Heck you can even cobble stuff together with Home Assistants and various door/window/presence/water/humidity sensors. I was able to build a notification system when doors, windows, or fence gates are open. Same with panic buttons that alert my SO if any of us need assistance when putting kids to bed without whipping out the phones.
All of that can be loaded into HASS using a $26 Sonoff Zigbee dongle and various Zigbee devices like Aqara and others.
ADT; there’s a program through my employer where employees get deals and so I made first contact with them. I chatted with a salesperson who walked me through a sign up process before I could ask any questions (I made contact saying I wanted to inquire about services and then said we couldn’t talk until he collected all my information).
He said normally it’s $100/mo but with this deal, it’s $75/mo.
No thanks. $900/yr to $1200/yr + installation fee for home security kinda stinks. I was told the equipment wouldn’t work if I didn’t have the subscription.
I’m sure I was taken for a ride too, being told false information (the equipment really wouldn’t work? It’s really $75/mo?). I indeed felt like I was being treated like a mark. At the end I said delete my information but honestly I doubt they did. But who cares because now I got myself into this pretty fun world of home automation and security through Home Assistant and self hosting.
Fair, definitely depends on the cat(s). Our cats will frequently decide to start rough-housing on the bed at 3am, so unfortunately we have to keep them out of the bedroom at night lest our sleep quality suffers drastically. They also need to be kept out for "adult playtime", because otherwise they like to get involved and that isn't the vibe we're going for.
Excellent article and absolutely fair points by the author. As a kid I completely fell in love with the characters and ambiance, but got hopelessly stuck in Act 1. In fact, I don't think I ever made it out.
But man, what a great story and what a beautiful style. I always half expected to see Hollywood pick this up and turn it into a movie. Just imagine what the folks at Pixar could do with this (with Tim Schafer as executive producer, of course).
It’s much too eccentric for the Pixar formula. They are family movies first and foremost. Characters need to be understandable and relatable to an eight-year-old.
The Pixar movie with similar themes is 2016’s “Coco”. It’s a fine production, but the themes are much less adult than in Grim Fandango.
If you're a Google Fi member, they have a nice discount on the price of the phone - but the trade-in value of your existing phone looks to be halved. I can get the Pixel 9 Pro XL with 256GB of storage for $750, but I only get $150 towards my Galaxy S22+.
Not bad, really. My Pixel 6 was being flaky a month ago (not playing sounds reliably), and I needed to fix it right then, so I bought a Pixel 8 from Best Buy for $549+tax and got $220+tax back (described as $70 valued price + $150 promotional) for trading in my Pixel 6. If you consider the $70 as the true value of my flaky Pixel 6, you could say I only paid $399 (plus tax) for the Pixel 8, and now Google's offering me $490 for it if I buy a Pixel 9.
Even so I'm not sure the Pixel 8 -> Pixel 9 upgrade is worth $799 - $490 = $309 (plus tax) to me when the Pixel 8 is brand new and working well.
I think it's a good deal. After-tax price is ~$1082, trade-in is $699, with a $200 store credit ($300 with a Google 1 sub), and $21 back from 2% credit card rewards. So ~$162 cost, which is not much more than the increase in trade-in value. Plus the 1 year of Gemini Advanced and maybe some YouTube premium months.
The main downside is that store credit expires in 1 year. Also I hate buying new phone cases.
Yeah, that sounds perfect. To go from my 256GB P8 to a 256GB P9 Pro would cost me about $610 + 10% tax after trade-in which I don't think I'll have the stomach for.
I'm glad they finally went this route. I can't be the only one who usually wants the specs of the Pro but always opts for the smallest phone (p1, p3, p5 & now p8).
Pretty much in the same boat here. The P9P is around the same size as my P8 (0.1" shifted from depth to width), which is great news. I would pay more for a better camera, but I care more about compactness than camera quality.
As likely anyone on HN is to hold: I have a bunch of old phones.
How harvest sensors, cams, thingamathings and have a new cadre of people who can build plans to take sensor THING from PHONEA and CAMERA from PHONEB and etc... and build a thing where these already known devices can be harvested and incorporated into projects, products, etc... and not landfil.?
I'm so sorry. I only learned about Jake due to his post the other day. I understood this was coming but still felt shock and sadness when I learned just now he has passed. Wishing you much strength.
I'm probably showing my age, but I'm just at awe what is possible in a browser in this day and age. Well done, OP. I'd love a hashed out, full length version of this, but with the same vector graphics.
I mean, WebGL was released in 2011, so this kind of thing was possible for like 13 years. If you go back once again as much, to 1998, the web has barely existed back then.
There were things, like Epic Citadel, a full port of Unreal Engine to the browser (using asm.js, a technique of compiling assembly to Javascript) a decade ago:
Can I ask what it was you found?