There are a few buttons around the house. For my wife (and kids to play with) the most important ones are the ones controlling the light in the bedroom. There is a motion sensor covering the door and wardrobe area which can be muted with a button (e.g. if the kids have snuck into our bed and we don’t want to wake them or if either one of us goes to bed later). We use mostly the IKEA Zigbee buttons.

We also have a great device called Home Buttons in our kitchen. It uses MQTT and has a fantastic battery life (using a 18650 rechargeable battery). It has an e-ink display and six buttons. I programmed it to display several things (you can use one MDI icon and a short text to display for each button) for everyday use, like switching some lights, displaying temperature and humidity and controlling the climate in our conservatory. You have to press a button for it to update (to save battery - even though it easily lasts months).

The main touch point though is the app. I built three dashboards:

• A general overview that dynamically changed based on events and time of day.
• A floor plan which holds every light, sensor and switch in it.
• A blood glucose dashboard as both one of my daughters as well as myself have diabetes. As I use the same insulin pump as my daughter I cannot use the pump’s app to follow her data as I need the app for myself. So for me this is quite important. My wife uses the pump’s app in follower mode for our daughter.

But I also made Home Assistant send notifications to our smartphones for several events (dishwasher, washing machine, too hot / cold in the conservatory, low blood glucose levels, kids turning on the TV in the morning). Some of them offer to respond with an action others are just reminders that something needs to be done.

My wife appreciates especially the notifications I think because you don’t have to think about some things as they pop up when action is due and we both can more easily share the workload as she gets notified as well when I started the dishwasher without me needing to tell her. (This may sound like we’re not speaking to each other, but we’re just not saying things like I just started the dishwasher can you empty it later.)

Because you can game it?

To be honest: After visiting both the US and China I was way more concerned after my US visit that my phone may have been compromised.

Using a VPN was no problem for me in China, but it has been a few years since I’ve been there.

Unified state shouldn’t be much of a problem for static web hosting.

I use tt-rss in combination with FeedMe on my Android.

That is really a missing part of this whole thing. I get that I could build something myself, but I don’t want to have the hassle of doing it and keeping it working all the time (because I am able to build it, but not on a “works perfectly all the time” level). I really hope that sometime in the future there is a standard for smart speakers (and screens maybe) that allows me to add them to my cloud service of choice.

Discourse exists and is free to self-host and open source. Compared to classic forum software (like most *bb variants) it is a pleasure to use and feels not like a remnant of a lost age.

The (only?) downside is the similar name to Discord, but that’s not them to blame, because they had their name first.

I think it is, because Siri is barely usable any more. Other solutions have shown how bad it is and everyone hopes real AI will make it better…

The funny thing is: This will work against them regarding the EU DMA regulations. If no one uses their offer it will not be interpreted as nobody wants to use it, but instead it will be interpreted as the offer was unfair.

Update: We switched to Kitchen Owl as suggested in the comments.

Acknowledging that 8GB only delivers mediocre performance at best would upset anyone who already bought a device with only 8GB. And as later upgrades are not supported by Apple it would abandon these users like buyers of a 1st gen Apple device…

That’s a reasonable decision. While passkeys are usually considered much safer than passwords they are not really common. It is mostly the big services (Google, Microsoft, eBay) which have implemented them. Also Bitwarden only supports them on desktop as they are currently working on mobile support. But this will change and as they follow a standard it will be no problem to log into apps with passkeys as the support widens.

It is a similar experience, but you don’t need any infrastructure for it. Everything is handled by your device.

Passkeys are a form of passwordless authentication. You store them in Bitwarden like regular passwords, but when you want to access a site that supports them (e.g. eBay) instead of asking for you password and autofilling or copy pasting it from Bitwarden your Bitwarden pops up and asks you if you want to login and it just happens (if you have multiple passkeys associated with a site you can select which you want to use). That’s it. No password fields which get autofilled and no password in your clipboard (history).

I am wondering if it’s really true, that Spotify pays nothing to Apple. If my information is correct every app provider needs to have at least one active Apple Developer subscription (in the case of Spotify there is probably far more than just one account involved). If it is true that Spotify pays nothing to Apple the only possibility is that Apple invited them to bring their app to iOS and granted them free access.

I know 99 USD is not what Apple is after, but it seems dishonest to not disclose this.

It’s not really an adventure in the classical genre definition, but maybe Return of the Obra Dinn is something for you if you like solving puzzles and fancy murder mysteries.

Does it have anything to do with the original storyline as far as the demo reveals?

I don’t know the name. In the afternoons in the early nineties after school I was at a neighbor’s house. Her husband had a PC and a joystick connected to it sparked my interest. He showed me a flight game. I don’t remember much detail, but it was a vector based game with fast action based flying and you had to bombard or shoot at enemy bases. The next thing I remember is my mother calling our neighbor when I planned to come home because it was already getting late and I had never stayed that long before.

I have a motion sensor in the bedroom that turns the light on when you enter it (or leave it) and turns it off after some time once there is no motion detected anymore. But there is also a button right next to the door which disables the automation for 10 minutes for entering the bedroom at night when our youngest is already sleeping in the room.

Simple but very useful and even my wife likes it alot.

Have you considered moving to an EU member state? 😉