I don’t have any sewing projects under way right now. ALTSpace is running smoothly and sustaining itself. My gas-burning motorcycle needs some work (valve cover gasket is leaking oil) but I’m going to leave that work to a professional. The meshnet project is ongoing but I’m just showing up to meetings and not really doing any work right now.

As a writer, I’d always been fascinated by the trope of the doppelgänger and its long literary life, from Dostoyevsky to Nabokov to Spider-Man. Often, in books, these physical doubles represent the worst a character is capable of. Lately, though, perhaps because at age 41 I’d begun feeling less like the captain of my life and more like its deckhand, I’d started wondering if there was someone out there who embodies not your worst self, but your freest one—a person who encapsulates everything you’ve ever dreamed of becoming. Let’s call him your Cooler Self. All those dreams that got lost along the way, the ones that were casualties of chance or duty or cowardice: There’s a “you” out there—a mountain climber or war photographer or race-car driver—who brought them to fruition. So I vowed to hunt down my Cooler Self.

Test-fitting a cardboard mockup of the Mars Electric ME1003 motor: it’s going to be a tight squeeze but it ought to fit. The ME0709 would fit in a little more easily, but the ME1003 is substantially more powerful so I’m going to see if I can make it work.

I had this idea last year about building a single-board cluster, linking a grid of microcontrollers using their SPI buses… but with a chip like this one, you could get a much higher-powered solution for a very similar price, using the onboard gig-Ethernet as the bus.

I said hello to Nathan H.’s daughter Mabry as she was eating lunch. She’s about four years old, and told me that she has a friend with a little brother who is also named “Mars”, who is two. I said that was great, I don’t know anyone else named Mars, and that I looked forward to talking with him some day. “Oh, but he’s only two”, she said; “by then you’ll be really really old, or maybe dead!”

It is a real, genuine, actual working robot.

It is going to clean my house for me.

I spent a fair number of hours trying to build a vacuum-cleaner robot when I was a kid. I bought what was then an old but not yet vintage Apple IIe to use as the controller, and scavenged the running gear out of one of those electric kiddie cars. I was woefully underprovisioned in electronics knowledge, but I did get a passable maze-exploration algorithm working in simulation. The project never got much further than youthful ambition and a lot of random parts, but it’s still a nostalgic memory.

Here I am a quarter century later, and you can just buy a vacuum cleaner robot off the shelf. I can’t quite believe it’s real; it seems like there ought to be some catch, like it’s going to turn out to be an expensive novelty that doesn’t actually work – but I’m not even an early adopter here! They’ve been around for years now, and people keep buying them! I can’t wait til it finishes charging and sets out on its first cleaning mission.