The German “ICON” model uses a spheroid shape that escapes me right now, but each grid cell is effectively a triangle. Most others are gridded squares.
I keep hoping for a Microcenter in either Portland or Seattle but alas, I get the "we're always looking for new locations" email from their team and a "why not just order it from Amazon" from nearly everyone else.
SLA contracts, clawbacks, and performance obligations make these pages a bit of a minefield for CSPs. When I was at a top-tier CSP, we had the status page that was public, one that was for a trusted tier of customers, one built for a customer-by-customer basis, and one for internal engineering.
Down Detector can have a poor signal to noise ratio given from what I am assuming is users submitting "this is broken" for any particular app. Probably compounded by many hearing of a GCP issue, checking their own cloud service, and reporting the problem at the same time.
I feel like a kindred soul of sorts with this author.
I’m on my fourth iteration of a smart home setup with HA. Depression, neglect, a feeling that I need to burn it all down and restart, and depression again were all extinction level events for my setup. At one point I had meticulous Grafana dashboards worthy of a Golden Grot that could tell you the concentration of CO2, the pressure waves from the Tonga eruption, a map of Puget Sound gas prices, and other bits and bobs. I had dozens of Airthings sensors, plant sensors, ZWave temp sensors, three weather stations, countless LIFX bulbs, all working in unison to give me a pulse on my house.
Then I had a bout of the existential sads and just stopped looking at the slack notifications when HA connected the dots between a spike in radon and a nearby earthquake. I stopped caring that the CO2 concentration in my office was over 750ppm, or that watering my plants in my office in the winter was contributing to increased particulate in the air. Because I wasn’t listening to the interesting stuff, I stopped listening to the important stuff- alerts about failed drives, dying batteries, and broken updates.
Not caring felt so freeing. I didn’t start things up again until a few months later when I realized I wanted something cool to show in an interview. The cycle started anew.
I have HA but my one principle is that it has to stay invisible.
That means it does things like switching off the lights when nobody is home, measuring temperature that informs heating, switching on certain things based on time etc.
But what it isn't meant to be is a dashboard that I have to look at constantly. All functions I need shall be accessinle with physical buttons, dials or switches.
This is what home automation was supposed to be. You shouldn't be looking at it, it should just help you silently and reduce the amount of things you have to care about.
Turning lights off, closing shutters when it goes dark, handling temperature and CO2 concentrations, etc.
I feel people have a need to look at dashboards, have screens, etc (maybe it's some sort of sympathetic reaction about looking at dashboards all day at work?) instead of letting go. Dashboards should be looked at if something is wrong and automation is failing.
The existential depression cycles that make me wonder why I’m even bothering to do the things that used to bring me joy, or at least keep me occupied, are exhausting.
Learned about this last night and needless to say it was a gut punch. There is a whole generation of us that have Gordon to thank for our monthly pilgrimage to the magazine section looking for the latest edition of Maximum PC. Once a year we were treated to a buffet of hardware with amazingly high specs and prices to match with these Dream Machines later serving as mental checkpoints of the eras fastest personal compute. The. There was the effort that Gordon put into consumer advocacy in his columns, bad parts, badder corporate practices, and he was there fighting for us on the printed page.
Bought it at launch and use it a couple dozen times a week.
For me, the killer function has been doing display mirroring with my Mac and leveraging the environments like Mt Hood or the Moon as a way to get into a focused flow. I love the idea of windowing in a virtual space, but the there is the same feeling of limitation that I get with this device as I get with my iPad. I've used it to capture some VR photos and videos of family, survey the house to identify the source of a water leak, used it for a couple workouts, to play some Xbox games in bed without waking my wife.
Weight only seems to be an issue for me at the 3h mark or so, but at that point I am taking a break. My eyes don't seem to be effected so far and the only visual quality issues have been either due to pancake lense physics or fogging up when the device is cold. App quality has been okish for the most part. I periodically check the app store for something new, but so far nothing that feels incredible. I'll probably buy a MetaQuest Pro after this just to see what that is like
I'm ultimately waiting for the ultrawide enhancement they teased earlier this year and hoping they add a few more environments.
