Thomil's Random Ramblings

So, Ireland has been on the highest lockdown level again since midnight on October 21st. To be fair, this was kind of inevitable, given the massive explosion in COVID cases in recent weeks, something that was accompanied by an equally worrying increase in the percentage of COVID-19 tests coming back positive. However, unlike the complete lockdown back in spring, this lockdown is not quite as severe, as cafés and restaurants can still sell take-aways, while the definition of “essential” retail stores was expanded somewhat. Still, the effect has been immediate and somewhat severe, something not helped by the usual shower of anti-mask cranks, racists, neofascists, religious nuts and other malcontents raising a huge stink. This time, the impact has been a bit more personal though. I’m currently half-way through a two-week time off period that was more than overdue! A few days before this time off was supposed to start, I started feeling a bit sick. A persistent cough, a tingling soreness a...

So, over the last couple of months, my blog has seen quite a few posts about Amazon products... if you ignore that embarrassing break over the summer months that is. That’s simply because bit by bit, I’ve found their products to actually be quite useful in my everyday life. Granted, not all of them are equally useful all the time, but all in all, they’ve really been useful in completing my smart home setup here at home. Anyway, for this article, I’m going quite a ways back, all the way back to January 1st of this year, to be precise. On that day, I published a long-planned article about my experience in setting up a smart home in my apartment here in Cork. At the time, I already had a pretty extensive setup, and on the whole, not that much has changed since then. I’ve added another speaker, while still waiting for a decent offer for a robot vacuum to roll around. There has been one major change however, and that is the arrival and integration of two more Amazon Echo speakers. The speak...