I now have a nabaztag. It’s an ambient device in the form of a wifi, talking rabbit (more details). If you like you can send me a message.

That form is possible because there’s a documented API for sending messages to Nabaztag devices; the difficulty is that the API is centralised on the manufacturers’ website, so if they go down (as they did over Christmas – unable to cope with all the new rabbits), then my rabbit can’t do anything at all – as it is, commands can take several minutes to make the long and arduous journey from my web browser to my rabbit.

What I really want to be able to do is send it messages and instructions directly from my computer (it is, after all, in the same room and connected to the same wifi router). The closest thing seems to be NabazLab, a .NET app which can act either as a proxy for normal Nabaztag functionality or which you can use to send it your own messages, however I’ve had no luck using this so far. Frankly it’s hard enough to set up, needing at least one other wifi device and even if you’re not using Violet’s servers you must have an internet connection so that it can ping their servers (of course, this should be reasonably easy to spoof using the information on ed-vero.com but for the moment it’s a necessity).

One of the biggest problems I have with NabazLab is that I don’t really understand the website: the links don’t match up to text and there isn’t a nice “Getting Started” guide, which would be mega-useful. I realise that English isn’t their first language, but this isn’t a problem – it’s the fact that their dev page only displays a tiny amount of information at once, using CSS to hide the other 90%, making navigation and bookmarking almost impossible.

Anyway, I only get to play with it for a few hours in the evening at the moment, I might experiment with taking it in to work and having it read out our CruiseControl status.