matthew1471

Nice post but I suppose the true cost of this is never the monetary value that the repair took (the author talks about how monetary wise it was cheap to do) but the time (at least an hour longer than I would have wanted to spend) and while a fun skill to learn it’s probably not terribly repeatable without investing time in how to fix the next broken electronic

AI has become the new RegEx, being used where a string search would have done fine.

I won’t go into too much details (it’s a product I have to evaluate at work so it’s not really my story to tell) but vendor x has put OpenAI in to search metadata when really all I want is a keyword search… maybe with some fancy operators “blue” and DateTime > “2026-09-27 14:00”

Not “the blue thing yesterday” which also allows me to search for words that are slanderous that the AI hallucinates results for.

A search through metadata without AI is fine.

Might be of use : https://github.com/Matthew1471/Enphase-API/blob/main/Documen...

The IQ Gateway authentication is done entirely offline - but you do have to have a device online (laptop, pi, mobile etc) to obtain a JWT to present to it.

Installer tokens are 12 hours, Owner tokens are a year. Some endpoints are only accessible with roles higher than Owner however, see https://github.com/Matthew1471/Enphase-API/blob/main/Documen.... for my scripts (available as the "examples") they're set to renew the tokens automatically where required.

Thanks for the shoutout to my wrapper and docs too :)

My GitHub repo serves 2 purposes:

1. To provide a reusable wrapper (currently only Python, https://github.com/Matthew1471/Enphase-API/blob/main/Documen...) to talk to the LAN API, it's even installable via pip.

2. To document what the LAN API returns and all the URL endpoints (https://github.com/Matthew1471/Enphase-API/tree/main/Documen...).

I would like to see more people using the wrapper so we have a common way of talking to the IQ Gateway (there's a lot of tightly coupled projects on GitHub), but most people seem more interested in the docs I provide and rolling their own wrapper.

I always have plans to add more to it - I found multiple security vulnerabilities in the IQ Gateway and that allowed me to get a dump of the firmware - so there's plenty more URLs for me to write about :)

They call this “Life event marketing” - one of the companies posting physical mail to me declared the name of the company that they got my details from so I could then contact them and ask them to take me off the list.

I have a similarish story - I went to New York once (I didn’t book it). I connected to the hotel WiFi and any other free WiFi in the area. I wasn’t using TLS. I received a lot of New York related spam for a while.. it dropped off after a while - I guess these lists have a shelf-life.

Identifying an issue with the hardware - yeah fair enough. Scanning the ISP’s residential customer range for hacking recon - yes I can see why that might bring a lawsuit.

I don’t port scan my ISP and then complain when they get cross.

I suspect these things will go in waves.. For a while we’ll embrace big tech.. then we’ll hear of aspirations to create a privacy revolution or run our own mail servers and jump on the next big thing.

Case in point Facebook.. it’s still huge but there are plenty of people that have decided they just don’t want a Facebook account anymore and Facebook’s own growth is floundering. Users are fairly fickle, WordPerfect to Microsoft Word, Flickr to Instagram, Instagram to TikTok.. A lot of employers even deliberately default to Bing instead of Google these days.

Look at the dominance Microsoft used to have with the Windows ecosystem, a significant number of people just want a web-browser and couldn’t even tell you what OS they were using.

I don’t think the concern is misplaced, profit driven companies will always strive for vendor lock in and monopolisation if given a choice but nobody is producing tech that someone else can’t.

I think the project is novel and cute.. but in terms of usage given most mobiles these days are used to access content rather than make calls I am not sure of the longterm suitability for most use cases. There’s a lot of “Well just plug it in to something to get even more things” but I am sure having to plug your mobile into a monitor or TV to read your e-mails is going to get boring relatively fast.

Also as already stated most network operators (at least UK ones at least) have a planned death date for 3G, some have already been shutting it down.

When I saw this I immediately thought of the Nokia 3210 reboot (fun and useful for those that want a dumb-ish phone just for calls and/or texts). That said I suspect the phone could be fairly good fun for sending SMS via a PC or making apps that interact via SMS.

I offered free hosting on my site for a little while, the legal issues of what people would do with free storage started to be the biggest problem. We're in a different era now.

Okay I haven't spent very long thinking this through but if we think lower corporation taxes wouldn't lead to an increase in staff earnings (which I completely agree would be the case and for the article to suggest that is offensive) then why not change the corporation tax laws so that it'd be banded? The average salary across the whole organisation that people earn (with different bands for different sizes of businesses to prevent small groups of people making up shell businesses) are then factored into different corporation tax rates.

You could financially incentivise companies to reward their workers, a big business giving its staff generous salaries could then pay almost no tax.. Then you go after the individual's tax instead.

I'm sure there's flaws in this but I think the premise of financially incentivising companies to pay better wages could make the lower corporation tax idea more credible than just expecting it'll magically happen.