up in your muscles when you're doing stuff. Brilliant. I'm sure sooner or later they'll develop internal organs that can process the alcohol out of your body so you don't get a hangover either. That might be a long way off but if it is then at least watching that film you can learn the soldier's pin code so if you steal his wallet you can get all his cash. Woo!

Going to the lake?

Maybe on one of these nice summers weekends you might fancy a nice trip down to a local lake or river to do a bit of boating. Normally you'd have to pay for somewhere to store your boat by the lake or hitch up your speedboat trailer to the back of your SUV. No longer, for some bright spark has solved this by creating the Humdinga, a combination Hummer and speedboat that can do 100mph out of the water and 40mph on water. Awesome, and probably really good for the environment too, because you don't have to manufacture both a boat and a car.

The pain of a non-functional remote.

Do any of you remember an ancient technology from the 1980s, a world before DVD recorders, TV cards in computers, hard drive recorders, TIVO, Sky+ and all that wonderful stuff? It involved recording television onto magnetic tapes and was called a Video Cassette Recorder or VCR?

Well, I have a horrible admission. I am still living in that 80s world. Not because I'm sitting around playing nerdy computer games and listening to Iron Maiden... although I am doing that too, but because I'm still stuck in the world of the VCR. If I lived in a perfect lazy world we'd have a wonderful Sky+ machine with the one button record, series link and all that other great stuff that makes recording your favourite programs utterly trivial. Unfortunately this isn't the case. Currently we're in rented accommodation and getting the landlord to agree to put a Sky dish on the flat is a pain. Cable services have been really crap and annoying with awful customer services until recently. I had 3 years at a place with cable and nothing but problems with billing etc. Also, we are moving shortly and I can't be bothered setting it all up twice, plus there's the minimum contracts and all that crap. We could just get a DVD recorder or hard disk recorder but it seems like a waste of money if we're going replace it so soon with the holy grail of laziness the HD Sky+ box.

So now I have the excuses out of the way. I'll let you know the current situation. In our flat we have 2 video recorders. Mine, a very cheap one that's over 10 years old and has some kind of power issue that means it can't rewind or record without getting a bit stressed out, groaning for a while and then powering itself off, and my girlfriends which is newer but similarly cheap. Her VCR works fine except for the remote control which has decided to stop working. It's not the batteries, we tried that. Taking a remote away from a Video Recorder is like taking me away from the internet it becomes incredibly stupid and only able to perform the most basic of tasks. So we can play, record, stop, fast foward, rewind, eject and change the channel up and down, and nothing else. We can't program the thing to record, if we are going out and want to record something later in the evening we just have to find a long tape, hit record and hope the tape is long enough to keep recording long enough to record the show we want. Luckily the VCR is stuck on Long Play (we can't change it so Short Play) so we've got up to 8 hours of recording. Forget recording anything if you are away for more than a day. You're just missing that show.

Doing anything to fix either machine would be more expensive and more effort than just buying a new one, and I can't even be bothered to do that. How did people survive before videos and TVs had remotes? At least we can change channels on our freeview box so we never need to change the channel on the VCR. I don't really mind most of the hassle of the non working remote though. Having to fast forward the video to get to the start of the show, recording 4 hours of crap before the show you want are both fine. The thing that really annoys me is that you have to get up to fast forward through the adverts! 4 times in a typical hour long show I have to get up, crouch by the machine and hold down the ffw button for 45 seconds or so. ARGH!

Don't worry, I found a solution. Now, we record stuff upstairs, on my girlfriends video that you can record on, and then transfer the tape downstairs to watch the program the video with the working remote where we can easily fast forward through the adverts. Even in the harshest, most deprived of environments laziness can find a way.

Oh yeah... I do have a computer with a TV card and theoretically you can record stuff onto that but it's really complicated to set it up, I don't have the right cables to allow me to watch TV on that and simultaneously in the bedroom without changing cables over and and the timer stuff on that seems to be really crap, especially if you have any kind of powersaving stuff set up on your computer.

Play a game yourself? Why bother.

You can just build a robot to do it for you. Some euro-nerds have built a robot to play Guitar Hero for them. They call it Guitar Heronoid.