I have 2 Coway air purifiers, they have no cloud stuff. They work really well.
While this is impressive: Why not just get a not-cloud one in the first place? Why does an air purifier need to be controlled via wi-fi?
I'm against a lot of smart home things because its actually more maintenance, not less, to have to think about an object connecting to wifi, to have to decide whether or not to control it (what are you even doing to it?) And I suppose to have to write your own drivers or app. Why allow it to occupy this much mental space for you?
It’s just a remote control. Why did the tv started coming with a remote control. It’s convenient.
Setting up almost never takes more than a few seconds for me. I have Apple home, it’s almost always scan a QR code, wait a few seconds for wifi and done.
Not sure about air purifier, but I have a Midea dehumidifier and it publishes runtime and setpoint info I pull into Home Assistant along with power draw from a smart plug. I can see how often it's running at different times of the year and how much it costs. Ended up saving some money tweaking it from 50 to 55 after seeing runtime and A/B testing both.
Also auto on/off. If you put Home Assistant app on your phone, you can wire up automations that turn things on and off depending on whether or not you're home. Could also have Home Assistant pull in air quality/pollution info for auto on/off. High pollen count today? Keep it running so I sleep well. Low pollen count? Turn it off.
Maintenance is minimal. I set the dehumidifer up 2 years ago and haven't touched it since or had a single issue. Main thing is a) get it working, b) get it isolated from internet, c) never touch or patch it.
Once the data is in Home Assistant, I can also look for correlation with wearable health info. Does purifier running improve sleep? Does changing thermostat set point improve sleep?
What I like about IoT is the idea of hacking them :-). Of course I don't want connected devices running proprietary firmwares anywhere near my LAN.
Also one thing is that when a company sells an IoT device, maybe they mass produce it and it's cheap. Whereas if you wanted to build it yourself, it would be harder. Getting relatively good and cheap hardware and putting your own software on it is nice!
The article explains why: the author’s wife cranks it up for white noise while they sleep, and the author wanted to tie that into their existing “go to sleep” home automation.
>> Why not just get a not-cloud one in the first place? Why does an air purifier need to be controlled via wi-fi?
It is convenient to be able to monitor air quality from your phone, sourced from a device that is designed to improve it. Because then you can see how much of an impact it is actually making, move it to a different location with better airflow, etc.
I have the non-wifi version, and have to use a separate device for it.
I just occasionally move them. I know it is working because the pre-filter needs cleaning often enough. Does it really need "monitoring"?
One of the nice things about air purifiers, unlike owning a boat or leaving a stove on, is that its never going to surprise you in a bad way. You don't need to really monitor anything, it will just purify some air. Do you really want to be bringing that under the umbrella of the stuff you monitor? Maybe this is an irreconcilable difference and we cannot see it the other person's way.
Camera Nocta. I started making an Android app to take better black and white photos of my wife, and it snowballed into a full fledged film-styles app for both Android and iPhone (if I ever get app store approval). It's best for portraits (tuned for a lot of skin) and fashion photography.
The RAW pipeline is my own, with my own denoise, because I hate the "skin waxing" that bad noise reduction and AI seem to do. So there's lots of natural grain. The UI is somewhat opinionated because geared towards more shooting and less editing. The editing tools are my own ideas regarding how to push color (more like dye and pigment than like saturation tools).
It's out on Android, but the Test Flight has more users (1,478) than the released Android app I think. Every single artist that showed interest online used an iPhone, so I guess I should have expected that.
Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is exceptional, much better IMO than the Tolkien translation. So I'm very excited for this.
The audio performance of it by Bill Wallis is also a family favorite:
That seems wildly incorrect. In the US the bottom 50% are closer to ~3% of federal taxes.
The top 1% pay about 38%. The top 0.1% is simply not a lot of people and not helpful for thinking about how much you can juice them in absolute dollar amounts.
You are bending a word to mean things it has never in its entire history meant. There is absolutely nothing intrinsic about democracy that protects minorities.
There is nothing intrinsic to democracy that means you need to have a constitution. This should be obvious since many democratic states and organizations have no constitution! The UK has no formal constitution, neither does Israel. Canada also has no single constitution document. There are probably lots of non-democracies out there that have constitutions. It's completely orthogonal to whether or not a place is a democracy.
Ok, there might narrower and wider definitions of Democracy: "Under a narrow definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections, while broader definitions also link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy)
But Germany has a constitution and it allows to ban parties, that act against it. Would you say, that makes Germany not democratic?
Medium and long term I expect this to become the default enterprise choice, simply because Google will avoid faux pas, scandals, or reputational hazards of competitors (like Meta). I could be wrong of course, but like Apple signing up for Gemini I think its how how most biggish deals will go.
Gemini Enterprise sent us the greatest slop deck ever, they obviously did not look, and it lost them any chance of our business. The cloud platform is becoming user hostile under Kurain with examples of forced product migration to charge us 4x (I'll never forget this). The slop is out of hand.
I recommend building in-house over any Google offering (all Big Ai for that matter). Agents aren't that hard, open source alternatives are more popular and adaptable. Google is the 21st century IBM. The people who made that company what it was are gone, now we have whatever it is you want to call them.
they don't require 30 years saved up, only showing (somehow) that you will be able to generate such a pension equivalent over time. I suspect that will be very squishy in practice.
Seriously. That's such a fuzzy number. Why not just say X yen? None of us have a crystal ball to tell us if our investments will make the traditional 8% interest or not.
> Draft Revisions to the Guidelines for Permission for Permanent Residence (Summary)
...
> Regarding the positioning of the "Permanent Resident" status of residence:
> ・ Explicitly stated for the first time that, as it is "the most stable legal status—entailing no restrictions on activities or duration of stay and presupposing a lifetime spent in Japan"—there is a "need for particularly careful screening."
...
> Regarding "2. Requirement for Independent Livelihood"
> ・ Underlying Principle: Explicitly requires an economic status equal to or better than that of Japanese nationals, both currently and in the future.
> ・ Income: Whether income consistently meets or exceeds the average income level of Japanese households based on household size (raising the standard).
> ・ Pension: Whether the projected future pension benefit amount reaches the level corresponding to 30 years of enrollment in the Employees' Pension Insurance at the aforementioned annual income level (newly added requirement; however, financial assets that can cover any shortfall will also be taken into account).
While this is impressive: Why not just get a not-cloud one in the first place? Why does an air purifier need to be controlled via wi-fi?
I'm against a lot of smart home things because its actually more maintenance, not less, to have to think about an object connecting to wifi, to have to decide whether or not to control it (what are you even doing to it?) And I suppose to have to write your own drivers or app. Why allow it to occupy this much mental space for you?
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