Hello, DC!  :-* Hope everyone's doing fine.

Just popping in to urge everyone to check out Steve Ramsey's selection of best movies of 2018, I think it's a fascinating list. Those of you who are into woodworking have probably heard of Steve, this is a side channel he maintains where he rarely posts. His picks are mostly lesser known movies, which is what makes it so good, IMO. Great list! Do yourselves a favor and watch!



Happy 2019 to all!

I got the 2nd gen Echo Dot. I've never been a fan of voice commands, talking to Siri only confirms how daft this category of AI really is. The Echo's introductory price was ridiculously low, they were all but giving them away so I got one just to see what the fuss was about.

As expected, it wasn't anything revolutionary, the responses are mainly hardcoded to certain keywords. Alexa has no real AI to speak of, if she doesn't recognize a keyword she's at a total loss.

Some things work great though - setting quick reminders, doing calculations or defining a word are all really convenient, but none of these make the Echo a must have device.

The speaker is shit for listening to music but the new gen devices have a line out, so I hooked it up to my mac, which in turn is hooked up to my main sound system. I connected my Spotify account and O.M.G - the convenience of listening to any song (without compromising sound quality) in an instant is truly revolutionary. Understanding the concept really doesn't do it justice, you have to actually use it so realize how bloody wonderful it is. I can't recommend this enough to anyone whose setup allows them to hook the Echo up to a proper sound system.