I have strategically replaced key bulbs with Lifx bulbs. I don't ever touch light switches anymore. I rarely use the app either. The lighting in my home is now automatic. Lights turn on as sunset, dim in the later evenings, and finally turn themself off at night. The only time I touch anything is if I decide to go to bed early. If I want to sleep early, one touch turns my entire home to 'Bed Time' mode.
 
Lifx has published the protocol specifications to talk to their cloud server that controls everything. They also publish the protocol specifications on how bypass the cloud and talk directly to the bulbs. This is what convinced me to buy into Lifx (that and the fact that the colors produced by Lifx make Hue bulb's seem like pastels). I will be retiring soon, once I have the time, I'll write my own controller for them and cut the ties with the cloud.

It a funny thing.... On one hand they say it is hard to list the charges up front. However, they don't seem to have any problem listing them all on your bill. I wonder why that is.

I haven't purchased a Western Digital hard drive in years. It is not because WD drives fail more than other drives. In fact I have a bunch of Seagate drives fail. It seems that the drives that Seagate made shortly after the big flood that they had in Thailand were bad. However, I still will buy Seagate drives over WD. The reason is because of the way the drives fail. Seagate drives get sick before they die. They will do things like randomly go offline and require a power cycle to bring back to life. But they do come back to life, at least for a while before they die completely. On the other hand every WD drive that I have ever owned worked great up to the second when they failed. I never got any kind of warning. Once they died, they would never come back In other words, Seagate drives give you enough warning as to allow you to get your precious data off of it. WD drives don't. I have lost too much data because of that.

Hmm, I don't get it. Please explain to me why the demand and price is so high for homes in California if the place sucks as bad as you say it does. Isn't it typical for sucky places to have cheap real estate?

Open letter to all Massachusetts legislators ...

There is this thing called YouTube. Yes! your constituents can post local news, local weather, and local PSAs on YouTube for free!

I just added a rule to my firewall that basically states that my HP printer is not allowed to talk to the internet. Problem solved.

There is a deeper issue lurking here. Forget about police and warrants for a moment. Amazon is getting a copy off all of your footage for all of your cameras 24x7x365. I guess it is not so bad if you just have a doorbell cam pointing outside of your home. For the life of me, I can't imagine why any person would think that it is a good idea to give Amazon, or any cloud provider, have a copy of the video from inside your home. The only exception would be if you encrypt the footage yourself before uploading it to the cloud. This way you can be assured that there are no back doors for them to use your data. There have been too many times where cloud service provider tell you one thing, like your data is encrypted or we don't long your information, only for it to be exposed that the data somehow got leaked anyway. This is a case where you are not too paranoid to trust no one; especially a mega tech company

Power doesn't drop lineally with distance (R). It drops off at a rate of 1/R^2 (1 over R squared) so if the moon is 20x the distance, the power will be somewhere around 1/20^2 or 1/400. This is also neglecting that fact the antennas will be pointing in the wrong direction.

Once living Republicans In Idaho

Why, just why would anyone in their right mind want to help create a deep fake version of their voice?

Did you try to go into the BIOS (I know it's UEFI, but it will always be BIOS to me) and turn off secure boot?

BTW, I run Ubuntu on a computer with Secure boot turn on. Microsoft agreed to sign Ubuntu's boot loader a long time ago.

Microsoft is going to wipe your data if....

I called BS at the words "Wipe your data". I totally buy into the the part where they won't make it accessible to you, but I can guarantee you they aren't going to wipe it.

I thought Resistance was Futile, no zero

Nothing is wrong with regular license plates. If you are looking for a reason for this product then look no further than this: Fools have money and are willing to trade it for the latest gadget.

As I remember, they shut down all of Beijing for the entire time that the Olympics were happening plus some time beforehand. The only reason that didn't put a severe dent into their economy is because the communist government subsidized everything.