I have an ecobee thermostat that I manage locally over WiFi using the HomeKit integration, but I’d stop short of recommending it to new users.

1. Ecobee used to support developer access to their cloud API for controlling the thermostat and collecting efficiency data, but stopped issuing new API access tokens in the last couple of years. They have no plans currently to reopen developer access. If you have a token then the ecobee integration works fine, but if you don’t you’re stuck with HomeKit.
2. The thermostat requires 24V from the furnace to run the display and wifi stack. They provide an adapter you can install if you have available free leads at bother ends of the thermostat control cable. I had to splice a new wire onto the 24V transformer in my furnace since it didn’t have a 24V common terminal on the control block. It wasn’t hard to do in the end, but it was a lot of research.
3. Some advanced thermostat features require the app. I am not sure whether the app uses cloud or local control when on the same WiFi.
4. Not all features are available through the HomeKit integration. I can change the thermostat mode among Auto/Heat/Cool/Off, manage the blower fan mode and manage the heat/cool set points.
5. Data logging. The damned thing does log activity back home, and the data is only available in the app or on thr web portal.

Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the show? I haven’t been unhappy with the ecobee. The HomeKit integration works fine, and I get enough data from the native HA history to track and manage my energy demand. I shied away from Honeywell because my last Honeywell thermostat-- the one I used just before the thermostat I replaced with the ecobee-- tended to cycle my furnace too fast during cold snaps, and it would put the system into thermal protect mode. There was no way to widen the hysteresis (or modify the duty cycle) except by manually setting the temp high, run the house up to that temp, and then lower the setpoint and let the house take longer to cool.

ETA: the ecobee a decent thermostat and I’m happy enough with it overall. It has “spousal approval” accreditation as well. I wish it checked more boxes for me*, but it was essentially free through a power utility program. Its a worthy upgrade for me, but YMMV.

* namely, Z* protocol local control and continued cloud API access

I’ve been happy with the GE Enbrighten series, though they do require a neutral wire. I use the Z-Wave models, but I can’t imagine the ZigBee models would work any differently.

Neat feature of the Enbrighten line is they recognize several gestures including short tap, long press, double tap, and I think even triple tap. I configured mine so that short taps on/off toggle the lights between off and 100% on, long press on/off brightens/dims, and double tap on activates the preferred evening lighting scene.

I think Minoston are also a GE product line? Again, Z-Wave, but rated for higher wattage in my case. They also require a neutral wire.

I had a pair of no-neutral ZigBee switches sold as ‘Martin Jerry’ brand, but they were super dodgy. Terrible feel to them, and they made a sort of electrical whine when the fixture was on. I pulled them right out and sent them back.

Seems It was actually 2024.6.1 that introduced the change. Not sure where in this release notes it said it was a breaking change, but

I’m all turned around. I updated the main post with the link to the PR and I had the right version from the get-go.

Unboxed?

Worthless.

Software problems require software solutions.

//not affiliated, not endorsing

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

If you just want each physical interface on your server to participate in a single VLAN, set the corresponding switch port as an access port in the desired VLAN, and then configure each server interface as a normal untagged interface.

You would only do tagged frames (802.1q trunking) if you wanted to support several VLANs on the switch port.

Either an ESP32 BLE proxy via MQTT with a Tile-like beacon in the backpack, or a cipher lock with a Kid Code are probably the most straightforward solutions.

If you have Frigate NVR set up, there’s a project called Double Take that does facial recognition. Looks like a bit of work and needs training, but it could be a fun project.

Definitely check in with the utility before mucking with the meter. You can find your way into a lot of trouble tampering with active meters. Chances are there’s new meter tech out your utility would install, and of which you could take advantage.

Check this thread. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/smart-water-meter/451935 . You’d install it down flow of your utility meter, and would need ESP32 to read the meter. It’s a bit of work, but if you’re already running ESPHome, it looks pretty straightforward.

On a long shot, you might consider looking into an inexpensively RTL-SDR software radio dongle, and use rtl_433 to scan a few common frequencies the utilities use to scan their meters from the street. I happened to find my neighbor’s electrical meter on a common wireless weather station frequency, and if In were so inclined, could publish it to MQTT for HA to pick up.

Just a couple of ideas. Good luck!

I’m in IT in a healthcare-adjacent sector. Never underestimate the motivation or tenacity of foreign state actors, organized crime and chaotic neutral hacking collectives. You have limited time and budget, and both financial and risk based approval processes to deal with. They have time, ideology¹, and financial incentives.

