Man renowned for over promising over promises. More at 10.

This coming down the line finally got me off of my incredibly lazy ass and forced me to switch a few months ago. It was easy, and I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner.

Titan mode was my absolute favourite and nothing since has filled that gap

The BPI-WIFI6 is currently half price and good value for what you get imo. Not sure on true performance yet as I need to rewire my house but it’s way more reliable than any of my other routers at least.

That would also explain why Aldi in the UK also has these while other stores don’t.

From the UK. I’ve never seen matte spelled as matt. CA, UK and AU are generally pretty close with spelling, whereas the US is usually off doing its own thing. It’s a similar thing to blonde and blond.

Oh no so am I, but I’ve seen enough of these stories in the past to know it’s a common occurrence ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t think it was intended to be sensationalist, just a pun with the words. It’s one of those non-issue stories that are sort of tongue in cheek so the writer has a bit of fun.

I think most outlets have pretty much given up writing anything serious about Apple based alarm issues as they’ve been a thing for years (whether it’s user error or otherwise), hence why this one in particular is just quoting people on TikTok of all places.

They did. Cheap and reliable

Is that Jon from Auto Shenanigans?

I definitely find it harder to think of words when I’m talking to people and it seems like something that came about after COVID. Also, I have a much shorter fuse now and seem to get annoyed almost randomly.

It’s not hugely complicated but instead of me having to ask an assistant everything, I let HA tell me everything through various speakers based on the state of sensors around the house at appropriate times.

When I wake up in the morning and go downstairs it’ll detect my presence, and if it’s a work day it’ll inform me of weather, traffic (as well as a suggested time to aim to leave by) and a basic schedule of my day, then it’ll stick some music on.

As it gets closer to the time to leave it’ll chime up again telling me I have x minutes left to get ready, but only if it detects me in a room so I definitely hear it.

All that is controlled by HA automatically and isn’t something you’d ever get from any of the big players, because they don’t have the sort of information and stats that HA does.

If I set a timer in Google Home then it’ll become available to HA through it’s integration and I’ll pop up a timer bar on some of the displays I have dotted around so I can track the time left without having to talk to the assistant, and as any timer gets close to expiring then it’ll even show a message on the TV saying which timer is about to activate.

There’s a few smaller things that just make life a bit easier too, like turning speakers off in rooms that aren’t active, or integrating my dumb doorbell into HA using an RF receiver so I can automate doorbell presses.

Home Assistant is currently working hard on assistants. I’ve not used it much yet but their text to speech offers so much more than any of the larger companies in just customisation alone, plus it all runs locally.

I have Google Home devices all over but they currently mostly act as a dumb speaker and I just get HA to do all of the heavy lifting. The most Google does is set timers and even that just goes into HA for most of the processing.

You’re fine unless something happens to PayPal.

Yeah but why do one simple task that covers your entire network when you can do more work on each individual device?

I do this too, but it is addressed in the post and is a problem which has caught me out on occasion:

A surprising amount of forms simply disallow the + symbol and consider anything containing it to be an invalid email. Worse is when a form allows it, but the subsequent login form doesn't and then you're immediately locked out of an account you just created.

The hyphen idea is better, but I'm not sure whether that's too much of a common symbol and would be too restrictive to disallow in a username for this service, and if it's not disallowed then I wonder about the security implications that could cause.

That entirely depends on how well code reviews are managed. I’ve worked with a “Martin” in the past and we did manage to move to a system where 2+ reviewers were required but it simply got to the point where no one would “rock the boat” because he’d simply brush off every comment made, or call you up to have a long rambling conversation as to why he made the decision he did and how you’re wrong and he’s right, and given his position in the company you couldn’t complain to anyone else about him because he was more valuable to them than you were.

We tried to put more and more blockers in front of him to attempt to encourage him to play nicer, but these were only temporary solutions to the bigger problem of “Martin” himself.