ColonelPanic

I'm not entirely sure how cheques work being that I've not used one in about 15 years, but I'd imagine they give a cheque from an account with no money. Because cheques are awful the money will appear in your account for a time period by which you are given the illusion of getting legit money. They ask you to buy something like jewellery or gift cards and ask for it back at the end, maybe letting you keep a bit of it for yourself. A while goes by and the cheque bounces, which means you're then on the hook for the cost of everything you purchased and the scammer gets a ton of free items that they can then sell on.

Nor-fuck in the UK, so sort of close I guess.

Line must go up

I definitely find it harder to think of words when I'm talking to people and it seems like something that came about after COVID. Also, I have a much shorter fuse now and seem to get annoyed almost randomly.

It's fine, they'll just suggest a new generation of baby boomers to get the population back up again.

It's not hugely complicated but instead of me having to ask an assistant everything, I let HA tell me everything through various speakers based on the state of sensors around the house at appropriate times.

When I wake up in the morning and go downstairs it'll detect my presence, and if it's a work day it'll inform me of weather, traffic (as well as a suggested time to aim to leave by) and a basic schedule of my day, then it'll stick some music on.

As it gets closer to the time to leave it'll chime up again telling me I have x minutes left to get ready, but only if it detects me in a room so I definitely hear it.

All that is controlled by HA automatically and isn't something you'd ever get from any of the big players, because they don't have the sort of information and stats that HA does.

If I set a timer in Google Home then it'll become available to HA through it's integration and I'll pop up a timer bar on some of the displays I have dotted around so I can track the time left without having to talk to the assistant, and as any timer gets close to expiring then it'll even show a message on the TV saying which timer is about to activate.

There's a few smaller things that just make life a bit easier too, like turning speakers off in rooms that aren't active, or integrating my dumb doorbell into HA using an RF receiver so I can automate doorbell presses.

Home Assistant is currently working hard on assistants. I've not used it much yet but their text to speech offers so much more than any of the larger companies in just customisation alone, plus it all runs locally.

I have Google Home devices all over but they currently mostly act as a dumb speaker and I just get HA to do all of the heavy lifting. The most Google does is set timers and even that just goes into HA for most of the processing.

You're fine unless something happens to PayPal.

Not tried in a while but it used to just be a case of leaving it disconnected from the net during setup.

Failing that you can still sign up with a throwaway account and convert it to local in the options after installation iirc. It's not ideal but it's still something at least.

Could anyone with more knowledge confirm, but couldn't they just do what some car companies are doing and have a system by which you can just disable keyless entry when it's parked up at night?

If I'm at home and my car is parked up where the key could potentially be repeated then I just disable it by locking the car using the key and tapping on the door handle, which disables just tapping the door handle to unlock it again, and only the unlock button on the key works. As far as I understand it resolves this issue, unless I'm missing something?

Also Blåhaj...

Currently running a desktop on W11 on "unsupported hardware". Even managed to get it onto a 15 year old machine running a first gen i7 920 and not even a hint of a TPM module as an experiment and it worked perfectly fine.