Is it just me or has Alexa become garbage?

For a while Alexa hasn’t worked as well for me as my wife, but lately things have gotten so much worse.

We have 4 Alexa devices in our house, and we use it mostly to play music, set alarms and cooking timers and activate devices with voice control. My wife also makes shopping lists, though they aren’t compatible with shopping list program I use so I don’t it for that.

My issue is how much Alexa actively ignores me, like when a reminder comes on and it just won’t stop (unless I mark it done on my phone).

And even with music attached to my Apple Music account it often can’t find songs, but lately it won’t play songs, or they take a while to start and then only play half way through and stop. This seems to happen about 60% of the time of late. Maybe it is the Apple Music thing, but I don’t pay for Amazon music above my Prime membership.

And Apple music doesn’t explain why I will be talking to one Alexa and ask it to play music and it will play music in another room about 25% of the time. And it isn’t like it can heard me from the other room. I can’t seem to get it to do this with commands myself and it just makes zero sense. Why would it play in another room and not the Alexa that is responding to me?

And I use it to control the light in the Baby’s and I would say that is about 33% successful. It works less than it doesn’t, and I am repeating myself. It is great when it works, but is super frustrating when carrying a screaming baby to get a diaper change.

And then there are the creepy ads that show up all over social media when my wife and I talk about things around Alexa. I fucking hate targeted advertising!

And now they are talking about making a paid tier of Alexa to make it better. Really? Fix what exists first!

Honestly if I could get a bunch of Apple HomePods for cheap enough I would love to replace our Alexa’s! At least Apple places some value on privacy, though I am sure there will have to be new models to deal with Apple Intelligence when that comes out and those will cost more!

Los Angeles International Children’s Film Festival Presents Ukrainian Documentary Filmmaker Marusya Shuvalova this Sunday Sept 1

I wish we could be there as we have been looking forward to this for so long, but unfortunately our newborn precludes us from going out much right now, but if you have a chance, please go see this!

Check out there website, facebook, and instagram.

Dramatically updated Color Management in Premiere Pro Beta

Adobe Announced in their Beta Community, a dramatically updated Color Management in the latest Premiere Pro Beta. This one sounds absolutely huge and is something we have all been clamoring for for a long time!

Here is what has changed.

  • Each sequence’s color management is easily configurable in the Sequence controls of the Settings tab of the Lumetri panel. By default, color management works similarly to the Premiere Pro color workflows you’re already used to when using the default Direct Rec.709 (SDR) preset. Alternately, you can choose to use one of our wide-gamut color processing presets to maximize the image quality of all grading and timeline effects when using wide-gamut or wide-latitude source media. Regardless of how you choose to work, Lumetri and other effects have been made color space aware, so they work well in any preset.
  • Users who don’t want to use automated color management can now turn it off from within the same Color Setup menu. This is useful for pass-through workflows when you don’t want the color space of media being processed at all, or when engaging in traditional display-referred grading workflows using LUTs and manual adjustments.
  • Premiere Pro now automatically color manages camera raw media, including Apple, ARRI, Canon, RED, and Sony raw media formats. As long as color management is enabled, raw clips will be automatically processed.
  • The Override Media Color Space menu has been expanded to support even more color spaces for more cameras and formats, making it easier than ever to color manage media that were either recorded or transcoded to standard file formats such as QuickTime and MXF, without needing to track down the right input LUT.
  • For clips you don’t want to be automatically color managed, a new Preserve RGB setting in the Color tab of the Modify Clip dialog prevents input to working color space conversions, allowing you to manually convert clips either using LUTs or manual filter adjustments.
  • Program MonitorVideo ScopesTransmit, and Media Export all output the image as it appears after conversion to a new Output Color Space setting. While the working color space lets you choose how media is processed, the Output color space lets you choose the specific color space you want to monitor (SDR, HDR PQ, or HLG) and deliver your program to. This guarantees that the working color space never needs to be changed, while making it easy to change color spaces at any time to create multiple deliverables using the same grade (e.g., delivering both HDR and SDR versions of the same sequence).
  • Improved tone mapping algorithms and new gamut compression settings improve quality when automatically converting wide-gamut source media to standard dynamic range. Additionally, there are now two ways  of using tone mapping, on input or on output.
  • Premiere Pro color management has been improved to enable smoother interoperability and color consistency using Dynamic Link for round-tripping color managed sequence clips between Premiere Pro and After Effects whenever you use the Replace with After Effects composition command.
  • Last, but certainly not least, if you import projects and sequences created in older versions of Premiere Pro that have grading and effects already applied, these will automatically be configured to appear the same as before, while the color management will function exactly the same as before. If you decide you want to override these legacy settings and use the new color management, you can override the custom settings the sequence was set up with and choose a different color management preset (and you can use Undo if you find this was a mistake).

Now this could be huge and no matter what is going to be a big change so I look forward to playing with this. I hope they come up with something like DaVinci Resolve has to deal with the QuickTime color shift issue, but I doubt it.

A Federal Judge has declared Google a Monopoly, what will it mean for Firefox and it’s parent Mozilla


Since a Federal Judge has declared that Google is a monopoly and specifically that it paying other companies for the top search spot in browsers like Safari and Firefox is monopolistic, I see a serious unintended consequence. People are wondering what will happen to Google, but I wonder what will happen to Mozilla and specifically Firefox, which I have long considered the best desktop browser around (I specify desktop as I am forced to use Safari on my iPhone and iPad, or at least a WebKit browser).

Mozilla releases Firefox for free and the company has long struggled to make money in any way besides selling Google its prime search engine spot. And since it is likely that the Judge will stop Google from making such payments, I wonder how long Mozilla will survive.

And ironically this will also benefit Google’s chrome browser, as without Mozilla there will be so few alternatives to Chrome, especially that run their own separate engine as Microsoft’s Edge, Vivaldi, Opera and Brave are all already based on Chromium. And sure these other chromium browsers don’t all share your data with Google as Chrome does, but the internet should not all be controlled by one company! And right now there is basically chromium, Gecko from Mozilla and WebKit for Safari, so breaking this monopoly could actually leave only Chromium and WebKit left.

And I prefer Mozilla because of its customization. Unfortunately they now have the same plugin architecture, but I can still customize Mozilla much more and am not having more of my data used by Google to make money off it.

And the less competition, the less chance of google improving Chomium.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-rules-google-broke-antitrust-law-search-case-2024-08-05