Category: Streamline

Roomba: The Good, but Imperfect Convenience Bot

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So I’m still searching for many solutions to improve my day-to-day life in a number of ways including housework, but have only encountered a few so far. The Roomba is one of these solutions, although I will say that it is without a doubt an imperfect one. I’m not the cleanest person, but I do take quite a good deal of interest tidying and cleanliness.

The Roomba happened to be my birthday gift in 2017 and I am writing on this post how I’ve liked my gift in this year since I’d received it.

It has its good and its bad points.

I’ll start with the bad points, I know that most bloggers posts will start with the good rather than the bad, but I’ll start with the bad because most of the bad points happened to come as a surprise to me. First, the Roomba isn’t the smartest robot you’ll ever meet, it will do its job decently well and save you some exertion, but it also just wanders aimlessly a good deal of the time and vacuums in the same spots over and over again and ends up running out of battery before it even completes vacuuming a room sometimes (I googled its charging time and it seems to take about 2 hours). Second, it likes getting itself stuck: under furniture like desks or beds and in the middle of chair legs. Third, it’s had its creepy moments where it has turned on all by itself early in the early morning or in the middle of the night and has started vacuuming or starts talking with its little robot voice demanding to be charged (happened to everyone in my family).

Now the good points and some possible tips: the Roomba will save you some effort, it will do its job of cleaning the floors, perhaps not quite as well as a real person will, but it does serve itself as a helper well. The Roomba can vacuum the floors while you take care of other tasks. As for its wandering about, the little machine that comes with it to block it off helps with this problem and also just moving items around the house to block off the area you’d like to have vacuumed helps as well. Overall it can serve as a bit of a time-saver, but I personally use it selectively. There are times that doing the vacuuming myself is my preference and other times just I let the little Roomba do its thing. So overall it’s a good but imperfect machine.

Walmart Pick-Up App

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This will be a relatively short post, but it will just be my little review of the Walmart pick-up app. I’d mentioned it before in the posts I’d made when I was feeling sick about how this app seemed promising when it came to my idea of avoiding too much interaction with other people when it isn’t necessary, not that I want to be antisocial and avoid people, but rather because the more people I’m around the more chances that I also give myself to catch something like a cold. Since those posts I’ve tried the app twice and I like it quite a bit thus far.

I can just pick my “favorite” items that I buy regularly like dog food, printer ink, antibacterial wipes, etc. so it makes things even quicker and easier. Also the app gives you the option of store pick up where an associate takes the items to you to your car or the delivery option where the items are delivered to your house. I always do the pick up one because my family and I avoid having strangers come to our house, we don’t even have pizza delivered just as a safety precaution we take.

For now I’ve gotten over my cold and will hopefully not catch anymore, so far the precautions that I’ve enacted to avoid catching a cold and to get better from a cold have worked decently well. This is just my little review that I definitely recommend giving the app a try if you’re interested or just curious.