Tag: Technology

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Oh goody! Google is at it again!

I knew it was coming. I just didn’t think they’d move this quickly.

According to an email today, and it was confirmed in the news Google is discontinuing support for Gen 1 and Gen 2 Nest Thermostats. 

At first thought, I was like no big deal, then I read further into the email and found that not only are they no longer updating the internal software, they’e also going to be killing remote access to the unit.

Basically, my smart machine is going to get just as dumb as a regular thermostat but will retain scheduling ability. 

This sucks!

No more ability to control the house temperature if I’m away. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s really nice in winter to have the house in the 50s when I’m away, then tell Siri to warm the house up to something comfortable before I actually get there.

If you’ve got a regular schedule that can be programmed. If you don’t have a regular schedule then you come home to a freezing house and crank the thermostat to warm it up quick.

With either the preprogrammed schedule, or the remote commands, the temp is increased in shorter bursts over a longer time. It’s a bit more balanced and efficient.

I knew Google was going to do this. To their credit they have discounted their newest version of the machine but I’m not interested. Yes It’s a nice machine, expensive, but given how Google is behaving and that they want me to have a full Google account instead of the old Nest account I’m not inclined to get deeper into Google.

What I want is an ecosystem that just talks to HomeKit and does so locally between devices inside the house. I don’t really like even low level stuff like house controls bouncing all over the internet. I was willing to put up with HomeKit, and Google so long as the Thermostat and the Protect smoke were providing what I believe to be a reasonable level of integrated protection.

The night of the fire, the A/C did kick on and distributed the smoke throughout the house. It also fanned the fire. 

But with Google’s recent moves,

I’ve been looking at alternatives.

Regardless of my remaining in this house or not, it’s a good point to disconnect from Google. My Thermostat will get dumb in October. I’ve got until then to make some kind of decision.

Trouble is, most of the smart thermostats want an account, and in some cases they want you to have a paid monthly or yearly subscription. 

That makes me rethink the whole smart thermostat idea. The Nest thermostat saved me money over the years, and while it was under Nest’s control didn’t cost anything beyond the cost of the unit and giving some of my information to Nest via their app.

This new situation may cancel the savings of any potential unit. It might also be a sign that for me, going forward simplicity is the best path.

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Always in the middle of the night!!!!

The second, of three, Nest Protect smoke alarms reached end of life.

I swear, I think smoke detectors in general are more of a pain in the ass than they’re worth. (I say that as someone who had a house burn down!)

I also have come to believe that the damn things are somehow built to sense sundown, then wait 6 hours before starting their bitching about low battery or malfunctions.

That’s only when they’re not going off because someone took a hot shower, or a bit of toast got overdone.

There’s nothing quite like being naked on a stepladder in the middle of the night trying to get one of these nuisance devices off the damn ceiling to shut it the hell up!

The modern machines all seem to have CO detectors in them and it’s the damn CO detector that goes out first. But rather than being able to tell the stupid machine, “Yes I get it, the CO detector is malfunctioning. There is another unit that is still functioning so stop chirping every 60 seconds and let us get some sleep…”

Nope! It’s gotta be taken care of right then. Like you’re going to be able to run out to the local hardware store at 2am and buy a replacement.

The Protects were literally the best of these nuisance machines. I’ve had these for 10 years and they have legitimately reached end of life. I’m not too annoyed, other than now I have to replace them with whatever bullshit machines are on the market today.

That’s thanks to Google’s masterful decision to keep fucking over Nest, (who they purchased a while back and have systematically destroyed.) Trust me, however much you hate Google, (and there are numerous reasons beside what they did to Nest,) it’s not enough.

I’ve hated smoke alarms since at least 1982. I had one in an apartment that pissed me off so much, (again at 3 am), that I leapt off the floor, snatched the damn thing from the ceiling and disemboweled it on the spot.

The Protect units were purchased after, at random, any one, of the three units installed in my house by the builder, started going off at random intervals for absolutely no reason. Always sometime between 1 and 3 am. (Not good if you’ve actually been in a house fire and are perhaps a little twitchy about fire!)

Those stupid machines were so bad we couldn’t use the stove in the kitchen without having the sliding doors and all the windows in the house open. Even then, it was 50/50 that they’d start that horrific screeching, reporting a fire that didn’t exist. This was only slightly more annoying than the smoke detectors in the previous house that burned, never raising a peep, even as they were consumed by fire.

But take too hot a shower… Then once again there you were, naked, throwing doors and windows open to make the damn things shut the hell up!

