Re: smart plugs???

On Fri, 17 Jan 2025, rbowman wrote:

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

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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.

A free range cat? Do you ever have problems with ticks? Every summer in the country house when I was young, the neighbours cat would more or less move in with us since the food was better than the dry food he got at his home. But sometimes it would happen that I would read, and the cat wanted petting. So I petted the cat while reading, then look at my hand to discover ticks crawling there. So the cat brought us rich gifts in the form of ticks and the occasional dead (or alive) mice.
I do not like ticks. They remind me of politicians and I would not be displeased if they all disappeared.
A small sliver of hope is a vaccine against lyme I read about a year ago that's in the testing phase.

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.

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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.
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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.
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