Entries from March 2008 ↓

For your consideration, a series of found photos posted by Flickr user foundphotoslj. Moral of the story, if you take photos of yourself snorting cocaine and drinking root beer, keep track of the photos, or they’ll end up on the internet a quarter of a century later. Personally I think all of this explicit drug use is too inappropriate for the internet. I have taken the liberty of making them more family friendly. Click each photo for the full-sized version. I call the brunette girl! Lance a
Read more…

I Could Have Been A Card Counter Amy and I went to see 21: The Movie today.  It’s based on the phenomenal book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions by Ben Mezrich.  I met Ben and had sushi with him a few months ago - he was really psyched about the upcoming movie and the relaunch of the book as 21.  Ben - congrats! Amy and I had a blast.  One of Amy’s ex-boyfriends had been part of the MIT Blackjack Team (1989-1990) so I’ve heard plenty
Read more…

David Bruemmer and Douglas Few, engineers at the US Department of Energy’s Idaho National Lab in Idaho Falls, have put together an unlikely use for the Wiimote—they’ve hacked the remote so it can control a bomb-disposing, landmine-detecting, machine gun-carrying robot. The Packbot robot, which is manufactured by iRobot in Massachusetts, is 70 cm long, transports itself via inbuilt tracks and is usually controlled via joystick-like device. However, the joystick method is problematic because it
Read more…

Someone posted this YouTube Video showing a warped and partially melted gearbox on what appears to be a defective Roomba 570 robot. No one from iRobot has commented on the video as of yet, but I think they absolutely should. If there is an actual design flaw (and not a manufacturing defect on this one poor soul’s machine) they need to fix it. This video was posted 4 months ago, but it’s unclear if there was any resolution of the issue. -Thorn (I would not for potential buyers of a Roomba that t
Read more…

Clever YouTube spoof of the iconic MacBook Air Commercial, featuring your favorite tiny vacuum that packs the big punch:iRobot should get on this pronto! :} Tags: iRobot, robot, MacBook Air, Roomba, YouTube
Read more…

Here is a HILARIOUS video from an iRobot fan who has a Roomba 560 and a top-of-the-line Scooba 380 cleaning his 3,200 square foot house. The accent is worth the price of admission. My sense if this dude can learn to love iRobot, we are on to something here. One note: Unlike the Roomba, the Scooba does not have dirt sensors, but many people think it must because of its occasional spiral patterns. Tags: iRobot, robot, Roomba, Scooba, YouTube
Read more…

It’s a case of ant versus robot. Think of it as Alien vs. Predator (AVP for fanboys), only on a much, much smaller scale. In one corner is the humble ant, scourge of homes everywhere. In the other corner, our beloved Roomba, which not only mercilessly, repeatedly and automatically on a schedule will sweep and vacuum your floors, but will also eat and kill ants, by the hundreds. In fact, exterminators have come to recommend the device. I swear I’m NOT making this up! From a web post on How to G
Read more…

Filed under: Nintendo Wii We like the way the U.S. military thinks. One of the Wii’s biggest flaws is the painful stretches of downtime between its bigger releases, causing dust to settle on Nintendo’s minuscule console and cobwebs to form on our Wiimotes. What better way to get more mileage out of our neglected gyroscopic peripherals than to use them to blow up actual bombs and landmines? This must have been the thought process of those techno-wizards at iRobot, who have modified their Packb
Read more…

If you are like me, you hate to sweep and are too poor to buy a “Roomba”. This BristleBot project by 11th grade programming wiz, Erin Kennedy, is a pretty simple way of getting some basic cleaning done and watching the bot scuttle around on the kitchen floor is pretty fun too. Bristlebot @ RobotGrrl [Read this article] [Comment on this article]
Read more…

Packbot was designed for US solders to help disposes of bombs, sniffs out explosives and checks for landmines. Some even have machine guns, however they haven’t been needed in combat yet. iRobot, the creators of Packbot, are now using a Wiimote to intuitively control the robot and plan to utilize the iPhone for its onscreen displays. From New Scientist Tech: Quote: Packbot is capable of some autonomous tasks, but is usually remote-controlled by a “joypad” similar to the controller use
Read more…