Riven

In my experience, if you want to use smart home stuff you really need a hub of some sort rather than connecting everything directly to your phone.

Smarthings is popular, or Hubitat for the more tech-savvy. Or just an old PC with HomeAssistant or OpenHAB installed. All have ways to expose their connected devices to HomeKit/Siri.

If you go the old PC route, just make sure not to buy any ZigBee or zWave devices since they’d need additional antenna dongles (built in to the standalone hubs) to function.

you can use a gif

This is the comment I needed. You’ve convinced me.

Been pronouncing it that way since Idea Channel :)

ʒaɪf ftw

I’m still on 10 myself so I can’t say for sure. I remember I needed to go into device manager and disable but not uninstall the Microsoft stack, and stop it from automatically updating.

It’ll break the Bluetooth settings/control panel and you’ll need to re-pair all devices via the new icon in the system tray. It looks basically the same as the old one and both might be present, so I advise hiding the old one.

I also seem to recall having to change a setting relating to the pairing password. Maybe? Sorry it’s been a while since I got it set up and it’s worked flawlessly ever since so the details are a bit fuzzy.

Windows’ built-in bluetooth stack is famously bad. Try installing the Toshiba one instead. It’s a bit clunky UI-wise, but tends to have less issues.

I’ve heard it’s because your brain thinks (somewhat correctly) that you can’t breathe and releases “clear that clog right now” chemicals.

Holding your breath until you almost pass out works for the same reason, but I don’t recommend it.