A fellow Marlboro Coors Lite Ford Chevy SUV pickup banking insurance sportsball enthusiast, I see

2 years later, somewhere in their sales and marketing departments:

“Hey, you know what would make us even more money?”

“No, but do tell”

“Advertising”

“Genius - how is it nobody has ever thought of this before?”

Roku somehow thinking that the Ferengi rules of acquisition was a how-to guide book.

Jeff Geerling discusses having done the same, in one of his videos.

I have a friend who is graphic designer for a small shop. Customers drop off work at the front desk, and depending on how much effort it works out to be, it can land on his desk.

Some customers insist on explaining to “the designer directly”. They get told/warned that it’s more expensive (hourly) and that the clock starts as soon as he walks up to the counter. And some customers agree to these terms.

It’s always entertaining to hear his stories.

I’m not sure I would use a nation’s strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.

That said, I don’t disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.

Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but that’s where we’re meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.

I’ve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times I’ve had that “finally, this is the one” moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.

I’m not a fan of my handwriting. And I’ve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)

Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldn’t manage.

Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like you’re doing. Likewise for myself, I think.

I find this fascinating. Props to you, of course.

Speaking for myself, my handwriting is far from elegant. In university (40+ years ago) I developed a sort of mashup of cursive and printing, since speed of transcription was fairly typical.

I adore the look of top tier handwriting. I even got into calligraphy when I was in HS.

Since my career has taken me deep into the world of tech, I’ve become twitchy at the possibility of a single point of failure, ie, one copy of something is equivalent to no copies of something, 2 copies of something is equivalent to 1 copy, etc.

As such, I’ll take casual note (eg, my to do list for my ADHD) using Google Keep, so that I can access it and update it from my phone or one of my laptops. For the grocery list, it’s Alexa. For professional notes, it’s a combination of Obsidian and Syncthing.

Speaking of Obsidian, I first learned of it while watching a video of anPhD student describing her massive manual note taking system, following a particular system manually, and then discovering Obsidian.

In your case, yeah, I see no reason to change. It works for you.

“This here’s the Lockpocking Lawyer, and today we’re going to take a closer look at the Flipper Zero….”

A similar suggestion to the other poster:

Try relocating one of the troublesome units to someplace nearby but not mounted to the ceiling. The top of a bedroom dresser, the floor, a bathroom countertop, the top step of the stairs, halfway down the stairs, hanging from a wall (picture hook)… just get creative.

And since you haven’t mentioned it, I presume these are all smoke detectors? Do you have any heat detectors or carbon monoxide detectors installed?

“WHOA THERE DUDE! Geez, didn’t you see that paper cup being blown by the wind?? Totally saved your ass.”

I did that for one neighbour in one apartment complex where we lived. Her laptop sucked ass beforehand.

True, there’s that :)

And of course there are those times that Alexa completely misunderstands. Neither my wife nor I know how it happened, but some months back we discovered “blow job” on our list.

“Alexa, add bananas”

“Alexa, 3 minutes”

“Alexa, add 30 seconds”

I think that’s just about everything I’ve ever used it for.

It really comes down to apps.

The only flag you mentioned that caught my attention was Word and Word templates. I’ve not tried Word templates.

I figure your options are either Libre Office or something cloud based, eg, Google Docs.

One thing you could try is to set up a VM or boot a live CD (USB) and try on the things that most concern you.

Very true, and along the lines of what I was thinking.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a way to establish a voice print. In fact, isn’t that already a thing? Even if it is a little rough around the edges, it wouldn’t surprise me if we were even closer to a higher reliability than thought.

With or without that, consider the copyright infringement suits for someone wanting to protect their song, melody, or whatever. Someone could poke at the 8 keys of a toy piano, and if a music artist’s legal team felt it sounded close enough to the original? The ol’ beatdown-by-seeking-damages trick if not a cease and desist order.

Anyway. If someone has enough money and too much time, they’ll make a case out of anything.

Man, I misunderstood the headline. I thought the AI had created a likeness of her voice, and SJ was going after them for that.

Which begs the question, just how unique are our voices? There’s being distinct, and then there’s being literally one of a kind.

A fartiste, you might say

Love Vivaldi, but when I hit a site that has excess crap on it, I’ll switch to FF and tap the reader mode for a cruft-free experience.

This could cause a fire given the right conditions.

Something tells me it could also cause a fire given the wrong conditions.

(sorry yeah I’ll see myself out)