We really need standardized protocols for garage doors. Chamberlin had a near monopoly on the market and had proprietary protocols.

If you want to make a compatible garage door opener, you have to use their HomeLink chips. My Tesla had HomeLink integrated, and it's awesome having the garage door just open when I pull into the driveway with GPS activation, but now they charge extra for this, in part because HomeLink is a proprietary chip, and they can't just integrate the functionality directly without an additional part. That's also why it's limited to only controlling three garage doors (which is an issue for some people with overly complicated lives).

Now it's a similar situation with WiFi control, where they have a proprietary protocol that goes through their servers simply so that they can charge a subscription fee.

What is needed is some good open standards.

An open standard for the RF signals: Let anyone implement the hardware. Allow for separate open/close signals, as well as the current activate signal. Allow for separate authentication for the signals, so you can do things like have a keypad access outside that only needs the code to open the door, not close it.

An open standard for WiFi control. This is likely already covered by Matter.

As a friend once said, "You don't penalize people for doing the right thing." But it's a legitimate concern that the system of funding roads from fuel taxes is going to collapse due to EVs. So the solution is to apply the new fees to all vehicles. This will encourage the transition instead of slow it. Also, they can start with the fee being much lower, so the estimated revenue matches the estimated loss due to reduced fuel sales, and they can phase it in over time as fuel sales continue to drop.

Is Apple's end objective here to integrate the modem into the CPU so that there's one less chip in the device? That should save significant cost.

It would be nice to use my TV for Zoom, but I certainly don't want the camera gathering data for its own purposes. The screen scraping that smart TVs do is bad enough.

I think you're confusing twilight with sunrise/sunset. The three definitions of twilight are the sun from 0Â-6Â below the horizon, 6Â-12Â, or 12Â-18Â. The time for sunrise or sunset is when the entire sun transitions to or from below the horizon.

My definition would need some tweaks for above the arctic circle, and all solar based times break down at the exact poles.

And of course, it all depends on exactly where you are, so I'm throwing out the entire concept of time zones, which were only invented because we didn't have automatically adjusting clocks.

Just block raw HTTP unless it's in a private IP address range. That should cover 99% of use cases where HTTP is still used. I would also consider allowing an option to blindly accept self-signed certificates on private IP ranges to encourage HTTPS for people too lazy to use Let's Encrypt or something like that, or are running older equipment on a local LAN.

I would assume these are already settings that just aren't turned on by default, as they seem pretty obvious.

The sign-in pages are stupid. Most of them are worthless click-throughs that should go away. A few do have you do some sort of sign-in, so they should be https.

But the whole process is a stupid hack. They did add a new DHCP option for sending a sign-in URL, but it was never widely adopted. That would have made it work much more reliably for everyone.

I propose we switch to Sunrise Time. Instead of AM and PM, we have Day and Night. The Day starts at sunrise and Night starts at sunset. So we would have times like: D1:30 (an hour and a half after sunrise) or N0:00 (sunset). We could also have negative time: N-1:00 (an hour before sunset). The day would start at sunrise, but if using negative day time, it would refer to the day of the sunrise, even though the same time expressed as positive Night time would be the previous day.

So someone might set their alarm clock to go off at D-0:45 on M-F to get up forty-five minute before sunrise on weekdays.

I'm sure this solves all the problems and nobody will ever complain again.

I've been saying this for a long time, though I would say 7am. Of course, sunrise time is different depending not just your longitude, but also your latitude, so we would be back to picking a sample location for each time zone. And this means adjusting clocks every night. Just slightly near the solstices, but more significantly closer to the equinoxes. So all clocks would need to have automated changes. This would be a great chance to get rid of all manually set clocks while creating lots of waste.

And then we would all complain that sunrise is either too early or too late, depending on our personal schedules and where we live in the time zone.

Oh, and Paul Eggert would probably veto the whole thing.

And Uber drivers are just one group about to be eliminated by technology. The same self-driving will also eliminate tons of truck drivers, though that will probably hold off until people are more used to the idea of self-driving cars on the road. (I would give it one to three years delay.)

We're in for some interesting times.

But Uber will have to build out its fleet of autonomous vehicles.

That's assuming Uber. Tesla is preparing the assembly lines now for the CyberCab, and they could be putting them out at thousands a week by the end of next year. There's a lot to be said for the theory that self driving cars won't be able to handle all weather and all weird roads, but from what I've seen, those are issues that may delay but not stop the self-driving takeover.

Yes, the ReplayTV interface was awesome. And the founder of ReplayTV went on to found Roku, which also has an awesome interface.

They were all in the same house, but they were installed at three different times (2 original, 1 extension, 1 later retrofit), so they wouldn't have been from the same batch. I'm thinking they were all in places where you would often be standing to the side, so there could be side-to-side stress, which is what caused them to fail. They were all from the 90s or later; older switches might have been stronger.

Funny you should say that. I had a ceiling fan that stopped working. Various YouTube videos suggested it could be a failed capacitor in the fan. I took it apart, and everything measured correctly on my meter. The fan was fine. The problem was the switch on the wall had broken. I've had to replace four failed light switches in our house.

They don't make them like they used to.

We had a ReplayTV 2020 back in 1999, and loved it. I always thought ReplayTV was better than TiVo, but TiVo had a lower sticker price with a subscription, and consumers are dumb. We moved to MythTV when we got an HDTV in 2004, recording off of antenna and QAM, later getting a HDHomeRun with CableCard. Last year we dropped cable, as we had mostly stopped watching it in favor of streaming, so MythTV still is sitting there recording occasionally from the antenna, but we rarely use it.

As far as features go, though, MythTV was the best I've seen for recording TV. It's a shame it's a bit complicated to set up; I believe someone tried selling preconfigured boxes at one point, which would have been a great idea, but there were issues with the TV listings.

For people who still want to record TV and are geeky enough to be here, MythTV is still a good option, though you'll need CableCard support from your cable company, and some of the channels will have copy restrictions so you can't record them.

But for everyone else, most cable companies will provide a DVR service of some sort (usually now streaming from their servers, not really recording locally), so you're pretty much stuck with that.