tristanperry

> is basically hacking around a load of text files telling their trillion dollar wonder machine it absolutely must stop talking to customers about goblins, gremlins and ogres?

I wonder how the developer(s) felt, who had to push that PR.

My theory is a state-sponsored actor targeting some of these services, but maybe that's just too 'tinfoil hat' of me, who knows.

I assume you're joking, but as an FYI, Rebecca Heineman died:

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/legendary-game-desig...

ChatGPT and Claude are down as a result, too.

Y'know, along with most other SAAS services.

Yes exactly - and they still have aging hardware, only 1Gb Ethernet and have recently nerfed H.265 support.

Too little, too late. I finished my 48TB Unraid build a couple of weeks ago :)

If Synology want me back as a customer, they also need to get modern CPUs, 2.5Gb or 10Gb Ethernet and reverse course on H.265 too.

Hi Matthew, Cloudflare just charged my card $235 with no prior warning (for a service I intended to cancel when I received the renewal reminder). I did not receive any renewal reminders, no advance notice of payment, no invoice. Nothing.

Is this normal operating behaviour for Cloudflare? This seems like very very bad anti-consumer behaviour?

A great essay, and it explains exactly why I left software development (as a career working for someone else).

Too much of what I call emergency-led management.

Their own summary is here: https://youtu.be/yGXaAWbzl5A

Paul Hibbert (a UK tech YouTuber) was also hacked in a similar way, and he dived into info on that here: https://youtu.be/0NdZrrzp7UE

Interesting for sure. The first time I done it, I had a beauty score of 5. I then put glasses on and got better lighting, and got up to a 7.

It kept saying my age was 18-20, but I'm 32.

Finally it kept predicting my BMI as 30+, even though it's 22.5.

So it was interesting, and a pretty cool tech demonstration, but it wasn't too accurate for me.

I'd be stunned if the Nasdaq above 11,800 (i.e. it's current level).

There seems to be too many economic headwinds. I think today was a short term relief rally, not the turning point of one month's sell-offs.

It is 'yet another' standard yes, but it's worth pointing out that Matter was jointly launched by the ZigBee Alliance (who now call themselves the Connectivity Standards Alliance).

So it's not exactly a rival to ZigBee at least.

Z-Wave are going a different direction though, and I wouldn't be surprised if Z-Wave slips into obscurity over the next decade.

Agreed, Caseta are worth their price premium IMO.

The only downside is that they aren't available in the UK, but that's not uncommon for non-mainstream smart home products.

(Disclosure: I have a smart home blog and YouTube channel)

A nice write-up. Insteon have (had?) some great products, so this is a shame. I do think that Matter will improve things a little, but we'll see - owning hardware from a bankrupt company naturally isn't great if the device breaks down...

LIFX (one of the most popular smart lights, aside from Philips Hue) have been having various troubles recently too:

https://www.smarthomepoint.com/is-lifx-in-business/

They are keen to stress that this is only affecting their owner, but in reality many LIFX customers have recently had issues with support tickets and warranty claims going unanswered.

The only good news is that LIFX support local control, meaning that HomeAssistant and Hubitat can still control them even if LIFX's cloud servers get switched off.

Nonetheless, reports of LIFX and Insteon struggling/disappearing is never encouraging. Especially when combined with recent (negative) subscription changes by Wyze and Wink.

Great article, thanks for posting. I've been on a smart home journey myself, but I'm still currently relying on Alexa for most integration and a Hue Bridge. It works well for the 30-40 devices I currently have.

I totally agree that Home Assistant is probably the way forward for many power users, but it doesn't quite feel beginner-friendly enough yet (although the HA devs do seem to be making some great improvements in this area).

I'm still undecided on Matter and Thread. Both are naturally great technologies, but I can't see Google/Nest opening up to Amazon/Ring and vice versa. Not in any meaningful way, at least. My hunch is that Matter will help smaller smart home companies, but not make much difference for the pre-existing 'walled gardens' that the market has. I hope that I'm wrong though.

