As a grandmom, my Mom has decided on boxes for really lame gifts that might make you wonder if she has dementia, for gift cards.

If you don’t give her sufficient ideas for her to buy you something you enjoy, you’re a Scrooge and deserve this box of instant jello …… containing a gift card so you can get it yourself

Too old to understand why you’re asking about American Sign Language

For newbies to home automation, it’s finally getting to the point where we should recommend Matter/Thread.

I mean, I won’t use it yet because I have mature Zigbee and Z-wave meshes, and use Home Assistant, but they want to run HomeKit and don’t seem to want to do their homework

Everything is in git, and I tend to use IntelliJ as an IDE. So my projects are all in ~/Ideaprojects/[PROJECTNAME]

I thought I read about this for real a while back? In a bid to make plastic decay faster, make it out of cellulose with embedded bacteria that can break it down. It still happens too slowly for most plastic packaging

I used to live in a townhouse and no one would bother going along the row. Finally we got together with other residents and set up a table in the parking lot next to the street. That was a lot of fun hanging out with the neighbors all evening, handing out candy

Pre-COViD we used to take out the screen in our storm door (and after put in glass for winter). It really freaked some people out when we reached through to hand out candy! Even better when someone didn’t keep a good hold on the dog and he leaped through! Of course today I have a pit bull instead of mini poodle so that wouldn’t go over as well

I took up smoking. No, not the lung cancer one. Cooking is one of the best things to keep me positive since I got divorced several years ago: treating it as a hobby I can be enthusiastic about, rather than something to do when I’m hungry. This spring I bought a smoker and had great fun learning new cooking techniques, new meal combinations, and enjoyed some excellent food. Previously I tried to do a meal from a different cuisine every week, before that I learned to use cast iron

That seems surprisingly rare. My bank’s app has been letting me do that for longer than I can remember, but people are still surprised that you can do that. Even my teens, who have only ever had online banking, don’t know how to deposit a check through their app

I don’t know what to get you and prefer something better targeted than cash. Tell me what you want, what you really really want, and you might get that instead

— if you complain again, I’m writing you a check: tell me how inconvenient that is

And a bunch of people saying “OMG, it’s Florence Pugh …… and she’s even fitter !!!”

(I assume, but not taking the bait)

Glory Hole

Raspberry Pi OS is sticking your hardware through a small hole into what a full Linux distribution would feel like, given sufficient imagination

That’s July question: the article even points that out. If previously the private key was in hardware, never exposed, but now it has to be available to software. Does it open any potential attacks?

Even if it is less secure, this is probably a good thing to prevent vendor lock-in. I know that’s one reason I rarely use passkeys

Nice. I’m at 92% health after a year.

I do use that power most of the time though (I spend way too much time on my phone). I do wish that control were more granular: if I’m charging overnight at home, I want to charge to 100% but if I’m wireless charging in my car I usually want to maintain

We’ll see if my habits change with this phone. Previously I expected to replace the battery and give it to my teen after 2-3 years. That way we use the phone for the full 5-6 years of supported life, they’re abuse is for only half the life, but we all get updates more frequently and I’m not stuck replacing all phones at the same time. However now they’re college age so they may no longer be content to have a hand me down

This is why I haven’t bought an Appe TV yet. The current model is from 2022, and I want it for more than TV. My motivation was based on Firestick getting further enshittified, but also improvements in Apple TV+ (which Firestick doesn’t have an app for). That old design was game oriented but I’m not likely to game through that. It does do home automation but nothing my Home Assistant hub (with HomeKit bridge) doesn’t already do.

But give me some actual improvements in my smart home and I’m there. Or give me on-device ai that does something useful for me and I’m there. I’ve been thinking about building smart home displays for various reasons but haven’t had time to. Third party monitors are too limited or require too much work to integrate with the Apple ecosystem, so build it and I will come (and yes I realize the pun)

Why not? While it does seem wasteful that people actually get a new phone every year, I want to see a new model every year so I can decide when it’s sufficiently improved over the one I currently own, or I may want to decide on an older model so want there to be one with whatever I feel is sufficient. Having new models every year gives us all more choice, not just anyone who may replace theirs that frequently

Edit: I really want an Apple TV, but there are constant technology changes so buying the current two year old design seems like a bad idea. It may still work but Why would I invest in a truncated future? If there were a 2024 version, I would already have it. Maybe even if there was a 2023 version

I also have a Raspberry Pi with 4G and it handles its load perfectly fine.

BUT lack of memory is a well known bottleneck so when I got a Raspberry Pi 5 with double the processing I also doubled the memory to keep it fed. While I haven’t really found a good niche for the new beast yet, if I’m spending money on a faster processor, faster board, why would I limit it by cheaping out on memory.

While we know that Apples memory is much faster than anyone else’s, we also know the entire system is outstanding. If I spend so much on a system with such high throughput, why would I want to cripple it by cheaping out on memory to save a relatively small cost? It’s not that I really have a need but that I’m paying for a beast so it better be able to go beast mode

Maybe it’s just me but I have the opposite take than this article ….

It’s great that Apple is switching across the board. It’s great that my iPhone has the faster data than ever before, although I’m not likely to use it. It’s also great that my phone charges so much faster. USB-C is not a step backward and may even be a little tip toe forward

However did they switch too soon? When I look at accessories like power banks, charging blocks, headphones etc, all too many are still using the older USB port/limitations. I expected to make a clean transition from Lightning to USB-C but instead have to buy double the cables to deal with a world that hasn’t fully adopted USB-C yet.

Sometimes wireless charging seems like a more common denominator than USB-C. It doesn’t matter that my car is USB-A, becuase it also has wireless charging

Where are you? The JavaScript block also seems to disable reader mode, so maybe they serve a different page in places with accessibility requirements

Like lack of accessibility? I generally use reader mode, because it gives an actual good user experience rather than “one that doesn’t look like the 90s”. I’m not sure if it turns off JavaScript, but it clearly turns off the crap that it does. Maybe half of websites work that way, the rest I either skip or click to turn off reader mode.

I just tried google, and reader mode is disabled, which is a problem for people with accessibility issues.

Does EU have accessibility protections? Does google give the same ad filled, cluttered, crap as the rest of us? What if you try reader mode