Tondon Tidies Up While Observing

Posted by Sheila Franklin Categories: Household, Misc. Tech, Science

Tondon has been “hired” by a 14 floor Tokyo apartment complex as its maintenance man. Built by Subaru (Fuji Heavy Industries) and Sumitomo, the bot uses an optical communication system to run the building’s elevators and has been designed to sweep, clean, and scrub dirty surfaces both indoors and outside. The next generation of the RFS1 robot, he is also waterproof and features a design to match the Bali-themed decor. Tondon, named after a legenday Balinese snake god, features 4 video cameras and a hard disk so that humans can keep an eye on the little guy while he is also being utilized for surveillance. We call any rent-a-cop who can clean up at the same time deserves Japan’s 2006 Robot of the Year Award bestowed upon him.

Read More | Pink Tentacle

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Halo 3 Beta To See Maintenance And Playlist Update

Posted by Chris Pereira Categories: Bungie, First Person Shooters, Xbox 360, Xbox Live

This week will showcase the first substantial change to Halo 3’s matchmaking playlist. Team Training is going bye-bye in order to be replaced by Big Team Training – 6v6 games of the objective and slayer variety on High Ground and Valhalla. Luke Smith also stated on Bungie.net, “… we’ve made some slight tweaks to the Team Skirmish playlist that should add greater variety in the opponents you’ll face.” If only that meant no slayer games in the skirmish playlist. Slayer is not an objective game! Go play Team Slayer if that’s what tickles your fancy.

In unrelated news, later today (May 23), some sort of proverbial flip will be temporarily switched between the hours of 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. PST. It supposedly should have no impact, but Frankie warns of what may potentially happen:

Should your game encounter a rare crash, your Xbox 360 will give you an alert screen, explaining that it’s uploading data to Bungie servers. We actually need this data, and we need your cooperation too. Although you probably won’t see that screen, if you do, let it finish uploading the data. It may take some time – upwards of 10-20 seconds and perhaps longer. So we beg your patience. When the process has completed correctly this is the message you’ll see, “File upload complete. Visit http://www.bungie.net/forums/halo3beta for more information (safe to reboot).“

Read More | Bungie.net

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