In alt.home.repair, on Wed, 02 Jun 2021 18:54:17 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

On Wed, 2 Jun 2021 17:50:29 -0400, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 6/2/2021 5:20 PM, Dean Hoffman wrote:
Amazon will automatically connect your devices to something called
Sidewalk Network. Fortunately, I don't happen to own any of them. The article talks about Ring and Echo devices. It has a link to a list.
https://www.theverge.com/22463257/amazon-sidewalk-privacy-how-to-opt-out



They mention Ring camera. I don't see it on my Ring doorbell. I did
opt out on the Echo though.

When I bought this house two years ago, part of the Smart Home system
included an Echo and a Dot. Those two devices are still in their boxes.

I actually paid money for one of those, probabl the Echo.

It works pretty well at moderate volumes, but i use it mainly when I'm
trying to fall asleep, and at low volumes, a lot seems to be mumbling.

Webpages suggested getter a bluetooth speaker, What! I just bought
this, which has a speaker and they want me to buy a speaker for the
speaker! I was ticked. But a few days later it dawned on me that it
was right next to my fairly new table radio which has aux, usb, and
bluetooth inputs. So I use that to play what should be coming out of
the Echo, and it works much better. It's not muddled at low volumes,
plus the radio has 30 volume levels and the Echo has only 7 I think. If
it was too loud and I turned it down, it wasn't loud enough, and vice
versa.

It plays off the wifi, and you can say Play Cartalk and it will play the
latest rerun. C-span radio is good on Saturday nights after 11PM ET,
they play lectures about history, mostly, at bookstores, like Poetry and
Prose in DC, and others around the country.

I'm pretty sure** it has Science Zone Radio too, if you're tired of
listening to politics, AM radio, sports or music. It's all science all
day and all night long, some of it really interesting.

You can also say, Play soft music, or Play slow music, etc. but various
versions of tha didnt' work well. In one case it was interrupted by
louder commercials iirc. When I used other words, the andante movement
was followed by a scherzo that woke me up. My friend told me to try
Chopin, and the first time was pretty good, but by coincidence, my
problem sleeping disappeared about then, or I found a news show that I
liked.

Another probem with echo is that it's harder to change stations and to
change back. You have to say something and then wait at least a couple
seconds. With push button tuning on a table radio you change in a split
second. But if I want to change from the Echo, I turn th volume down
until I can't hear it and then I turn on another radio. that's easier
than changing from Bluetooth to FM, losing and having to reestablish
later the bluetooth connection to Echo (although I think I'm actually
wrong about that and all I have to do is go back to bluetooth mode on
the radio and it connects again.) But when I change to FM and break
the bluetooth connection, then Echo starts playing directly and I have
to stop that.

Also once in a while even when I speak clearly, it claims to not
understand.



**I think it has it because it's on Tune-in. It's also in radiomaximus,
but that's not directly playable via wifi, only via the PC.