alexfoo

You obviously need another agent that is the only one that can run perf tests.

Turtles all the way down.

Sure, the concept of a _Vomit Draft_ is not new, but the ability to come up with one quickly is.

It plays into the generalisation that people aren't good about saying what is the right way to do something, but much more open to saying what something is doing the wrong way.

In a previous job we used to do prototypes in languages like Perl because we couldn't ship them and knocking something non-production ready was easy. We were able to quickly come up with the PoC, iterate on it, and then plan and write the whole thing in $LANGUAGE_OF_CHOICE.

I haven't seen any credible evidence that any of the reputable brands of smart speakers send anything other than what you want to send (e.g. the sentence after you say the watchword) to their servers.

Yes they are constantly listening, but this is just for the watch word (as a cue to start listening/sending) but they lack the on-device ability to convert anything else to text on their own. All they can do on their own is listen out for the watch word.

Certain smart TVs on the other hand, are known to constantly stream audio back to their HQ as they don't have on-board watchword detection.

Of course you can set up firewalls and VLANs to have the best of both worlds. You can remotely interact with an IoT device like this to set them off or check the status, but the device itself can't see anything else on the local network.

I have all of my IoT devices on separate Wifi network(s) and VLANs and almost all of them are isolated so they can't talk to each other, plus I occasionally look at how much data they are sending/receiving from the Internet (some is expected obviously, and it differs by device).

Doing this requires a considerable amount of admin work and IT knowledge though. It also requires something a step above most consumer grade or supplier provided networking equipment.

I've never spotted anything egregious like the coffee maker in the OP but if I did I'd be making sure other people knew about it and the device itself is either firewalled off properly or replaced by a brand that isn't a security risk.

> It was working as designed and they didn't want to check less frequently, despite there being no logical reason to do this.

We had a similar thing, the other team wouldn't back down.

We ended up implementing a kind of rate limiting internally.

If the previous request (from that IP) was more than 4.5 seconds ago we let the check request through as normal.

If the previous request (from that IP) was more recent than that we just returned a cached "there is no update" payload that had a TTL of 60 seconds.

We told them this and left it up to them, they soon changed their polling frequency.

Small areas in Imperial, then you move on to number of tennis courts, then number of football pitches, and then to fractions/multiples of Wales.

That was my first thought. Then I wondered why it was talking about Reading rather than Lincolnshire.

Are you sure that's all it does?

My $150 "smart toothbrush" (some Oral B iO model) has accelerometers to track its head position and the app lets you know if you're not covering certain areas well enough. Since using it properly (i.e. checking the app and adjusting my brushing) I don't have to go to the hygienist as often.

Certain models of the Mk3 Ford Focus (2011-2018) have a wet timing belt.

Needs changing at 100,000 to 150-000 miles or every 10 years.

The 10 year service is a spendy one.

Indeed. Absolutely sterile inside. They could have done so much more with it.

Proposed venue looks in keeping with this theme. Capacity of 600 and I'm sure whatever tickets will be priced to keep the hoi polloi away.

Amongst other films a few scenes in the 1994 MacGuyver movie (Lost Treasure of Atlantis) were filmed inside the power station before it was renovated.