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Hacking Major Appliances For Fun And Profit?

Posted by Cliff on from the workshop-of-the-budding-inventor dept.

waynelorentz asks: "I've finally reached a point in my life where my time with my family is more important than my money, so I've given in to my wife's persistent urging and bought a Roomba robotic vacuum. While I'm waiting for delivery, I googled for additional information about it and found there is a fledgling community of Roomba hackers outfitting their Roombas with cameras and other equipment. So, it got me wondering - what other appliances have Slashdot-types hacked? I remember when the Internet was young, there were coffee and soda machines you could ping, and the fabled Jellyjet toaster. Anything else?"

1 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Re:When the internet was young.. by danielsfca2 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Oh, come on. Does that type of inaccuracy really degrade the meaning of the post?

    It's people like you who'd kill someone for saying "PIN number."

    Sorry, the popular term for a PIN is "PIN number" because a pin is a small tack-like fastener. And the popular term for the WWW is "the Internet" because "world wide web" is too long to write out, "WWW" is nine syllables, and a "web" is where spiders live. Neither term is correct, and that fact makes no difference in either case.

    The moral of the story: "World Wide Web" is a stupid term and nobody uses if for that precise reason. Even its acronym is the longest three-letter acronym (in syllables) you could possibly have.

    Oh, and "Worldwide" is one word. So it be "ww," not "www."