Month: October 2010

Revived toy?

How to make a long-dead cat toy interesting again:

Let it get run over by the roomba, then spend 5+ minutes untwisting the string with the end of the string hanging down. The picture was taken after it was unwound and had been reclaimed from Talore.

I thought I’d put it out of reach of the roomba, but not quite. It was under a box which was placed such that I didn’t think it would be moved, and I had part of it under the scratching post base as an anchor anyways (I was trying to get Talore to pull on it and fight the elastic – didn’t work).

The box got moved and the side sweeper brush on the roomba caught the cord, then proceeded to wind it up. It then got dragged around the room (there are little tufts of fur in random places) till the roomba finally decided it was stuck and stopped. I nearly had to take that brush off to unwind it, but it was flexible enough I could bend the brushes to get the cord off. The fur covering for the toy was all bunched up in a tuft around its nose, but it didn’t come all the way off.

Talore watched and attacked the string while I was untangling it, then was quite happy to chase and pounce on the toy after I’d finished. She continued the work of the roomba in nearly pulling the fur loose, but eventually got distracted by the tissue paper she was walking around on (I usually put it back on the floor when the roomba is finished).

Game Night

A group of us from work met last Friday to play video games late into the night, and a couple PS3 Move controllers were acquired to try out. We had one game (that I think was in the Move controller/camera package) and a demo disk. The game was a set of sports that were played using the Move (archery, bocce, disk golf, gladiator, table tennis, and beach volleyball).

All of the sports were fun and tracked the controller pretty well (probably because every time you switched games or number of players it had you recalibrate), but I never did manage to get consistent at disk golf throws except gentle straight throws (somewhat similar to real life with a Frisbee actually). Not all the games in the demo pack were playable (due to random “This must be enabled in the XMB menu” messages), and not all of them tracked the controller all that well. The worst part of the demos was that they tended to be somewhat lame games with Move controller support that didn’t add anything to the game.

Anyway, gladiator was a big hit. In that one you have a shield and a melee weapon and the point is to beat the other person with your weapon while blocking and bashing with the shield.

Calvin solo

For some reason the embed code is setting it to much wider than my page formatting accounts for, so I’m just putting in links for the sake of finishing this post quickly. I didn’t get Calvin’s first round which featured even more exaggerated movements and jumping, but that was the second round.

These were the 2 player matches that I filmed. Calvin won both.
Round 1
Round 2

The Move controller shows up really well in the videos as a solid color ball. That’s probably why they didn’t need a great camera plugged into the PS3 for it to work (every time a game brought up a video feed of what the camera saw it was grainy, low resolution, and the colors were a bit shifted, but we didn’t have great lighting in the room).

New Cat Toy

I got a package from my mom last week that contained a few things for me and a new cat toy for Talore. It’s basically the same toy as the black ball of fur but with different coloring.

That’s just after I took the toy back from Talore as she snatched it out of my hand while I was untying the string from how they packed it. I think she grabbed it again right after the picture was taken, she was certainly interested in having it.

I actually read the instructions this time (and looked at the pictures, they were more helpful) and hung it up as was intended to be: with the wire hanger clamped above the molding on a door frame.

With it just hanging there Talore wasn’t interested in it at all.

The tissue paper that was used as packing kept her entertained for the rest of the night. It was under the ceiling fan, so it was twitching in the slight breeze, which was all it took to get it attacked repeatedly. By the next day the tissue paper was thoroughly perforated and one of the sheets was nearly torn in half. The roomba took care of the bits that got shredded off.