Amazon Prime (not the leader of the Autobots nor an incredible simulation)

It's also useful for asking how tall celebrities are.

lol

can you ask how tall Tom Cruise is and then yell "YOU LIE, ALEXA"

i want one so that amazon can listen to me all the time/craft a superior consumer experince

My parents are visiting and my dad refers to this speaker as "the woman who lives in the ceiling" but when he said, "Alexa, play Boston" and "More than a Feeling" came on, he was pretty impressed. My mom is convinced this is a government conspiracy to invade our privacy.

Crazy woman. It's a capitalist conspiracy to invade our privacy, not a government one. DUH.

the capitalists provide the means through which the govt invades ur privacy

like the nsa is prob already on top of back-dooring these things so they can open the mic permanently and store records of all the important convos that go on around these special robots

good point. I always forget we're living in a plutocratic corporatocracy. All that "no no this is a democracy" indoctrination is deeply rooted.

what do people buy using prime now

Uh everything?

had food poisoning, used prime now to have gatorade delivered to my door stat after copious vomiting

Amazon Echo Dot and Tap just announced. Been waiting for something like the dot, since we have wanted to use voice commands throughout the house instead of always yelling in the general direction of the kitchen. Ordered a Dot for the living room to control our TV through the Harmony remote.

Is there a thread where we discuss Amazon Prime series? We watched the first two eps of Catastrophe -- not amazing and not worthy of its own thread, but entertaining enough.

there's a lot of mixed commentary on netflix threads and a few others. there was some talk of man in the high castle

theres a p good profile of sharon horgan in this wks new yorker -- guess she irl wanted to name her daughter Muireann (instead named her Sadhbh)

and relatedly, i really like the newsmagazine-ish new yorker show on prime.. has a nice freeformedness and delivers me no urge to binge it, which is refreshing

the other huge beneficiary of prime is my cat, who has a lot of often changing and different sized boxes to be inside of

Same here. My cat often remarks (through me, his conduit) that he would love to invest in amazon if he knew how money worked and could land a steady job

I have cat food cans auto-delivered via prime

How does the New Yorker show compared to HBO's Vice show?

favorably imo but theyre doing diff things

there was a new yorker show on how i guess we really did have the intelligence to stop 9/11 which i had heard but i had no idea how real it was and how terribly it was fucked up by inter and intra agency politics

enraging really but well done

man in the high castle was awesomely produced camp!

Pay $79 to get free 2-day shipping all year! Er. (Do people need their Amazon orders that quickly?)
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, February 7, 2005 6:59 PM (11 years ago)

A valuable historical document.

if only we knew

I guess they're adding their video service as an a la carte thing, for $10 a month or whatever people charge for streaming video these days, if you don't want to go full prime

Man In The High Castle was a fairly faithful adaptation of the book - most of the changes made sense for tv. Not sure where it will go in season 2 though - I think they might abandon PKD's ending and see what else they can do with the alternate history.

Mr Robot was equal parts fun and corny as hell. Into the Badlands is great if you like that sort of thing. Hand of God hasn't gripped me yet.

I was quite happy with my Lovefilm subscription so to have free delivery and unlimited cloud photo storage and a free kindle loan every month and access to a shit music streaming service thrown in is all a bonus.

Evil Corp has won.

is Mr Robot on prime now? I bought it on disc when it came out, really wanted to immediately rewatch

Yes

who here has used PrimeNow? it's dope! i've actually done minor grocery shopping on busy weeks using it (note: not good if you have any kind of particular shopping needs, inventory too limited, but works for me)

Pay $79 to get free 2-day shipping all year! Er. (Do people need their Amazon orders that quickly?)
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, February 7, 2005 6:59 PM (11 years ago)

A valuable historical document.
― Alba, Friday, April 22, 2016 9:51 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

11 years later, I'm still with Ned.

screw that I got a cat o' nine tails real fast when i needed it

Tbh I get disgruntled when I order something not from Amazon and it takes the better part of a week.

if it doesnt arrive next day (as it is in the UK) you complain and you often get an extra 30 days free prime added on. I reckon my father has got well over a years free prime from them :)

pry my prime out of my cold dead hands etc

Prime is awesome.

really noticed in the last year or so that amazon has slowed its regular free shipping waaay down, presumably to get more people to get amazon prime.

Yeah, and they already jacked up the free shipping base to like $35-50 an order. On Prime, I can make a bunch of small change and/or impulse orders (great for gifts or things I just know I can't get locally easily) without the waiting game. Between that and the other benefits (Streaming, AutoRip* etc.) easily justify the cost. Just wish the shipping perks extended to more of the Marketplace, which is still as inconsistent as ever, shipping-wise.

*I was in the hospital for about two weeks a little over a year ago. My AutoRip'd Prime Music on my phone (don't 'do' Spotify) was a lifesaver.

Hey, here's a question. My family just got me Echo for Father's Day, and really I'm not sure what the hell to do with it beyond asking it the weather. Any suggestions/advice? I'd put off buying it for myself for a reason, and now am struggling to be a good sport, but there must be some real benefits. Right?

