Dyson Detect V15

V15

Tired of constantly walking on breadcrumbs, the old cabled Hoover massively noisy and underpowered, I took yet another middle-class/middle-age plunge and bought a Dyson.

I saw ads for an "optic" Dyson, with a green light emanating parallel to the floor. This made sense to me as I'd just been experimenting with a LED torch in the dark for hunting tiny items on the floor.

These portable Dysons are sold as bundles, there are only few main motor unit variants, but they come packaged with different set of nozzles. This one was V15 Detect "fluffy", aimed more for pet households which sounded good enough for tackling strands of long hair. 

Extra nozzles, the main one not included

The package was not too bulky to carry in public transport. Opening the box, I encountered an enormous pile of cardboard for all the sub-parts, and very minimal instructions. 

The plastic and carbon-fiber appearance wasn't very convincing at first, but the parts fit together with a nice and satisfying lock. It does feel slightly flimsy, with the long pipe and a nozzle attached, but not horribly so.

I don't like the Dyson looks and color choices all that much, but at least as it turned out, the actual design (i.e. how it works) is rather well thought out.

The head with the rolling furry bar and green "laser" light is effective. The nozzle adapts and turns along multiple axes, making operation quite gentle and flexible. The light is not a gimmick, you can easily spot hair and dirt concentrations.

The main nozzle layzoer experience

It's almost addictive. After having this experience, the other nozzles don't seem to do anything. Perhaps it could be considered "gamification", but in a good way, it gives a sense of purpose to see the dirt at first and then feel the achievement of the the dirt and hair going away.

When there was more hair, they would circle around the yellow/black bar. These were easy to remove, though.

As usual, the floors and surfaces should be in basic good condition. Porridge particles stuck on the floor won't be removed by the vacuum just like that, and the light will forever highlight them.

The bagless operation was one draw, but this is common even in many crappy hand-held vacuums, so how does the Dyson fare? Well, the trash ejector handle works nicely, so mostly you just eject to get the dirt out of the compartment.

Gun and the gun-like ejector-rod

Hair proved to be a little more tricky, though. The end of the compartment could get a little bogged with a "donut" of hair, but the entire container is also quite easy to remove.

So, on the whole this is all thought out very well.

I sung the praises of the optic "fluffy" head, the rest of the heads were not as impressive. There's this corkscrew thingy that's supposed to take out pet hair out of sofas and beds, but couldn't confirm if it's any more effective – it doesn't have a light.

As the nozzle carries a motor, it's heavy and the sound is crunchy. It's possible you really need to have cats and dogs to appreciate this one better.

The corkscrew thingy

Talking of sound, the Dyson does make some noise but it's far less whiny than the old Hoover or a Bosch hand-held I already recycled. The quality of the sound needs to be taken into consideration, too. Again something to check later, if old age changes things on this front.

The Dyson Detect is portable, yet fortunately larger than the smallest of portable vacuums, so I don't think I need two separate items. The trigger needs to be pulled all the time, with no lock function, and this can be considered a little minus. The other thing is the stiff hose is not perfectly suited for vacuuming from under sofas, so you need to be a little more nimble to reach those places.

The display that tells how many microbes, small particles and crap have been accumulated is probably just a statistical approximation based on how far the head has rolled, but why not.

ECO-mode was fine for standard floor-cleaning, this likely lasts about an hour or even more. AUTO might be better when using the various heads and trying to get into more difficult places. I dared not really use the BOOST for more than a few seconds, as it might deplete the battery under 10 minutes.

The battery is not super powerful and takes a few hours to load. I believe the idea is that cleaning doesn't take a huge amount of time and there's ample time to recharge in-between. At first I'd find all kinds of excuses to use the vacuum, so the battery also depleted faster. A plastic wall-dock was also included.

Altparty 2024

The ceremony's about to begin

I probably shouldn't make a party report before the party has ended, but hey, it's alt, it's different!

I confess I added Alt Party (11-13 October 2024, Helsinki, Museum of Technology) to the year's party roster because I just couldn't avoid going to a demoparty so near. No hotels, no badly slept nights, no stressing about the contents of my bag.

Not been to Alt Party before, there was considerable "party shyness" on my part. Even if I had some more time on my hands lately, not so sure if I would have dared to contribute to a demoparty I know so little of, and that prides on doing things differently.

Perhaps many others felt like it too, as the number of entries in compos were rather low, not in proportion to the amount of people I saw in the audience.

AI music compo starting

I was impressed by the music compos, because in some parties it becomes something of a chore. But here the low number of entries was beneficial, so the obscure music compo stayed fresh and not tiresome. 

At some point of AI music compo I could have started wondering why I need to listen to this, but then it was already over. I feel we also witnessed some reverse cheating, as at least one of the songs didn't sound like it was only a result of a prompt (and no prompt was given).

Alt Party might be a little flexible in how the compo rules are interpreted, but it may also be they needed take "all in" to have at least a number of works.

Ultimately the demo compos were fine, and the "dynamic demo" is an interesting category, having to prove that your demo has a realtime element in that it plays a little differently each time – it's not an animation or a music video. I expected having to view the demo twice would be boring, but it was in fact quite intriguing. Certainly some succeeded better in making a re-watchable demo than others.

What was dubbed as the "Temple" for this weekend

The milieu of the Museum of Technology, and the exhibition itself is worth visiting. The party organizers had gone through the effort of integrating demo culture in some of the permanent exhibition, and I felt this was a good idea. 

Esko

I'd not been there before so overall the weekend was of high value. The normal exhibition features things like old TVs, radios, computers, industrial control equipment, but also vehicles and tools. This is a very suitable environment for a demoparty.

They put a färjan in a färjan

Skrolli magazine was again present, with a Commodore 128 running Super Mario, Spike on a Vectrex, and some obscure Japanese(?) computer I already forgot. This time did 292 with the "speden spelit" speed challenge, trying a two hand approach. Apparently someone had broken 400+.

For me, the most interesting single piece of hardware on display was the Canon Cat, in working condition and you could type and try the LEAP-based text navigation. A couple of Forth-based entries were present in the 256-byte compos. I forgot who brought the Cat there, but will add that information later.

Canon Cat

Prof. Nick Montfort gave a remote presentation, going through the generative text art angle he has been exploring, mostly in the context of WWW and in the frame of collaboration. Although the "10 PRINT" work is legendary and there was ample contextualization, the presentation might have rubbed a part of the audience wrong way.

At least one person opined it was "shit" (!) and comparable to BASIC hobbyist stuff of early 1980s. The latter evaluation is perhaps not wrong, as Montfort can just as well align himself with the demoscene, Brian Eno or David Ahl's book of Basic Computer Games.

Montfort has done a consistent body of work at the uneasy intersection of demoscene, computer history, art and the study of language. Perhaps Montfort doesn't even need the demoscene, but I feel the demoscene needs people like Montfort.

Nick Montfort

It may be that going to a demoparty so near removes some of the excitement of visiting an "other" place. It became rather easy to just jump in at a convenient point of the schedule, and then leave when it looked like nothing was happening any more.

As often happens with these things, "if only I had known" I could have cobbled together some filler entries. Maybe I will be wiser the next time, if there's another Alt Party.

River Vantaa