InfoHole

After seeing an Engadget article about a Roomba Pacman hack I was fascinated by the idea of a robot vacuum.

Being skeptical; I searched for reviews and the Wikipedia page for the Roomba for more information about how well these things actually clean. I found lots of praising videos on youtube , which combined with the information on Wikipedia that the 560 is the fifth generation of Roomba convinced me to order one.

A few things to note about the Roomba 560:

• has IR sensors in the front bumper which allow it to slow down before bumping into any furniture.
• carefully navigates around the top of stairs without falling down them (not shown in the video).
• has an on-board scheduler and auto docking system so that it can clean and then recharge itself on a programmed basis without any interaction.
• will clean for about 60 minutes each cleaning cycle.
• using the included lighthouses you can block it from entering a certain room, or set it to clean one room fully before automatically going to clean the next room.

My Roomba arrived this morning. Below is a video of a quick run around my living room and entrance hall, at the end of the video I cut the cleaning cycle short to demonstrate the auto docking system.

You may also download a high quality .wmv version of the video here (147MB).

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gordonrp technology

The Red Alert side of the Command and Conquer series has previously provided a naval game play aspect that other games in the series haven’t. RA3 promises to expand upon the naval aspect of the game as well as bring back favourite units including the Tesla troopers.

In the video we see that the traditional ore gathering method has been replaced with Ore nodes which harvesters simply dock with to gather ore and then return with it to the base. Many amphibious units and abilities have been added, including the Bullfrog amphibious troop transport and the ability to deploy the Soviet MCV either on land or in the water.

Red Alert 3 is due to be released later this year. Hopefully it will take advantage of multicore technology unlike Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars which would choke up during massive battles on a quad core machine with 4 gigs of ram and a 768mb gfx card.

Check out the video below or download the high resolution 400MB .mov version here (right click, save target as).

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gordonrp gaming

This one is for the TF2 players out there, this animation by Cacti is hilarious (note you need to play Team Fortress 2 to understand what is going on here).

gordonrp gaming animation, cacti, dinner, tf2