The Protects, solved most of those problems. I’m not looking forward to going back to the shitty overly sensitive machines.

Last night, at least, I knew what was going on. Even half asleep, I got the malfunctioning Protect off the ceiling. Unplugged it from the AC connection, pulled the backup batteries, and left the mess on the kitchen counter.

I don’t remember pulling the batteries, I was on auto pilot. I don’t even remember going back to bed.

From this you might infer that I’m very grumpy when my sleep is disturbed. That is true to a point.

If the source of the disturbance is the dog wanting out at some ungodly hour because he’s not feeling well. I’m totally fine with it. If it’s a child or even an adult that’s waking me for a legitimate reason, I’m not grumpy at all.

But a machine? (Including alarm clocks,) oh hell no! I loose my damn mind. This is especially true of a machine that’s decided to tell me about a low battery every 60 seconds at 4am.

Now my challenge is to strike a balance between price and minimal false alarms in my replacement smoke detectors. Truthfully, if the originally installed units weren’t wired into the house power, (and therefore there weren’t open holes in the ceiling where they were installed,) I’d be removing the mounting rings, spackling the screw holes over, and calling it a day.

What ever POS devices I choose, I take comfort in the high probability that I will not be living with the decision for long.

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That was interesting

We just had an earthquake.

That in and of itself isn’t surprising. What was surprising is that I got an emergency alert on my phone and watch about it. A full 10 seconds before I felt it.

Pretty slick!

The dog didn’t like it at all!

He’s wandering around trying to figure out who was stomping around in his yard.

Clearly, peeing on every fence post will scare the evil stomping giant away.

It was a pretty strong roller. The ground kept moving for a few seconds after the initial rolling motion subsided.

Hmm. There’s been a whole string of quakes in the last 1/2 hour in Julian. Looks like the strongest was a 5.2.

That’s a heck of a distance from me. What’s weird about it, it that the rolling I felt seems to have come from the opposite direction.

It’s nice to see the alert system working.

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Apple has announced their WWDC dates

Apple WWDC25 Event Logo.I expect they’ll talk about IOS19.

Okay… 

I like a lot of the features in IOS18, I’d probably be a little more excited about IOS19 if Apple had finished implementing all the features promised in IOS18.

They’ve got until June I suppose, then the rumor mills and all the publications will switch to IOS19 stuff and we’ll see IOS18 finally completed in August or September.

Just in time to have IOS19 released in October. 

It’s not just Siri or Apple intelligence. It’s the entire ecosystem that I’m getting a little annoyed with.

There are some things about Apple’s move toward “Intelligence” that I’m not thrilled about.

Chief among these is Apple’s replacement of words while I’m texting or writing. I’d like to be able to tone down the replacement. I’d also like to have the ability in some cases for word replacement to go back to just underlining incorrect or questionable words.

The automatic replacement is annoying in some cases. If I’m writing something and moving fast I might stumble in spelling. In those instances Apple chooses what it thinks I meant, then doesn’t leave the highlight in place.

So if I’m writing stream of consciousness and glitch on a word I might not see it at all because I’m 6 paragraphs down the page. 

I only see the problem after I’ve pressed send or saved a document, by then I’ve forgotten what I meant to say and it makes proof reading much more difficult since if my spelling caused the selection of a completely different word, the next few words Apple replaces may be grammatically correct but not at all what I was saying. 

I’d like to select the old reliable red underscore and tell Apple intelligence to not replace a word or string of words. I’m going to notice the red underscore then correct spelling based on those highlights.

Dictation is a nightmare as well. This is one of the reasons that Siri & I don’t get along with each other. Sometimes, no matter how I pronounce something, Siri or the Apple dictation screws up so badly everything I said is completely lost or worse. Maybe its better to loose the thought than to have it butchered. 

For example, last night I was cuddling the dog and asked if he was ready to, “Go beddie by,” He knew exactly what that meant and went to the door for his last bathroom break of the evening. Siri on my phone across the room piped up and told me there was no Betty in my contact list and therefore it couldn’t complete my call. I don’t recall calling the dog by his name “Jesse,” which sometimes Siri mistakes for me asking for “Siri’s” assistance.

Thank God, I’d have been unknowingly calling someone at midnight on a Sunday!

AI input should be delayed so that the AI helps me, rather than overriding me or being so confident that it takes actions.

Recently, I used the AI in Microsoft Word and found it to be a more pleasant cooperative experience. In that case, the AI waited until it was called upon. When I asked for assistance, the AI evaluated the entire paragraph then did a fine job of cleaning up what I was saying.

