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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and Chris discuss Apple’s new CEO, Meta settling legal action over addicting children to their platforms, Amazon and Apple increasing prices, Amazon’s drone delivery, and more.
“News Pick of the Week” with Ralph Bond
When it comes to making cookies three ingredients are the foundation of most recipes – flour, sugar and butter. This week our science and technology reporter Ralph Bond says scientists can now transform plastic from soda and water bottles into an ingredient for cookies you can safely eat.
Read more here.
Ernesto in Miami asked: “What is a good vacuum, self-cleaning that mops, for a house?”
Ernesto, this market has grown significantly in recent years and there are more options than there used to be.
Back in the day you wouldve been looking at a regular Roomba and a Braava. You can still go with iRobot and have a Roomba/Braava pair do the job for you, these days theyre smart enough to work in tandem if the models are both relatively new.
Having said that, you can also look at other brands like the Roborock Qrevo which will automatically dock itself and empty its vacuum container, refill its water and dry its mop pads, and at $600 will likely cost you less than even one modern iRobot cleaning robot, let alone both.
The eufy X10 Pro Omni will also vacuum (and eufy brags about its 8,000pa suction power, so we assume its a lot, probably), it will also clean itself, refill itself, dry its pads with hot air, but it will cost you more at about $900.
If its a concern to you, keep in mind that these devices also record data about your house and their manufacturers sell that data.
Famously, not too long ago an engineer noticed that his iLife A11 vacuum was constantly sending logs to its manufacturer. He blocked it from sending that data on his network but continued to allow it to call home for firmware updates.
After a while it stopped working and when he took it apart and examined it he discovered it was running Android Debug Bridge and it could be accessed without any password, it was also running Google Cartographer to build a detailed map of his house that it was attempting to upload to the manufacturer, and he discovered that after he blocked the vacuum from being able to upload data on his network the manufacturer had turned on a kill switch and that was what had disabled it.
After flipping it himself it started working again.
You have to wonder what the manufacturer is doing with that map that makes not getting that data worth killing the vacuum cleaner remotely.
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