We ended up using the Co-op to cremate my mum, skipping any funeral services and going with the most basic offerings and it still cost more than I expected. It was darkly funny that when we were paying we were asked if we had a Co-op loyalty card, the exact same one we'd use when buying milk and bread in the shop, and she scanned it and we got a discount.

Thanks :)

She went from diagnosis to death in two months so things were a bit disorienting and just getting a RESPECT form (aka DNR) completed was such a struggle as everyone I spoke to had no record of my previous conversation with the last person I spoke to.

When mum was admitted to the hospice, despite explaining the arrangements we’d made and showing them the paperwork, it was only by chance that one evening I happened to overhear a nurse mention that mum had ascites, which is one of the few things that disqualified her from being able to donate her body. I googled it and realised we would need to arrange and pay for her body to be collected, stored and cremated.

She died the next morning and luckily I was able to get that sorted about 2 hours earlier. I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that if you go through the process of arranging to donate your body to a teaching hospital (which you must do yourself ahead of time) don’t assume it’s on medical records or that anyone will advise you that the body isn’t suitable for donation for any reason. Like all NHS-related things in the UK, the systems are breaking or broken and so are the poor staff, so you need to advocate for whoever needs it and never assume what you said one day will be passed on to the next shift.

VR is like Linux, it will never be used by the masses for the foreseeable future as there's just to much friction in using it. There is an audience for it in its current form though. Having millions of headsets sold, with multiple iterations maintaining the sales figures and multiple companies producing their own models is enough for me to consider it to have "taken off". In the simulator game space, especially cockpit driving and flying games, I think it's fair to say that VR has definitely taken off.

and

https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/generative/deepdream

oh and Google's original repo from 10 years ago with a Python notebook about running it: https://github.com/google/deepdream/blob/master/dream.ipynb

Obviously, this is still possible and many people do maintain blogs and websites for the love of it, the overwhelming amount of internet users are happy using a handful of giant social networks.

Heck, internet dating used to be looked down on as something so pathetic only complete losers did it. The world and the internet has evolved and as much as I miss the wild west days where it felt like anything was possible, the giant corps have taken over and people are too scared to say the word suicide on YouTube lest they be demonetised, so everyone trembles and mutters unalived and everything gets a little bit worse.

I’m rambling, sorry,

So, you can use it for 30 seconds a day to get 2 years of usage. They also mention using it to control your music, the lights in your home and are assuming STT accuracy of 100% using a local model. The fallback of having to manually transcribe it from the audio recording if the STT fails is going to happen often enough that it'll get annoying. You're not going to be sending any messages to people as that will take a lot longer than 30 seconds a day.

I suspect the battery will last about 3 months if you just use it how you'd think it can be used. You would need to really discipline yourself to keep to a limit of 30 seconds of use a day.

I think they will need to end up adding some charging contacts to the surface once they start sending these things out into the wild or sales will be very limited.

How do you know how much time you have left on the ring's battery? Do you have to keep checking the app? Why not just use your phone for notes then.