HomePod Mini is a waste of money, unless you like screaming at your dumb robot that never understands what you want it to do

Setting timers works well though

HomePod Mini is primarily a speaker you can AirPlay to which happens to have some basic voice control functionality. I'd really love them to be a bit more usable (in particular I want to be able to change the app it sends reminders to) but my experience has been that they're fine for music, timers, and basic smart home control.

> they're fine for music

I guess my age is showing, but isn't it just a mono speaker? so much is lost in music without stereo imaging. it's one of the main eyebrow raising things to me about most bluetooth portable speakers. If you're mainly listening to podcasts or playing lullabyes to a kids room, sure, but we're adults here and personally I like listening to stereo way to much for these to be an option.

Definitely showing how deep down the Apple rabbit hole I am but I have a pair of them connected to my Apple TV which are the ones I use for music/TV/games. The single one in the kitchen really only gets used for podcasts and audio from the iPad I have for watching YouTube and trashy TV while cooking.

are you saying you have 2 pod minis that act as a stereo pair? what is that experience like?

Yup, its about as slick as you could ask for. They appear as a single device to anything connecting and then distribute the left/right channels between each other. I've also got the Apple TV set to use them as its default set of speakers, and that handles ARC over HDMI from the TV to send audio from anything else plugged in to them.

Even cheapo BT speakers can “team” together to make stereo. I think it comes standard in BT speaker SoCs and that’s why they all do it.

+1 to this we had a set of HomePod minis for intercom and not only do they not work reliably, but the diagnostics provided when they fail are non-existent, making it hard to improve the setup.

> Setting timers works well though

This is Siri’s primary use case, at least I assume so based on my experience.

As long as the timer isn’t for 50 minutes.

Or between 13 and 19 which intermittently is interpreted as 30 or 40 etc. Maybe it's just my enunciation.

They're nice little speakers that also do well when controlling things through Apple Home, setting alarms, timers, reminders etc.

I'd love to know the % of Alexa Dots (whatever the small ones are called now) that are used for anything more than this.

I have one for settings timers when cooking and playing music.

Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I don't see anything else I would want it to do.

One thing that makes OpenCode stand out to me is the web UI. I host it on my rPi 4B, serving as my AI assistant and remote mobile access to my homelab.

Since the homelab doesn't really have access to any risky data, I just gave OpenCode full Docker access and connect to it through Tailscale on my iPhone https://github.com/pprotas/homelab

It’s not incompetence, it’s malice

Monkey paw curls tight

Microsoft acquires Astral

Wish comes with a cost

That'd be fine, MS is a blue-chip

I'm not worried about OpenAI messing up uv, I'm worried about OpenAI running out of money and cutting an unnecessary team.

This has always been the case, not sure why you’d frame it as a recent development. Not that long ago you even had to PAY for an SSL cert. Domains are nothing new. You always needed a server.

It hasn't. TLS was not needed until recently. Non-TLS sites used to show up in search results. TLS was not mandatory at all. Also ISPs often provided users with a free webspace. So I could just send 1 html file to my host without much technical knowledge and I had a website that people could visit.

Another alternative (apparently the Logi software is so bad that it spawned many of these): BetterMouse. It supports my MX Master 4 https://better-mouse.com/

Second this. BetterMouse supports hoards of features and only charges a one-time fee.

This comment is right, this screenshot is not Claude Code. It’s Opencode.

Won’t even let em keep their laptop

I suspect their equipment is worth a lot more than $1000 USD. Bummer.

Human greed knows no bounds

AI slop article