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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I recently traveled abroad. Flying back to the US I was one of about 10 passengers on my flight that was randomly selected for an extra search that I guess the TSA requires of flights coming into the USA. I couldn’t create my boarding pass in the airlines app ahead of time. I had to check in at the airport, and the airline employed explained that it was because of this random search. He had to print a physical boarding pass, and pointed out it had the code AAAA printed in big letters across the top. This lets everybody know I was one of the lucky random winners.

    At the gate, prior to boarding, they called up the names of all of us who had been chosen. They had a list, so they knew who we were. They confirmed our ID again & the boarding pass, then swabbed us down along with our carry-ons and put the swabs in an explosives detector.

    No idea why all that required a physical boarding pass, but it did. Until the TSA moves into the modern age they’re likely going to continue demanding paper boarding passes. And we all know how quickly government organizations upgrade the technology they use…






  • That applies to public spaces, yes, but not ALL spaces. I’m on the board of directors for a small non-profit organization that expanded their facility a few years ago. We had to prove for ADA compliance that one floor of our facility was restricted in its use and not for public access. If we had been required to make it publicly accessible then it would have required an elevator, which would have been so expensive that it would have put an end to that expansion project before it even started. The public spaces are all fully ADA compliant. Those private spaces are not.

    Also, like most building code requirements etc. the ADA only comes into effect with new construction or when the renovations to an existing property exceed a certain threshold (I forget the specifics). There are plenty of older buildings out there that aren’t fully ADA compliant.

    I know people who live on 3rd floor walkups that were likely built 100+ years ago with narrow curved stairs as the only way in or out. If you want to replace a delivery person with a robot in places like that then wheels won’t cut it.





  • Any army that treats their troops as “cannon fodder” deserves not only all the casualties they rack up, but the long term social, political, and economic hardship that is pretty much a guaranteed result of such a policy.

    The constant rounding up & minimal training of “cannon fodder” is expensive both in the short and long term. Better to protect well trained resources and have them continue to gain experience by using more advanced weaponry that minimizes risk to them.




  • I’m sure you know what xkcd has to say about standards

    Back in the 90’s before this whole internet thing started taking off I was heavily involved with Microsoft’s effort to create a telephony API (TAPI) that was meant to standardize all manner of telephone equipment. The problem is that it has to be overly broad in order to support everything from a dial-up modem to fax machines to the telephone systems used in large corporate offices, and everything in between.

    I remember testing a TAPI program I wrote on different types of hardware. I wrote and tested it on a handful of smaller systems that handled a dozen or so phone lines. The first time I tested it on a large enterprise phone system it failed miserably. That enterprise system had a feature that I never anticipated so my code didn’t handle it properly. In a nutshell, if you placed a call on hold then that system assumed you were placing a new call and you immediately got a dial tone. My code assumed when a call was placed on hold that that was all that happened.

    I can see similar issues with a broad standard like Matter/Thread. There will likely be devices out there that behave in unanticipated ways, and testing them will be difficult unless you have the physical device. But hopefully, given the backing of all those big companies, they’ll have a good handle on this. It should be able to let end users gracefully handle edge cases, etc.


  • I took a very cursory look at HomeKit a while ago and found its ability to create complex automations rather limited. For example, our washer & dryer are in our basement, and we can easily forget we have loads of laundry being washed/dryed when we get busy with the rest of our days.

    We now have an automation that will text me and/or my wife when a laundry cycle finishes. But it only alerts us if we’re home, and only whoever is home so can go take care of it. If nobody is home when the cycle completes then it waits until one or both of us is home, and then it alerts us. It also won’t alert us overnight but will wait until morning. So if we start a load of laundry at 10pm it doesn’t wake us up at midnight but instead waits until 7am to alert us.

    I’ve implemented this in both Home Assistant and Indigo without too much difficulty. Not sure how easy it would be to do in HomeKit though…

    That’s one of the more complex automations I’ve created, but I have a few others that are up there as well.