Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Clean Roomba, clean!

I've had an iRobot Roomba 530 for a few months now. Here's a video of it in action in case you've never seen one:



That's not my video, but that's pretty much the same kind that I have.

When I first got it, I sat around and watched it in action for a couple of days to see where it would potentially get stuck and where I'd need to put up the virtual walls. Then the newness of it wore off and I'd just ignore it and let it do its thing.

I really love it a lot and kind of wish I had two of them. One for upstairs and one for downstairs so that I wouldn't have to bring it up and down. At least the Roomba is a lot easier to carry up and down stairs compared to a normal vacuum, especially compared to our old Fantom.

It is great at picking up all of my long hair. Too great, in fact. I end up cleaning the rollers and emptying it after every use - the Roomba manual recommends after every three cleanings, but for our house, it's necessary to clean it more often. After about every three cleanings, I'll spray the filter and collection bin with a can of compressed air just to really get it clean.

It's pretty awesome that it has stair detection. So it's nice not having to worry about it going down the stairs when it's cleaning upstairs. I also love how it docks by itself when the battery is low or when it's done cleaning a room. And I love the sound effects. It'd be kind of neat if I could hack the sound box and load some custom sounds onto it. :P

The best part about having a Roomba is being able to have it vacuum while I go and play Rock Band or just do something else in general.

One kind of annoying thing is if you have a cluttered floor, you have to block it or move all of your stuff first or else the Roomba will scatter your stuff all over the place.

I kind of wish they were smarter about knowing where they've been before though because sometimes it'll just go in zig-zags and end up stuck in one general area.

After having one, I don't think I could ever go back to using an old vacuum again. I'd definitely get another Roomba because they're worth it. Sure, it takes longer to get your vacuuming done, but at least you're not the one spending the time to do the cleaning.

I thought this was a pretty fun idea for a Roomba hack:



Cool! I want a Pacmba!

Monday, August 18, 2008

My new iPhone!! :D

Well, sort of... it's new for me, but it's old.



That's not an actual picture of the one I have, but you get the idea.

I got an unlocked/jailbroken old gen iPhone for my birthday. Whee!! It's been a ton of fun playing around with it. I do have some gripes about it though...

Battery life seems kind of short for me... or maybe I just use it way, way too much, but it seems to get drained pretty fast.

It can't send/receive MMS messages! WTF?! Why have a camera built in if you can't MMS your pics? I guess they figure that's what the e-mail capability is for... but most people I know don't check their e-mail much these days since they're all too busy on MySpace or Facebook or whatever other social website there is that sucks up all your time (I'm more of a Twitter via Twhirl person than anything).

Speaking of the camera, it's a huge piece of crap. Can barely take a good pic in less than bright conditions.

The calculator has no "backspace" key. It's one of the better cell phone calculators I've used since you don't need to hit one button multiple times to pick between +-/*=, but I do miss being able to backspace when I mess up.

You can't use text or e-mail in landscape mode. So it kind of makes it a pain to type on the tiny keyboard... and auto-suggest is anything but helpful... at least there's an app to turn suggest off.

Every time I plug it into my PC via USB it constantly disconnects/reconnects. So annoying!! I think my laptop might have bad USB ports, but none of my other USB devices have that problem at all.

Other than those things, I really like it. It's nice having a keyboard even though it's a virtual touch screen one... it makes text typing and web browsing a lot easier.

I love having the internet at my fingertips. I had it before with Opera Mini on my other phones, but Safari works really well and it's neat that I can have multiple pages open. And, again, the keyboard and touch screen interface make it easier to navigate. It's also great being able to switch between portrait and landscape modes easily while browsing.

It's nice that the weather app is free and works amazingly well. On my old phone, I think it was $7.95 for a weather application that wasn't anywhere near as good.

Maps rocks too! I had it on my W810i and my 3220, but it works so much better on the iPhone and I love that I can see real time traffic since I could never get the sigalert website to work that well on any phone.

Despite some of its shortcomings, I think the iPhone is still a pretty good phone for me. I'd still prefer one with an actual keyboard, but at least it's still better than hitting buttons a bunch of times just to type one letter.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Sorry for the lack of updates

This post isn't about anything in my home, but I've got some new pictures to share, which I'll post at a different time. But not this month!

This month I'm taking part in the Thirty Day Challenge. So it's sort of related to the whole "home" theme since I've been doing it from home. The challenge is 30 (actually 31) full days of tutorials on how to build your own business from the ground up. The best thing about it is that it's completely FREE! You won't have to pay a single penny to learn. They have a fantastic community that'll help you along the way in case you get stuck.

The 30DC is officially "live" during the month of August, but all the training videos will be available well after this month is over.

Anyway, I've got to get back to the challenge now, but if you're even curious about internet marketing at all, the 30DC is an excellent place to get your start! Hopefully I'll see you around the forums over at the TDC!