(Disclaimer: I blog and do YouTube videos as Smart Home Point, but I mainly cover consumer friendly products - and hence I haven't delved into Home Assistant too much)

That's what multiple newspapers including The Times are reporting, yes.

Since Boris' job is on the line, he's apparently panicking and due to roll out a series of popularist policies next week.

That's an annoying blog. I was half way through reading when a full page "enter your email address" pop-up appeared. I closed it, and was sent to the top of the page again. (Samsung S20, Chrome).

I do agree generally, but it's funny that the suggested solution (spacers) are basically back to the old 1px transparent gif trick from the 90s/early 00s.

Nothing wrong with the suggestion, but it's just ironic that we seem to be coming full circle again.

Next we'll probably have posts extolling <Table> components for layouts ;)

I watch Netflix at 1.25x and YouTube at 1.5x-2x - but this is mainly because I find some shows/channels a bit too slow at 1x speed.

Some YouTube channels are unbearable at 1x speed due to the slow speaking speed.

3x speed probably is hard to genuinely acquire knowledge effectively for most people - although I have heard of blind people who do 2.5x-3x with ease, so who knows.

Yep true, although it's not just laptops. I often see 'high end editing PCs' with 16GB of RAM, which is possibly sufficient for 1080p editing, but nowhere near enough for 4K editing for multiple programs open.

I guess it's similar to how some laptops/budget desktops still have hard drives, even though an SSD wouldn't cost much more but it'd offer great performance benefits.

Good. The more exposure this tactic gets, the better.

I remember trying to cancel my The Times (of London) subscription a few years ago. It was a terrible experience - having to ensure a pushy sales call for 20 minutes, where the call handler kept ignoring my requests to cancel as they kept reading a hard sell script.

The sooner this practice ends, the better.

Agreed.

I have a series of content websites, and at first I used Jekyll and it was fast to load, but everything took 10x longer to do than just using WordPress.

I now use WordPress on a VPS and served with Litespeed Enterprise and the performance (read: load times and CWV/GMetrix scores) is very very good - better than static sites hosted on shared hosting, in-fact.

My Wordpress sites have minimal plugins (hence minimal JS and CSS) and run via a VPS and using Litespeed Enterprise, and they're almost as fast as static sites - but with 100x the ease of use and power.

Heck, my Wordpress blogs are faster than when I had static sites on shared hosting.

Nice job :)

I don't completely agree about Jekyll (it can be very light weight, requiring zero Ruby unless you need to extend things), but rolling your own solution for a personal home page is always nice.

Annnd.. the tweet shows the exact product used.

It's now showing as sold out on shopee.com (maybe it was before though, who knows?)

I run a smart home blog (smarthomepoint.com) and it's surprising how many people email me saying that their Ring cameras randomly stopped recording, and right before someone walked past and pointed a 'phone like device' at their camera.

It'd be interesting to know just how pervasive WiFi jammers are.

I suspect it's a bigger problem than is advertised in the media.

It's a great bit of advice.

It does also apply to companies who demand that their workers have bums on seats in an office 8-9 hours a day...

Companies often don't seem to understand that loading employees with meetings and bureaucracy, then wondering why productivity isn't higher, is fairly foolish.

Awesome thanks, that'll be a helpful addition :)

Yep, came here to say this.

I dislike when companies do this; even more so when they say you need to pay - and even THEN they don't give a price:

"Pay once. No subscriptions"

Not anymore. Many ad networks have rolled out their 'CLS' solutions for the upcoming Google Web Vitals algo change, and ads don't jump about anymore on these networks.

Example ad networks that work well with delayed ads (that don't jump) include Mediavine and AdThrive.

Not sure if I'm missing something, but the pricing of Creative Cloud has always been made very clear from the order form:

  "Monthly Plan - £75.85/mo"
  "Annual plan, paid monthly - £49.94/mo"
  "Annual plan, prepaid - £596.33"

I can't see how there's any confusion here, or do they only show the options like this in the UK?

Also I just upgraded from Premiere Pro to the Creative Cloud and was given the full upgrade T&Cs, including that there'd be a cancellation fee to pay if I signed up for the yearly option and cancelled mid-way through.

Again, a genuine question: am I missing something?