It’s been a nifty toy in our house ... I’m embarrassed to admit that it gets frequent use from the kids saying, “Alexa, tell me a joke!” or, “Alexa, what does the fox say?”

They have an If-This-Then-That API in it now, and it’s set to work with both Nest and Hue, I believe. Let’s see ... from the e-mail they sent me a while ago:

Even donating for research is stupidly difficult — I assume there must have been some case where somebody had remorse after the fact, and sued or something ... doing *anything* other than just keeping them on ice indefinitely is difficult in ways that just piss me off ... can’t give them to people who desperately want…

No worries. And honestly, my wallet may be able to afford the kids, but my back muscles? Not so much. :) Man, I’ve aged two decades in the last few years!

Yeah, I’m not actually positive ... it could have been $700, although I don’t think so. I don’t think our place cared how many straws there were, it was just a flat fee. Regardless, it’s been a while (we ended up attempting to use them, without success, so that kind of solved itself), but it was certainly a thorny…

I couldn’t help but read this headline as “Google Guns,” and I thought, “really? They’re innovating on guns now? This should be interesting...” :)

They’re so tiny, though! At least judging from ours, they were so much meatier by age one than they were as embryos! :)

You can’t give them to other people — it actually used to be easier to do this, before about 10 years ago, but since then, liability issues have made it almost impossible. And the “keep ‘em frozen” has the problem of the $400+ per year cost. And while we’re pretty much opposite end of spectrum from the “embryo is a…

Well, yes. :) I was counting just the medical costs of the actual IVF cycle (as opposed to all the “normal” costs). The place we used ... Pacific Fertility Something? (it’s been a while) was in the $15k range after we subtracted out other costs (because we’d already paid the higher ones during the initial cycles). I…

That was pretty much our situation exactly — after two wonderful IVF children, we still had half a dozen frozen embryos in storage. Our cost was on the low end of the scale listed — I think around $400 annually — and the choices were to keep paying that indefinitely, or ... well, or spring for another ($15k+) cycle of…

I’m not the original commenter, but I suspect PRMan’s reply was directed at the main article, with a general “you,” rather than at you specifically. Just guessing, though.

It’s a case where I think they have the ... kind of the legal right to do it. After all, it’s their product, and they can charge what they want until somebody makes a better product and undercuts them. However, I find it still unreasonable — at this point, even if I’ve paid them $600 for a year, if I don’t *continue*…

I don’t have a problem with their charging me for their products ... but I’m paying $50/month right now for access to Photoshop and Illustrator, and it just doesn’t feel like I get $600 per year of worth out of that. I bought the products since about 1994 .. I’d skip a year or so, if I could, and then get the upgrade,…

Just as a note, you can actually turn your Audible subscription completely off — no yearly fee — and still retain access to everything you’ve paid for (I think they’re legally required to do that, since the books were sold as a purchase, not a rental). I finally did that about a year ago, after a bunch of hassle, and…

I’m right there with you on the free shipping — I’d have to check my account history, but I suspect our family hits the break even point quickly each year, and that’s not counting the small fortune I find myself spending at Christmas. Google (Shopping) Express has eaten into those a bit for us, but mainly for…

Thanks for all the info! Yeah, I’m kind of amazed that a thing like a Mac Mini can exist with any sort of reasonable graphics components at all .. at least without melting into a puddle of goo. And really, the discreet card on my Macbook Pro seems surprisingly good at not going into jet-engine mode all the time..…

That’s a very good point. When I think of it, I probably also started focusing more on laptops when I didn’t have a good place to use my desktop machine during the evenings, the way I used to. Now that we have a living room that doesn’t easily keep a desktop around, I just sit on the sofa with the laptop ... but if I…

I have to admit that I miss the full-on frequent customization that I used to get with my big boxes. Doing iOS development for a number of years, I looked up one day and realized I was using the same MacBook Pro from 2009 for 5 years ... completely the opposite of my old habits (and partly because I don’t get to game…

Fair enough — as I said, I used towers for years and was very happy upgrading all the guts. I guess mostly at this point instead of building true gaming machines, I go with kind of the B+ of gaming systems — discreet graphics cards that can play most modern games reasonably, but not the cutting-edge ones I did when I…

Good ol’ Teddy Ruxpin! He was after my time, but my younger brother played with him.