Does anyone have one of these devices and if so what do you use it for?
They look like bobbins to me.
I might get some use out of one by shouting obscene commands at it - for the fun of it.
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Yes.
It controls all my three lounge lamps. All have lifx bulbs.
I have various mood settings for normal light. I could also shout lights 70 percent and they dim accordingly.
Music listening moods with different coloured options set as well.
It is also connected to my plug socket for the tv system. So I can turn everything off by voice.
It saves me reaching for plugs and it’s great to go to bed and just have to say two words and the room shuts down.
It’s only going to be good if you know what you want it for in advance.
I can think of some everyday actions I could automate by voice command but wonder if those actions would really be any more convenient/better/quicker than using the appropriate knob, switch etc
For controlling a lighting ‘set-up’, if you have one, I can see how it could be useful.
The tasks I would like to automate are still too complicated for the technology I think.
I know what you mean. When I used to go out to work it would have been handy to set one of these up to do that for me.
VB
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Sonos One is recently out - incorporates the same functionality as the Echo, but much better noises, and not much more £$£$£$.
Excellent, pointless solution looking for problems that people don’t have, now has competition. Fan fucking tastic 
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having tried one (Sonos) and sent it back - it doesn’t support anywhere near the amount of Alexa skills that the Echo does and actually doesn’t sound that much better (my bro has an Echo) to my ears. Think I might get an echo for the landing then I can get it to play hands free when I am in the bathroom…
I keep looking at them, as I want a quick way to switch between 6music and radio 4 on my Kitchen Sonos. I can’t think of a single other use for it other than transmitting every conversation I have to GCHQ.
Apparently the Sonos integration is shite, so I’ve decided not to buy one.
In fairness, the Sonos sounds about 100 times better than the Amazon speaker.
My kitchen Squeezebox Boom is wonderful: press 4 for radio 4, 6 for 6 music. It’s such a shame that these are no longer made.
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now there is a point - I have a Squeezebox Radio sitting doing sod all in the spare (junk) room…and it has presets for internet radio. Can you run a SB device without running LMS? I stopped running LMS on my NAS ages ago as it was flakey
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mysqueezebox.com is still live, although it’s limited in what you can do compared to running a local server.
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I have a Squeeze box Boom in the house somewhere… It was always flaky as hell, although it could have been the PSU. I’ll drag a PSU home from work and test it (assuming I can find it)!
I have 3 booms and a radio, they are always rock solid except for when there is a networking issue. I run the server on a raspberry pi, which again has uptime in the months.
I’m convinced that 99% of the problems that people had with those things were always either network or a crappy server.
One working Squeezebox Radio - lets see how stable the LMS is on my Synology NAS now. When I stopped using it about a year ago, it was constantly failing (server dying on the NAS, not a network problem). I suppose I could run a server on a Pi if all else fails.
If it’s a new’ish QNAP try container station, I’m running LMS on this without any issues.
It’s worth it for the RP flac stream alone.
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its a 3 year old Synology NAS
If you can, make sure you are running 7.9
It’s very stable and there have been lots of worthwhile performance improvements added since the old logitech 7.7.2 build.
I’m on 7.9.1.xxxx. But as per my recent experiences LMS starts on the NAS ok, but just dies after a period of time