I have been able to "smarten" dumb appliances by plugging them into smart power switches. For less than $8 each I bought a couple boxes of smart switches from Amazon, then reflashed them with Tasmota -- no more cloud! -- and joined them to Home Assistant. Now any device I want to be smart, I plug it into a smart switch and monitor the power.

One of my scripts monitors the power draw on my dryer, and when it goes above 100W for a minute then drops below 10W for 15 seconds, it knows the cycle is done and alerts us to go down to the basement and take out the clothes before they wrinkle. A similar script monitors the washer.

The refrigerator's plug has a script alert me when the average daily power draw is higher than normal. I added that after my son called me from his most recent vacation and said "my refrigerator is using more power than it should, can you go check it?" Sure enough, their freezer door had been left open by their toddler. Of course the food was already thawing, but we cleaned it out a week before they would have come home to a house full of rotted food stench. And before you ask, yes, when I installed Tasmota I configured the switch to be "always on", so that even if Home Assistant thinks it would be a good idea to shut off the refrigerator's power, it can't.

I also have a small water pump on a smart switch. Normally the pump draws 36W, but when it runs dry it draws 30W. Now if the power consumption drops below 33W and stays there for a few minutes, it shuts off the pump and alerts me that the water is low.

So I get what I need -- timely information about the equipment in my home, automated reactions when things go bad that might keep things from getting worse, and no cloud involvement from any sleazy appliance manufacturers. And an $8 plug is a lot cheaper than paying a $400 premium for a "smart washer".

Tuya's become a nightmare to deal with. They've decided they fear local integrations because they're losing ad revenue when people don't use the Tuya app. They have been going to progressively greater lengths to prevent device buyers from bypassing the Tuya servers and running their stuff locally.

My understanding is you can no longer register for a free Tuya developer account that lets you set it up with the "Local Tuya" integration for HomeAssistant -- you have to have a paid developer account, if it works at all. And their libraries used to flash right onto an ESP32, but now they're encouraging developers to more secure chips, in an attempt to prevent end users from reflashing their own devices with firmware (like Tasmota) that no longer communicates via Tuya services.

I wouldn't buy anything Tuya with the hopes that it will someday integrate with anything else. If you buy them, expect them only to work with the official apps.

PKIs were designed for offline use. There are a couple hundred trusted Certificate Authorities that each issue a "root" certificate. These root certificates are distributed worldwide, in browsers, operating system distros, phones, etc. When you encounter a certificate in the wild, you have to verify the certificate before accepting it, which is done by checking what you can locally: is it expired? Does its DNS name resolve to the name on the cert? Does it have a valid signature? This means checking to see if it was signed by a CA certificate that you already have in your local trust store; if so, you can accept it without going online.

Not to say that the online component of certificate validation isn't important, but it's of varying importance depending on the risk level. When online you should check for certificate revocation, which is to check to see if a previously issued certificate has since been flagged by the CA as compromised and revoked. This can be done by looking for it on a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) published by the signing authority, or by querying the authority's Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) server. But it's an optional step, and can be skipped in low-risk situations (such as being offline.)

The ones with actual users ...

These are the sort of self-generating monopolies I've seen in the past 25 years of the internet.

Effectively, everyone goes there because everyone goes there.

A bit more than herd mentality, but makes any startup something which requires large amounts of energy to succeed and then keep going. Never stop.

Twitter has self-inflicted wounds, thanks Elon, but continues to limp along. I find myself less likely to visit because -- not everyone is there any more.

Not all Venture Capital are angels, some come in and kill the fledgling company and take it's IP, others wring it dry over months or years while skimming money off the top. Never occurs to some investors a company could be the next Alphabet or Meta.

This would then block the future as depicted in Minority Report.

"Hi there! Would you like to buy another [highly personal and embarrassing item]?"

There's a relief.

I visited Activision in the mid 1980s, when it was a shoe-string operation. Games for the C64 were coming along and quite impressive, including Little Computer People, which was running on a desk over a weekend to check for stability.

Seems it's all about IP these days.

It's just a shittier version of Theranos.

FTFY.

This was an economic choice. Icons are multi-lingual, meaning manufacturers didn't have to create dashboards with knobs labeled in dozens of different languages.

I think you've brushed really close to the real issue here.

The question isn't "Why is Firefox losing users?" The real question is "Why does anyone masochistically keep using Firefox when the devs are so arrogantly and willfully contemptuous of their core clientele?" The answer is singular: Firefox is not spyware. The Mozilla team knows they can do anything they want as long as they don't start sending our browsing habits elsewhere. We're literally a captive audience because we absolutely refuse to use a browser that feeds our data to a corporation, we demand privacy- and security-focused plugins (like NoScript), we need it to be open source so we can verify it's not violating our trust, and there just aren't any good browser options left.

What makes it particularly galling is that we know they ignore their own data. Look at Pocket. How many clients use it? Let's be generous and say 5%. (Alternate answer: the inverse of how many consider it spyware.) How many clients want them to leave the UI alone? Let's be meager and say 30-50%. They must know how much we hate what they do and yet they still prioritize the stupidest new ideas in favor of listening to their users.

That said, I bailed on Firefox back when the Waterfox fork came along. For years the add-ons were the only place to restore functionality critical for safe browsing that Mozilla had inexplicably cut, such as the status bar. But Mozilla's gonna Moz, and so they killed off the old XPI add-on interface; in classic Mozilla fashion they built the new add-on interface such that it was impossible to re-add those functions with new plugins. Giving up the classic add-ons was never a good option, so when Waterfox came out it was "jump ship!" So far, Alex has done a great job of merging in patches from Firefox that address security vulnerabilities, but that's a lot of work and I don't know how long he can keep it up.

They're coming for the upper bands which were available to Ham Radio enthusiasts. FCC doesn't care about us anymore.

Such a useless post and reflecting lack of actual knowledge of Fry's.

20 some years ago I bought my first laptop (still have it) at Fry's in Sunnyvale. It was still in the little grocery location, the shelves (and even former refrigerated goods) aisles has resistor and capacitor models sticking out of the floor. It's long since become some health club or other business after Fry's moved to a big store a couple blocks away.

In the hey day of the stores on E. Arques, E. Brokaw and E. Hamilton had about 40 or 60 cashiers, the queue moved pretty swiftly and they didn't take American Express. I tried to buy my first digital camera there and found that out. Went over to Wolf Camera to pick it up. Anyway, over the past few years I've visited the number of cashiers has dwindled down to only a handful. Few floor walkers, where once they were all over you, asking if you needed any help. Last visit I didn't see one at all.

At the end Fry's probably only had a dozen people working in each of their giant stores, a far cry from the hundreds they employed a decade or two before. The downsizing has been happening over time. Weep not for droves of employees losing their jobs, weep for the few who worked in desolate stores, with unstocked shelves who knew the writing was on the wall. They've been circling the drain for years.

The main hurt here is losing a chain which once carried just about everything the home hobbyist/maniac could ever want. That's been going on with the closure of Weird Stuff and Halted Specialties. I'll have to look to see if there's anyone left who sells components, wire, cable, solder, special tools, etc. I'd say they failed to plan well and we've known the eventual source of stuff is going to be our mailbox.

https://www.rollingstone.com/p...

If they won't boot Alex Jones for inciting an armed simpleton to enter a pizza place demanding to search the basement for Hillary's secret child sex trafficking ring, they sure as hell won't boot Trump for anything.