Are you looking for a fun way to spruce up the housekeeping chores in your home, especially so when you own the iRobot vacuum cleaner? At the Super iam8bit art exhibition, it seems that the iRobot vacuum cleaner has received an 8-bit makeover that boasted hundreds of works inspired by retro video games. Artist Kelice Penney decided to come up with such colorful covers that were inspired by different characters from the Nintendo world, including the much stomped upon Goomba from Super Mario Bros., the rock-spitting Octorok from The Legend of Zelda, and of course, the classic weaponized turtle shells from Super Mario Kart.
It does seem as though the iRobot vacuum cleaner’s erratic movements suit the aimless game characters, but it is rather unfortunate that such vacuum cleaner covers are not going to enter mass production, so if you want one of these puppies, you will have to just find out how to make one of these (or more) for yourself.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Roomba 650 and Looj 300 cleaning robots launched by iRobot, Cocorobo; Sharp’s Talking Vacuum Cleaner Has Different Moods,
For those of us who are voracious readers, how has the eReader market changed your reading habits? Have you actually started to migrate to the digital platform, or have you remained a firm believer in the traditional paperback and hardcover? Well, if you want to give the eReader platform a go, you might want to cozy up with what PocketBook has in mind – with the announcement of an 8-inch eReader which will come with a front-lit color E Ink display. The resolution count on this display is nothing much to shout about, especially when you consider the paltry 600 x 800 pixel display that does 4,096 colors at best. To see it debut in June next year would surely not make any of the other tablet manufacturers quake in their boots, as this technology is obsolete even as we speak, although one needs to bear in mind that this is a dedicated eReader and not a tablet that does e-books.
With the introduction of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the Android operating system has finally received gapless playback for music files as part of its core operations. Technically speaking, this was true, but the stock Google Music app still did not offer gapless playback support, while other independent audio players only supported gapless when they played .ogg files, with other apps relying on their own software so that gapless playback is achieved. Good thing Google Music has finally been updated so that the gapless playback feature has been thrown into the mix, something that quite a fair number of folks have been waiting for all this while.
If you are an Xbox Live member who has invested the better part of your last 10 years (or more) with the service, then you will be pleased to hear that Microsoft will be rewarding you with special edition Xbox 360 consoles as well as controllers, sporting a special logo on the side of the console, in addition to a nice aesthetic touch on the disc tray door that is emblazoned with a special “XBL10″ plate. This particularly generous gift is meant to celebrate 10 years of Xbox Live that debuted in October 2002, so you can “wear” this as your badge of honor the next time other gamers drop by your place.
Assuming you have been holding out for a spanking new smartphone all this while, but have yet to take the plunge simply because you believe that there is a better deal right up the horizon, here we are with a leak on an upcoming T-Mobile sale that will involve none other than Samsung devices. T-Mobile did confirm many of the details of this particular sale when they made announcements late yesterday, including the number of handsets that will be available without having you to fork out a single cent, other than to sign on for a contract. If you have been hankering after a juicy Samsung Galaxy S3 all this while, then you will be pleased to know that this offer will even extend to this smartphone.
Yes, we did mention quite recently that Android 4.2 Jelly Bean has started to be released for the GSM variant of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and this can only mean two things – both Verizon and Sprint versions of the Galaxy Nexus would have skipped out on this particular update. Well, for folks who have been enjoying the Takju (US-based and unlocked) version of the Galaxy S3, it seems that there is one particular snag that might not make you too happy. We are referring to folks who tend to make use of Google Voice, as it seems that after applying the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean update, using the app to send a text via Google Voice does not work, where we will be greeted by a force close message instead the moment you start to type the recipient’s name.
If you are looking forward to StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, then here is a wee bit of good news for you – Blizzard has announced it to be ready for play when March 12, 2013 rolls around. This game has been talked about for quite some time already, and it seems that the beta has started just a couple of months ago, and it is nice to see the good folks over at Blizzard finally come to a consensus, knowing just when they are going to release the game for the masses. The European Blizzard store has listed the game as “available for play” starting from March 12, 2013 onwards, and this particular expansion to StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will arrive in a couple of flavors – standard and digital deluxe, burning the price of a full retail game in your respective pockets or digital bank accounts.
If you happen to own the Sony PS3 and have flashed a custom firmware on this console, then you ought to take note that there is a very real possibility of Sony’s banhammer come swinging your way. Sony did issue a warning to the masses, touting that they have started to ban accounts and console IDs which were connected to modding activities. Not only that, customized firmware users as well as folks who run select applications which are capable of bypassing certain PSN authentication checks such as “F*ckPSN” have already begun to receive the proverbial boot, so to speak, with a bunch of users reporting the following message identified by the error code 8002A231 upon PSN sign-in: