It turned out to be as bad as I’ve heard. The Roomba completely avoided the rug, and wouldn’t work at all when placed on top of it. Worse, my initial idea of blocking off the edge sensors by sticking pieces of styrofoam inside didn’t work at all.

It turns out there’s actually an easier way to get it working though. Just put a piece of clear packing tape across each of the four edge sensors on the front of the Roomba. The tape diffuses the light enough to trick it into working. On mine, it worked perfectly. Of course, this will prevent the Roomba from avoiding actual drop-offs, so if you have stairs in your house you’ll want to come up with something else.

See more pictures on my Flickr account.

Instapaper is a new web application for saving links to websites you want to read later. It’s simple and fast, and it’s replaced the .webloc files scattered around my desktop.

Iconfactory released version 2.0 of xScope, a toolset for designers that makes it easy to measure or align visual elements on the screen. It’s extremely handy when doing web design.

Tentacle Arm. Who doesn’t want one?

It’s 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing — and the Earth is flat. It’s been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped.

I’m a big fan of both the cold war and science fiction, so in my opinion putting the two together can rarely do wrong.

I’m writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

It’s bad news if sites like Pandora and Last.FM are forced to shut down because of this; I’ve always thought the concept behind them is great for both listeners and artists.