Re: smart plugs???

On Fri, 17 Jan 2025 02:53:38 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

I hate Alexa. We had an Echo in the house for a bit, and it was forever
listining in on our conversations and breaking in on them. That got her
banished.

I never had an Echo. I asked a woman I worked with whose name a Alex about
t. Apparently you can select other wake words which was good for her. My
utterances on a normal day are 'Good morning, cat' when I go out to feed
her in the morning, or 'Hi cat' when she mysteriously appears when I drive
in. I've seen the cat galloping from the pasture about 100 yards away when
I pull in so she has learned to recognize my car or motorcycles.
 

I never understood how any business - large or small - could be
comfortable having their financial information or their proprietary
technical data on a cloud server.

'The Cloud' buzzword was popular for CAD (computer aided dispatch) vendors
a few years ago but it died down to some extent. Part of the data
emergency dispatchers collect may be criminal justice records covered by
NCIC regulations, medical records covered by HIPAA, or juvenile records.
In theory the cloud provider's employees would have to be vetted by the
various agencies. Sites like that are available with a premium attached.
 

I just discovered that in the last two weeks, as I replaced by Fitbit
Charge 5 with a new Charge 6. It somehow would not show me the time when
I had left my phone in the office while going out to get the mail from
the mailbox at the driveway. Recovered once I was in Blluetooth range.
Some datapoints can sync between the watch and the phone over BlueTooth,
but "deeper stuff" like sleep analysis does indeed require connection to
the Google servers.

Synching for me often shows a network connection is necessary and may
require multiple restarts of the app. It's not very smooth. The latest
feature, 'cardio load', has many people trying to figure out how it works
and the prompts to get your lazy butt in gear are not appreciated.

I got the Fitbit at a discount through Planet Fitness a year ago. It
usually works for distance and seems to be relatively reliable for HR. The
rest is iffy. The real selling point for me is it's not a Dick Tracy
Communicator on my wrist.