I use it to drive all my home automation, mostly lights. You can get bulbs that work directly with it, but I use it in conjunction with a SmartThings hub to control more types of things.

I also link it with my todo all to add items to my todo list or grocery list. Nice because I can build a grocery list as I'm rummaging around in the kitchen fridge/cabinets.

Other than that, weather, news, timers, alarm clock. There was recently a skill released where I can ask when the next CTA bus is coming. That's fun when I can get it to work.

At the worst, you can use it as a decent Bluetooth speaker.

I just wish there was an easy way to have it play music from my collection, but it looks like that only works if I upload stuff with Amazon Music, and that costs money. Obnoxiously, Echo will not stream from the Amazon Cloud, just Amazon Music.

I wish I could just say "Alexa, play iTunes on shuffle" and have it start up all the music I keep on my Mac Mini server.

is there a way you can make it fart on command, that would be father's day gold

Yes, there is a skill for that.

kids never understand that, they think that dads must just be wizards of farting. but no, it's just a mundane skill you can improve at with practice, just like any other.

yea prime pantry is good i sent my mom a box full of lentils, etc

OK, a couple of days in and the Echo is pretty maddening. It's like they've designed this really strong technology based on a good idea and did everything they could to impair its functionality. Sometimes I understand why, even if it's no less frustrating. Like how I mentioned you can only play music stored in Amazon Music (limited to 250 songs for free, an annual fee of $25 for 250K) as opposed to whatever you might have in Amazon Cloud (whether you're paying or not); they want to drive people to use Amazon Music, which is lame but I get it. Other stuff is stupid or vindictive, like how it uses Bing to search and not Google and doesn't let you change it. Along those lines, the only way to expand its functionality is to jerry-rig it with IFTTT, which is erratic and limited at best. And then there's total head-scratcher decisions, like the inability to create and use multiple shopping lists or to-do lists, or the way I can be listening to the news and then my kids can just walk in and say "Alexa, play shitty music" or "Alexa, tell me a joke."

What I really want, and what I assume everyone wants, is an always-on device just like this but not hampered by corporate rival bullshit (or shitty tech like the Echo app itself). I want to be able to walk into my house and say "Dipshit, play my Brian Eno mix" or "Bubba, add Cheerios to my shopping list" or "add pick up kids at school to my wife's to-do list." Right now it can't do this. Or I guess what's frustrating is that it undoubtedly *can* do this, but for now they don't want it to, or want to make it too hard for me to do.

Google has their own version of this coming out soon. Rumor has it it will be even simpler, but I have a hunch it will be more useful, and quickly overtake Echo.

I use my Echo Dot as an alarm clock, and have a speaker in my bathroom I turn on to listen to the news or music in the shower. I just yell "alexa, news!!" at it as I turn the corner and then turn the speaker on, works pretty well

Yeah, that kind of stuff seems to be the best use of its constrained tech. It's an OK speaker, so I think it will mostly be used to listen to NPR in the morning, and I like its pretty sensitive always-on status.

But, like, more annoyingness: It can give you traffic info, but only if you manually add in various destinations, which is stupid, because using a map app like Google's is so much faster and simpler than that. Also, it lacks SMS functionality, so I can't use it to text by voice. Why not? And so on.

It's not... a phone? Phones do SMS, what are you looking for here

Phones can also do most of what Echo can do, too. And then some. But If I'm cooking dinner and my hands are messy, I can't use my phone to text my wife with voice; I have to turn on the phone first. I use my (Android) phone to play music off my server, but that requires using my hands, too; Echo can play music hands-free, but not from where I want it to. My phone can give me traffic and directions, but again, only once I activate it, even using Google Now; Echo can't give me either of those things accurately, unless I program it in. Right now the Echo app is no substitute for various apps (like calendars, or lists) it replaces, but does not allow you to choose alternative apps that either work better or work better for me. Again, it won't even let me add a second, separate shopping list within the Echo app itself, which is crazy. And so on.

I really like the idea of an always-on interface, but this one is hampered. In an ideal world it would be a hands-free smart home hub, and I suppose that is coming, but this is clearly not it.

idk, I can turn my lights on and off with it and set temperature, etc

all of the solutions for that are pretty piecemeal right now but as a single-location hub, it works pretty well

It probably helps that I only paid $99 for my Echo, since early prime members where given the chance to buy it first at a reduced price, so I think it's been well worth that. But really only after I started linking all the home automation stuff into it.

Like I have a routine for bedtime for my kid, I just say "Alexa, turn on Bedtime for Ivy" and it turns the lamp in her room to 10%, turns off the office Lamp, lowers the lights in the living room, and turns on her white noise machine. All of that I would have had to do manually before, and even then I couldn't do the dimming. Of course the echo is just the trigger here and I have to have other equipment to do this, so it's not actually doing that much, but it does work well in this use case.

I have a similar routine for wake up time. Actually two different ones, one for Wake up Kid and another for Wake up Wife.