You can’t win in the face of that.

¹ sometimes it’s hacking for hackings sake, but more typically it’s to disrupt critical services and extort modest capital to go away. Rinse, repeat, make that bank on volume.

I do this, but I also work in tech and have a pretty solid grasp of routing and how that all works. I agree it may seem overkill for many installs, but makes sense for certain use cases. I’ll try to explain without writing a book. I’ll be glossing over a LOT of texture in the following…

In networking, a router is considered to be a node in a graph with multiple host IP addresses, one for each edge. It has an interface-- sometimes physical but more often viirtual-- on each edge (network segment, VLAN) that connects to it, and which usually serves as the gateway IP for that edge. In larger networks where there is more than a single router, the routers must all tell each other which router has which destination network segment, so they all speak a routing protocol like RIP, OSPF or IS-IS. Each of the speakers must be able to identify itself uniquely among the others so the others know which node is making what advertisements. To do this, they each are assigned a unique router ID, which is normally a 32 bit integer value represented as a dotted quad. Customarily this is an IP address, and the protocols further this idea by adopting the highest numbered IP address on the device or the addrss of its loopback interface, if defined.

The point of a routing protocol is for the participating nodes to advertise IP ranges associated with their connected edges. They assert advertisements for each edge when it is active.(I.e., the interface is UP) and withdraw or expire them when the edge is unavailable (I.e., the interface is in any state other than UP). Every time an edge changes state-- goes from UP to not-UP, or not-UP to UP-- that advertisement must propagate across the whole system, and every node must stop forwarding traffic to recalculate its own best path to the remaining available edges. This is called reconvergence, and network engineers try to do things to minimize the number and frequency of these events.

Practically, one of the things network engineers do to try to avoid instability is not having the ID of a speaker change dynamically. Going back to how the device selects its router ID, it considers the loopback IP first, or else the highest numbered IP active on the device at the time of evaluation. Edge interfaces can go UP or not-UP for any number of reasons at any time, thus they are less than ideal to use for the router ID. The loopback interface by contrast is always up. This interface is typically assigned the IP the routing protocol will use for its router ID.

In practice, the loopback is the only interface on a router than can be said to belong to the router itself¹, and not to an edge connected to the router². There are other practical reasons in routing to do this, but they all come back to the fact that the loopback is always up, and therefore it’s always apt to be advertised as an available edge.

So what does any of this have to do with servers, applications and self hosting?

Applications that provide services over the network, DNS servers for example, need to bind to at least one IP address and protocol port. On servers with multiple interfaces, these applications normally bind to all available interface addresses, using the address 0.0.0.0. In some situations this might be undesirable. Maybe you don’t want your pihole serving your internal DNS to your ISP, or maybe you have several VLANs at your house and want to use a single IP address for DNS across all of your VLANs, or you don’t trust the VLAN interface IPs to always be the same.

Adding an IP to the lo interface ensures that IP is always available and reachable. It provides a single place for all hosts in the system to go that isn’t pinned to any one of the possible VLAN interface IPs.

In my own home setup, I define several IPs on the loopback for different containers that all want to use port 8443/tcp for their public port. This gives me the flexibility of being able to assign different services their own IP (which I can then reference by name in DNS) on their native port vis-à-vis the documentation. So my Pihole container has its address and my Unifi controller container has its own as well.

Anyway, this is very much a Done Thing in the industry. Not everyone needs it, but its a useful technique in the right circumstances.

1. Considered from to perspective of graph theory, network nodes and the edges they connect are distinct things. A router participates in a LAN, but the LAN is its own thing, and not formally part of the router.
2. In large IP networks, there are frequently tra sport topologies like VLANs or other shared.media that connect two or more routers, and are used exclusively to distribute traffic among themselves. Which of the participating routers is said to “own” that advertisement?

I’ve been hearing good things about Kagi.

Google search got so bad I use DDG by default now, but that seems to be Bing by another name and itself seems to be deteriorating.

Not really productivity services, but to name a couple,

• Google One (extra storage, bonus YouTube Premium & YT Music premium)
• MXroute for mail hosting (used to self host)
• Amazon Prime (for the shipping, the content is a bonus for us)
• Hulu (kid’s gotta see that ONE show… 🙄)
• Lemmy.world (via Patron)
• Couple of YouTube creators and app publishers I enjoy regularly (via Patreon)

I’m considering joining Nebula because many of the creators I frequently watch on YouTube are setting up shop up over there, and I’m getting irritated with YouTube for how The Algorithm is affecting the quality and content of the infotainment channels I enjoy.

