Yeah, you can plug it into a few external services like OpenAI or even use a local LLM like LocalAI. Not used either, but I know it’s possible.

That would also explain why Aldi in the UK also has these while other stores don’t.

From the UK. I’ve never seen matte spelled as matt. CA, UK and AU are generally pretty close with spelling, whereas the US is usually off doing its own thing. It’s a similar thing to blonde and blond.

Oh no so am I, but I’ve seen enough of these stories in the past to know it’s a common occurrence ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t think it was intended to be sensationalist, just a pun with the words. It’s one of those non-issue stories that are sort of tongue in cheek so the writer has a bit of fun.

I think most outlets have pretty much given up writing anything serious about Apple based alarm issues as they’ve been a thing for years (whether it’s user error or otherwise), hence why this one in particular is just quoting people on TikTok of all places.

Don’t forget 4 as well. The music in these games brings back some great memories, and I still catch myself listening to them every now and again.

I dunno. 60km/h is pretty much 40mph, which seems acceptable for what looks like a low density country road. On those sorts of roads the center line is sort of implied, and cars move to each side when approaching each other. I’d personally say the US plays it safe on low density road speeds. For example, there are a ton of roads like this that are a similar width to the above (despite not looking it) but have a 60mph (~100km/h) limit.

There are many ways of doing this. I know the source engine uses visboxes, which are calculated once at map compile time. It takes a while to compile, but it means that clients can use the pre-compiled data to calculate parts of the map that are visible and the server can use them to determine what the player can see at a given time. I’m not sure whether it does that or not, but it would make sense to use that data.

They did. Cheap and reliable

The index is better overall and I love mine, but I can’t help but feel jealous that someone can just grab their quest, put it on and get into VR immediately. I have to cart my PC downstairs, turn the base stations on, find the index and wire it all up, troubleshoot why Windows has decided to mess up the drivers and now nothing works, and maybe half an hour later finally get into a game or completely give up and try again another time.

The quest gains a lot in portability and ease of setup, and that does result in a lot of other features being sacrificed but to most people the downsides don’t matter as much.

You can, but MS disables automatic updates without telling you. I have TPM but my CPU is one generation too old apparently, so they silently disabled updates on my machine and I didn’t realise I was still on 21H2 until a couple of weeks ago and had to manually update it.

The manual update worked and it didn’t warn me about anything or encounter any issues, but that was a massive pain.

Is that Jon from Auto Shenanigans?

Line must go up

I definitely find it harder to think of words when I’m talking to people and it seems like something that came about after COVID. Also, I have a much shorter fuse now and seem to get annoyed almost randomly.

It’s fine, they’ll just suggest a new generation of baby boomers to get the population back up again.

It’s not hugely complicated but instead of me having to ask an assistant everything, I let HA tell me everything through various speakers based on the state of sensors around the house at appropriate times.

When I wake up in the morning and go downstairs it’ll detect my presence, and if it’s a work day it’ll inform me of weather, traffic (as well as a suggested time to aim to leave by) and a basic schedule of my day, then it’ll stick some music on.

As it gets closer to the time to leave it’ll chime up again telling me I have x minutes left to get ready, but only if it detects me in a room so I definitely hear it.

All that is controlled by HA automatically and isn’t something you’d ever get from any of the big players, because they don’t have the sort of information and stats that HA does.

If I set a timer in Google Home then it’ll become available to HA through it’s integration and I’ll pop up a timer bar on some of the displays I have dotted around so I can track the time left without having to talk to the assistant, and as any timer gets close to expiring then it’ll even show a message on the TV saying which timer is about to activate.

There’s a few smaller things that just make life a bit easier too, like turning speakers off in rooms that aren’t active, or integrating my dumb doorbell into HA using an RF receiver so I can automate doorbell presses.

Home Assistant is currently working hard on assistants. I’ve not used it much yet but their text to speech offers so much more than any of the larger companies in just customisation alone, plus it all runs locally.

I have Google Home devices all over but they currently mostly act as a dumb speaker and I just get HA to do all of the heavy lifting. The most Google does is set timers and even that just goes into HA for most of the processing.

You’re fine unless something happens to PayPal.

Not tried in a while but it used to just be a case of leaving it disconnected from the net during setup.

Failing that you can still sign up with a throwaway account and convert it to local in the options after installation iirc. It’s not ideal but it’s still something at least.

Also Blåhaj…