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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: smart plugs???
Date: 17 Jan 2025 03:49:43 GMT
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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.