Now, shifting gears dramatically, I've always been intrigued by and, while there are many amazingly humanoid designs that can do amazingly clever stuff (for amazingly high prices), the only robots commonly available today are of the g variety, so I figured it was time to take a look at how far our future overlords have come.

Back in the second quarter of this year I moved into a house and the new abode has a main "great" room with a wooden floor. This floor is very smooth and requires constant mopping (I've never had a floor that shows up dust and dirt so easily) and constant vacuuming (we have two large golden retrievers that shed enough hair each week to stuff a decent sized sofa).

To make this onerous maintenance task more tractable I went and purchased an 560 ($350) and an a 330 ($300). The former vacuums the floor while the latter, in theory, washes it.

After a few months of use I can report the Roomba 560 works fantastically well. It can be set to perambulate around in the wee small hours and deals pretty well with long, blond hair. I say "pretty well" because you do have to pick the hair out of the brush mechanism which is why iRobot has the ($319) with two cleaning bins and two sets of brushes.

I'm not sure that the extra gear would make a difference as hair always gets caught in the brush mechanism, eventually causing so much friction the Roomba gives up and switches off. I had to search online to find out what the problem was and it turns out the solution is to remove the brush bearings and fish out the hair that has wrapped around the axle. Way too fiddly.