I feel like I have to watch the Apple version like a hawk, this interrupts my train of thought and makes getting what I want on paper far more time consuming.

Perhaps, the next iterations of Apple operating systems will correct these issues but I’m not confident about it. Apple is renown for their arrogance when it comes to their software.

It looks like instead of correcting issues, Apple will be making IOS19 pretty. Yawn! I could be wrong, in fact I hope I am.

As disappointed as I was in Apple for not releasing an improved Apple Watch Ultra last year, (they changed the color not the inherent functionality,) I’m not excited to hear, and probably wont’ make time to watch, this years WWDC.

I’ll wait for the pundits and wags to breathlessly extoll the amazing WWDC25 announcements.

In other words, I’ll read about it over the following week.

I wonder if this is a sign of me being bored, or Apple being boring.

I guess we’ll see in June.

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As Anticipated, Making Apple’s ADP Unavilable to UK citizens wasn’t enough.

HD wallpaper london doomsday big ben clock dark doom england lightning uk united kingdom.Big Surprise!

NOT!

Here’s a link to another article about the UK hearings

The UK simply cannot be trusted with a back door decryption key. No government entity could be.

I don’t care who. We certainly can’t trust the United States Government based on what we’re learning about the corruption there. 

We have no reason to believe any other government would be trustworthy.

According to Apple, even they don’t have the keys once the ADP system is turned on. The upside is Apple cannot be compelled to disclose something they don’t have. The downside is if you lose your recovery key, or your devices you’ll not be able to recover your data either.

Everything has a risk. The question to answer would be, “Is this an acceptable risk?”

I’ve been considering the Pros & Cons for my personal situation. There are some documents that I’d like to store in iCloud but haven’t, because I was concerned about security. Enabling ADP would make me feel a lot more comfortable about sensitive documents being in iCloud.

The trouble with that is, in the event of some catastrophe, such as the house burning down and losing all of my devices where would I store the recovery key?

The reason I consider the iCloud solution is because I’ve had a house burn down and did lose all my devices. After the fire it was very difficult to recover a lot of critical items/paperwork and some, I was never able to recover.

Scanning and storing those kinds of documents in cloud based storage makes sense until you consider the possibility of hackers gaining access to what would be a gold mine of information.

Consider for example, having your home, papers, and all your data storage destroyed but having that data in the cloud. With ADP enabled, hackers couldn’t further compromise you. But without ADP, hackers, who are soulless animals, could be able to utterly destroy your life while you were trying to recover.

After the fire, there were all kinds of strangers showing up “Offering to help” but they weren’t neighbors nor did they know me. These were people who, for a percentage would have been happy to “help” me, A.K.A. to rip me off. Due to record keeping, police & fire reports, my name, address, and personal information was widely available to anybody.

It felt like I was waving a torch at a bunch of jackals closing in for the kill.

It’s because of this experience and the other half having their identity stolen several times that I have been adamantly opposed to storing anything of importance in the cloud.

However, I’ve been reconsidering that stance due to the advances in security Apple has made both on their devices, and in their cloud storage.

Now, with the UK’s demands I feel that Apple is being pushed up against the wall.

The UK is also just fucking sneaky about how they do this stuff. Apple can’t mention it, Apple can’t have open public hearings on the matter, the UK wants to do all of this in back rooms, in the dark.

United kingdom dark flag texture_204197 4943.That, in my opinion, is never a good look for any government.

If the UK persists in their unreasonable demand, I could see Apple making a tough decision like closing all their stores in the UK.

Imagine that! Apple fires all their UK employees, closes their stores and refuses to sell their products or services in the UK.

That would be one hell of a statement on Apple’s commitment to privacy.

I doubt that would happen, but my goodness what a message to totalitarian elements within the UK government.

The other part of this is why is the UK so determined to compromise their people? If the issue is to put an end to crime, then what kind of crime do they seek to end? Are they fighting terrorist elements they’ve allowed into their country? 

Or are they trying to make sure that UK citizens who have reached their limit with unending migrants and cultural accommodation resulting in child rapes, don’t have the ability to become nationalists rising up in defense of the UK?

Honestly, the latter wouldn’t surprise me since in the UK you can be arrested and harassed simply for saying you don’t like the muslim invasion on social media.

This line of thinking leads to another question. 

“Who is pulling the UK government’s strings?”

Is it the EU? I thought the UK had pulled out of that globalist crap.