Ask Paul: September 27 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Let’s close out September, and the week, with another great round of reader questions.
Amazon tsunami of products
madthinus asks:

Any of the Amazon announcements that has caught your eye?

Yes, but the most impressive thing about this week’s Amazon press conference was the sheer scope of its announcements; it was a real tsunami of new and improved products, demonstrating once again how serious is about this market and how it intends to retain its leadership role. That kind of thing alone makes me consider jumping ship.

The one product I’m most interested in is the Echo Studio, which I’d consider using in a stereo pair. I’m currently using Chromecast for whole-house audio as some may know, but this would be an interesting home theater choice with my smart TV and a Fire TV. The Echo Studio comes with a 24-bit DAC, meaning it can actually output Amazon Music HD songs in their original quality. And because it has line-in, I could add a Chromecast and make it part of the whole house solution.

I may wait for the reviews before I go in this direction but I’m thinking about it.
Amazon Voice Interoperability
skippu asks:

What's your take on Amazon's Voice Interoperability Initiative? Is this an anti-trust defensive play or a true value play for consumers? Given the list of participants, it seems like they are trolling the bottom feeders to funnel them into the Alexa ecosystem. For ambient computing to really make sense, don't you think this is just what the doctor ordered?

I think it’s both. My knee-jerk reaction was that this was antitrust-related; after all, why would the market leader suggest opening up devices to support competing assistants? But regardless of the impetus, it’s still a huge win for consumers. And Amazon did already open up Alexa to interoperate with Cortana. I’m guessing that the ponderous way in which we currently have to use the two together was indeed part of the inspiration behind this new initiative. Which, yes, does appear to be a better way to access multiple assistants from a single device.
Better NUC cooling
wright_is asks:

Have you looked at something like the Akasa Turing for the making the NUC silent?

Not exactly, but I did coincidentally watch a YouTube video recently about a more powerful Raspberry Pi-like single-board computer called the Rock Pi, and the cooling solution I saw there made me think about the NUC. And it looks like the Akasa Turing case is similar, with silent passive cooling techniques. Obviously, part of the appeal of the NUC is the small form factor. But yeah, I am thinking about this now, thanks for the suggestion.

Is silence worth $140? Yeah. I bet it is.
Third-party utilities
hrlngrv asks:

Perhaps an odd tangent, but what 3rd party utility software do you use? FWIW, without naming it, I use a 3rd party file/directory comparison program which has saved me a helluva lot of headaches over the years. Also, where I work group poli...