> is basically hacking around a load of text files telling their trillion dollar wonder machine it absolutely must stop talking to customers about goblins, gremlins and ogres?
I wonder how the developer(s) felt, who had to push that PR.
Hi Matthew, Cloudflare just charged my card $235 with no prior warning (for a service I intended to cancel when I received the renewal reminder). I did not receive any renewal reminders, no advance notice of payment, no invoice. Nothing.
Is this normal operating behaviour for Cloudflare? This seems like very very bad anti-consumer behaviour?
It is 'yet another' standard yes, but it's worth pointing out that Matter was jointly launched by the ZigBee Alliance (who now call themselves the Connectivity Standards Alliance).
So it's not exactly a rival to ZigBee at least.
Z-Wave are going a different direction though, and I wouldn't be surprised if Z-Wave slips into obscurity over the next decade.
(Disclosure: I have a smart home blog and YouTube channel)
A nice write-up. Insteon have (had?) some great products, so this is a shame. I do think that Matter will improve things a little, but we'll see - owning hardware from a bankrupt company naturally isn't great if the device breaks down...
LIFX (one of the most popular smart lights, aside from Philips Hue) have been having various troubles recently too:
They are keen to stress that this is only affecting their owner, but in reality many LIFX customers have recently had issues with support tickets and warranty claims going unanswered.
The only good news is that LIFX support local control, meaning that HomeAssistant and Hubitat can still control them even if LIFX's cloud servers get switched off.
Nonetheless, reports of LIFX and Insteon struggling/disappearing is never encouraging. Especially when combined with recent (negative) subscription changes by Wyze and Wink.
Great article, thanks for posting. I've been on a smart home journey myself, but I'm still currently relying on Alexa for most integration and a Hue Bridge. It works well for the 30-40 devices I currently have.
I totally agree that Home Assistant is probably the way forward for many power users, but it doesn't quite feel beginner-friendly enough yet (although the HA devs do seem to be making some great improvements in this area).
I'm still undecided on Matter and Thread. Both are naturally great technologies, but I can't see Google/Nest opening up to Amazon/Ring and vice versa. Not in any meaningful way, at least. My hunch is that Matter will help smaller smart home companies, but not make much difference for the pre-existing 'walled gardens' that the market has. I hope that I'm wrong though.
(Disclaimer: I blog and do YouTube videos as Smart Home Point, but I mainly cover consumer friendly products - and hence I haven't delved into Home Assistant too much)
That's an annoying blog. I was half way through reading when a full page "enter your email address" pop-up appeared. I closed it, and was sent to the top of the page again. (Samsung S20, Chrome).
I do agree generally, but it's funny that the suggested solution (spacers) are basically back to the old 1px transparent gif trick from the 90s/early 00s.
Nothing wrong with the suggestion, but it's just ironic that we seem to be coming full circle again.
Next we'll probably have posts extolling <Table> components for layouts ;)
I watch Netflix at 1.25x and YouTube at 1.5x-2x - but this is mainly because I find some shows/channels a bit too slow at 1x speed.
Some YouTube channels are unbearable at 1x speed due to the slow speaking speed.
3x speed probably is hard to genuinely acquire knowledge effectively for most people - although I have heard of blind people who do 2.5x-3x with ease, so who knows.
Yep true, although it's not just laptops. I often see 'high end
editing PCs' with 16GB of RAM, which is possibly sufficient for 1080p editing, but nowhere near enough for 4K editing for multiple programs open.
I guess it's similar to how some laptops/budget desktops still have hard drives, even though an SSD wouldn't cost much more but it'd offer great performance benefits.
I wonder how the developer(s) felt, who had to push that PR.