Have you ever appeared on Angry People in Local Newspapers? That would be the true claim to fame!
TedZanzibar
joined 1 year ago
The name of an actor from Steven Toast's autobiography Toast on Toast (from the sitcom Toast of London). He's having a huge rant about a film's credits being listed in alphabetical order after being assured that he would get top billing, and poor old Ted Zanzibar is one of only a few people listed below him.
Srsly though, crocodiles have pointy snouts, sort of like an A, and alligators have rounded snouts, sort of like a C.
No, I don't know why they were named the wrong way around.
I do something very similar with my connected dishwasher and Home Assistant. It's way over-engineered due various limitations/odd design choices with the API and the machine itself), but I've got it setup to store the selected program when I press a button on a Hue Tap switch, and then it turns on and runs that program when our off-peak energy rate kicks in - which is better than working out how much to set on the delay timer each evening to start it in the right ballpark.
Of course I've also got it setup to announce the selected program, and that the machine is "armed" via Google Home when the button is pressed, and again each time the door is opened/closed to add new dishes. And it sends notifications to my phone when the program starts (mostly for debugging purposes) and ends.
Like I said, massively over-engineered but it was a fun little project.
I don't have a smart washing machine (yet) but I do have it plugged into a smart plug with an energy monitor. When the power usage drops to near zero for more than 2 minutes it sends a notification to tell me that the cycle is done.
It was two minutes five minutes ago!
OK that's genius, I will definitely look into that!
Elliot. After the main character from Mr Robot.
This reminds me of working for a UK developer back in the PS2 days. From what I remember, one of the coders there wrote a tool that enabled the comparatively cheap QA test kits that would only boot from a CD/DVD to appear to dev PCs as full blown dev kits (that cost 4 or 5 times the price) and boot code pushed to them over the network.
They didn't have as much memory or processing grunt so there was still need for a few proper dev kits, but it saved them a fortune in hardware costs. Pretty sure it was an open secret that Sony reluctantly allowed, and most of the UK dev studios were using it at one point.
I'm not saying Telegram is perfect by a long shot, and they've made some questionable decisions around crypto and paid-for services, but it grinds my gears when people suggest that it's "unencrypted".
E2E encryption means that yours and the other person's device are the only ones that have the keys for decryption and are typically the only places where chats are stored.* The conversation is secured end-to-end.
Telegram has the master copies of your chats on their servers to enable certain extra functionality that you can't get with E2E messengers, but it does not mean that the data is stored or transmitted unencrypted. The data at rest is encrypted and it's encrypted when it travels to and from your device.
Sure, there's the argument that governments could compel Telegram to hand over the keys to your chats, but considering that the platform is outright banned in more than one country with questionable regimes, it's reasonable to conclude that they don't give in to such demands. Honestly, if your government wanted copies of your chats so badly it'd be far easier for them to go through you and your device directly, and then no amount of E2E encryption is going to help you.
All that said, Telegram does actually have E2E encryption in the form of Secret Chats which, while having no method of backup, allows you to have two very different conversations with the same person and provides a level of plausible deniability that E2E only platforms cannot.
*Until you or the other party chooses to export a plain-text backup and store it on Google Drive where it's far easier for governments to subpoena. I'm looking at you, WhatsApp.
The problems with tipping culture aside, the eyes in this strip are just perfect. I love it.
I was with you until you suggested it would use 5kWh every hour. That's an insane amount of power even if they were using an electric griddle, which is unlikely. A small generator would be enough to power the lighting and refrigeration and then the griddle would run on gas, which is way cheaper than electricity (or the petrol for the electric generator).
I'd imagine energy costs would be a fraction of what you've calculated, and would scale up along with any increase in sales volume.
So many Google products are either crippled or completely unavailable outside the US, it's honestly quite ridiculous. I'm still waiting for call recording to be made available in the UK.