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.

Some, yeah - mostly for laptop chargers on the longer routes. A lot just have usb though.

They did. Cheap and reliable

How do you prepare for an update when Bethesda don’t tell you what is changing? It says in the article they had literally no correspondence from Bethesda until the update dropped, so the only thing they could do was keep developing and hope not too much broke in the process.

That being said, from what I understand is that the script extender broke, so they’re just waiting for an undefined time until that gets fixed for the latest update.

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.

I’m not entirely sure how cheques work being that I’ve not used one in about 15 years, but I’d imagine they give a cheque from an account with no money. Because cheques are awful the money will appear in your account for a time period by which you are given the illusion of getting legit money. They ask you to buy something like jewellery or gift cards and ask for it back at the end, maybe letting you keep a bit of it for yourself. A while goes by and the cheque bounces, which means you’re then on the hook for the cost of everything you purchased and the scammer gets a ton of free items that they can then sell on.

Nor-fuck in the UK, so sort of close I guess.

Line must go up

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.

Could anyone with more knowledge confirm, but couldn’t they just do what some car companies are doing and have a system by which you can just disable keyless entry when it’s parked up at night?

If I’m at home and my car is parked up where the key could potentially be repeated then I just disable it by locking the car using the key and tapping on the door handle, which disables just tapping the door handle to unlock it again, and only the unlock button on the key works. As far as I understand it resolves this issue, unless I’m missing something?

Also Blåhaj…

Currently running a desktop on W11 on “unsupported hardware”. Even managed to get it onto a 15 year old machine running a first gen i7 920 and not even a hint of a TPM module as an experiment and it worked perfectly fine.

My YouTube alerts come days after the actual video release dates. I’m not even sure how they manage to get it that delayed.

Also the same, but both ears. I think I’ve had it since I was about 10 after an ear infection and only relatively recently learned not everyone has stupidly high pitched ringing in their ears all the time.

Give Jellyfin a try too. I switched to that from Plex after I realised they were trying to charge me money to use hardware transcoding on my own hardware.