Tag: yourself
How to explore the Westminster Accounts for yourself – a guide to our interactive tool
100% essential Skyrim mod lets you see yourself in the inventory menu
Gross Yourself Out Completely With This Very Potent Horror Short
Bug Bites starts off innocuous enough, if a little disturbing: a young woman with an alarming amount of bug bites decides to call an exterminator to make sure she doesn’t have a dreaded bed bug infestation. From there, the short dives into some extreme body horror… then injects an unexpected tidal wave of surreal…
Zoom’s avatars now let you appear as a cartoon version of yourself
Zoom announced human avatars today for its video meeting app. Like Apple’s Memoji or the humanoid cartoons Mark Zuckerberg wants us to use in the metaverse, the customizable virtual characters mirror your movements and facial expressions. The idea is to inject zaniness into less formal meetings, letting you be present without appearing on camera as your (flesh and blood) self.
The human avatars follow Zoom’s release of animal avatars earlier this year. The company suggests using avatars when you are eating, don’t want to use a static profile pic or feel like livening up the mundane. The feature is available to beta testers, which requires a paid account. Zoom adds that it will roll out new facial features, hairstyles and customization options as the beta progresses.
Zoom also announced templates as shortcuts for various meeting types. You can now create your own templates or choose from three out-of-the-box setups. These include large meetings (automated captions and automatically recorded content), seminars (tighter crowd-control settings with screen-sharing disabled) and K-12 (enabled polls and quizzes while limiting distracting features). You can learn how to create templates by following these instructions.
The company is also soon adding threaded messages and reactions for in-meeting chats. Similar to what you’d see in Slack, Facebook Messenger or iMessage, message threads make it easier to figure out which message someone is replying to. Similarly, emoji reactions help clean up the chat and pair the response with the original message. Zoom says threads and emoji reactions will arrive later this month.
Finally, Zoom is adding Q&A in meetings. The idea is for meeting hosts to stay organized, confining group questions to one area of the app. The Q&A pop-out lets meeting hosts view, answer or dismiss queries. They can also choose whether participants can view all questions or only answered ones. However, hosts will need a premium plan to use the feature.
TaxWatch: Brace yourself: Your tax refund could shrink in 2023. Here’s why.
Have Yourself a Very X-Files New Year, With a Side of Zombies
The X-Files generally didn’t give much shine to holidays—aside from a few notable exceptions, like the season-six classic “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas.” But the looming arrival of the year 2000 was too juicy for a show that reveled in conspiracy theories to ignore, and thus the aptly titled “Millennium” popped up…
Coming Soon: More Ways to Be Yourself in the Metaverse
Have a pet? Don’t do all the cleaning yourself. Here are the best robot vacuums for pet hair.
Best Black Friday robot vacuum deals
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iRobot Roomba i1+ Wi-Fi Self-Empty Robot Vacuum
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$288.00(List Price $529.99)
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iRobot Roomba j7 Wi-Fi Robot Vacuum Cleaner
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$399.00(List Price $599.99)
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iRobot Roomba 692 Robot Vacuum
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$174.00(List Price $299.99)
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iRobot Roomba j7+ (7550) Pet Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum
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$599.00(List Price $799.99)
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iRobot Roomba i3 Evo Wi-Fi Robot Vacuum
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$279.99(List Price $349.99)
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iRobot Roomba i3+ Evo With Self-Emptying Base
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$398.00 -
Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni Robot Vacuum and Mop
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$999.99(List Price $1,549.99)
Pets can be mediocre roommates.
Their presence makes your life better — but significantly messier, too. And unlike in a passive-aggressive roommate group chat, you can’t tell a pet to clean up after itself.
Whether they have a favorite floor spot for rolling around, or prefer to spread the love (fur) around the house, it’s impossible to follow their trail with a vacuum and lint roller. Sending a robot vacuum to tidy your floors on a regular schedule can cut you a major break on your added chores as a pet parent.
What makes a robot vacuum good for pet hair?
You’re the human here, but the types of floors in your home will probably be a big part of your decision.
Virtually all robots can master hardwood floors (as well as laminate, tile, and vinyl). Smooth surfaces don’t take a spiderweb-like grasp on pet hair like carpets do. The hair may blow across and collect in furballs, but it’s relatively easy for any robot vacuum to grab with a rotating brush, push it into the line of suction, and scoop it up. If your home’s corners are particularly popular hangout spots for furballs, a D-shaped robot vacuum can detail those walls and 90-degree angles better than a circular vac.
A living space that contains a combination of hard floors and carpet or rugs will prove to be a little more challenging. The robot vacuum you choose should be able to detect different floor types and be able to hoist itself over the spots where they switch over without getting tripped up. Most vacs on the market today are smart enough to enact some sort of boost mode to work a little harder on carpets, though suction power itself plays a bigger role when it comes to extracting pet hair from carpeting. Veer toward a model harnessing with between 2,000 and 3,000 Pa of suction.
Stronger vacuums collect more debris in every trip, and households dealing with shedding probably require more trips to tackle the extra debris. Naturally, these dust bins will fill up faster than a vacuum cleaning a petless household once a week. A self-emptying vacuum alleviates the need for you to empty the dustbin on the daily, letting you off the hook for one to three months at a time.
Pet owners with allergies will appreciate the streamlined emptying process for another reason. The automatic emptying process involves sucking the contents of the dust bin directly from the vacuum into the canister on the loading dock, containing the blast of dust that typically clouds the trash can during manual dumping. Allergy sufferers can also look for vac models that house HEPA filters.
Do robot vacuums scare pets?
No one *wants* their robot vacuum to be loud, but noise level should be a heavier consideration in households with skittish pets. Some models are louder than others, depending on the strength of the motor or, on more high-tech models, a noise-dampening design. If your pet reacts well (or doesn’t react) to the dishwasher, a hairdryer, or a blender, the low roar of most robot vacuums should be tolerable.
A robot vac that reliably follows boundaries might be helpful to avoid knocking into a water bowl or slurping up corners of a dog bed. Most low-end vacs come with adhesive magnetic strips that create a physical border around danger zones, but virtual no-go zones on nicer vacs that utilize laser mapping are far more reliable — and one less thing to chew on.
The noise level on automatic emptying stations is a different story. They sound like a plane taking off. However, the deafening whoosh only lasts for about 15 seconds, and the ability for a dock to hold months’ worth of debris is crucial for homes where a robot vacuum could fill its on-board dustbin after cleaning a few rooms filled with pet hair.
Let’s get down to our list of best robot vacuums for pet hair in 2023:
Nab yourself a Gingerbread Bastion skin for just one Overwatch coin
As you might have noticed, there’s just a few days until Christmas lands on us all like an overladen sleigh pulled by some very exhausted and confused reindeers. Overwatch 2’s marking the occasion by turning robotic damage hero Bastion into a gingerbread automaton with a new legendary skin. Seeing as it’s the holidays, Blizzard are charging just a single Overwatch Coin for the skin, which is way, way less than the thousands that legendaries usually cost. Bastion’s fresh look is also quite a bit more involved than some of the other legendary efforts Blizzard’s dreamt up for Overwatch 2 so far.