We got great gifts for our wedding, but hands down, the best (ever!) is A ROBOT.

My mother-in-law got us a robot. Got that? How cool is that!?

And it is not to make her daughter’s life easier, because I am the one who vacuums at home. She did it because it is cool. Heck yeah it is!

So the Roomba is nothing new. It has been around for a decade already. But it still amazes me, from the design to the usefulness. 

The best part is that they (iRobot) encourage you to tinker with it, to hack it. It took them almost 3 years, but they decided to publish documentation in 2005 and to open the interface in 2006. Now there are a ton of funny, useful, and crazy things you can do with it, like turning it into a printer or drawing machine or an air quality controller or telepresence robot or battle robot, playing pac man or music, control it with your phone or with a Kinect, modding it to resemble a Cylon (Battle Star Galactica)…

There is even an instructables page on Roomba hacks.

Nevertheless, for now it is really cool to use it to vacuum while I write this… and to watch our cat stare at it trying to determine if is is friend or foe 😉