Maybe not the solution you were asking for, but the Nvidia Shield on the stock code has been a fair compromise for me. The ads on the main screen are relatively unobtrusive, and sometimes even vaguely relevant to our viewing preferences. We largely watch Hulu, Prime and YouTube+ (with free access to AppleTV and Netflix, but I haven’t set those up yet). For ads, we pretty much only deal with Amazon’s new advertising in included Prime content. We’ll probably stop viewing that content once the series we’re currently watching wraps.

For context, my daily driver phone is LineageOS which is rooted all to heck to smack down intrusive advertising and tracking (Magisk, AdAway, AppManager to disable in-app trackers, uBlock on the browser, etc…), and my home network uses a pihole for DNS and malware blocking. I really hate advertisers.

On the pihole, the Shield is actually only the #3 top offender of blocked requests, behind my wife’s work laptop and my kid’s Steam rig. The main offender on the Shield was the ESPN app, which I removed because I never really watch sports outside of tye idd division game, which most of the time I meet friends out at the local pub anyway. Otherwise the Shield has been a well behaved appliance.

So it’s not the perfect ad-free experience, but its hardly the advertising dystopia of broadcast TV.

Ah! There it is! Thank you.

Still a bit broken on mobile, but they’ll catch it up.

How do you edit or delete categories once you’ve created them?

To be sure, I’m using the companion mobile app and don’t see an obvious Categories editor. I haven’t explored the desktop UI fully for this question yet.

Not many 3rd party shops are qualified to work on Teslas, so repairs are generally performed at the dealers who are on balance more expensive. You’ve been lucky so far to have warranty coverage, but what would your out-of-pocket costs have looked like if you had to cover to cost of those repairs yourself?

How long do you intend to own and drive your Tesla, and what do you anticipate future maintenance and repair bills to look like?

Traditional internal combustion vehicles burn fuel and require regular maintenance that electrics don’t. They also suffer mechanical wear & tear, and need regular maintenance, oli changes, fuel, etc. Back of the envelope math: over 100,000 miles, or say 10 years of light to average driving, you are apt to have 330 fuel fill-ups at $55 per, maybe 30 oil changes at $65 per, 5 sets of brakes at $225 per, maybe an odd $3000 in other wear & tear maintenance or a major repair. Call it $20-25k in over 10 years for cost of ownership. If you drive more, you’re apt to see those costs go up. (eta: Not accountig for things like taxes, insurance, registration fees, and other wear elements like wipers, tires, and the like as they’re probably a wash between IC and EV fleets)

I’m not nearly as familiar with ownership costs of a Tesla, but I do understand that there are probably fewer maintenance expensss because there are fewer moving parts to wear. The power plant and braking systems are electrical and suffer less mechanical wear, fueling costs are shifted to electric costs which are obscured by other supply costs and usage, and the fleet is young enough that most major repairs are still under warranty.

But, when do those warranties expire, and what do you the consumer do with the vehicle after that? Is there an aftermarket? A buyback or trade-in market? If you plan to “drive it into the ground,” then how many miles can you expect to get out of your Tesla before you have to buy a new car? Will an extended warranty be an option?

At that point, what does an out-of-warranty battery replacement look like? I’ve heard it can be between $4000 and $10000, a significant portion of the cost value of the vehicle. How about a dead touchscreen? That’s a major component for the vehicle. What about the maintenance fees for software upgrades for those systems? (eta: or ongoing software support?)

I may have made your argument for you, but I also hope I’ve demonstrated that potentially significant ownership costs may simply have shifted later into the life cycle. You may still have to bear them if you can’t offload the vehicle.

What I hope isn’t the answer is that these cars are all destined for scrap after their first owner. I buy my vehicles to drive for a long time and plan to offload through private sale or for parts. I don’t know that I’ll have that same luxury with Teslas, let alone the current fleet of EVs and HEVs.

edits: typos, mostly

I’m not buying one primarily because they are expensive to repair, have terrible in-cabin controls and ergnomics that I feel make them mile-for-mile more dangerous to drive than a traditional control layout, and have a lot of “fine print” terms & conditions that make a purchase unpalatable for me. It’s a shame really because they’re quite innovative vehicles otherwise, and they are fun to drive.

Touch controls and feature subscriptions are non-starters for me in any vehicle though. Add in that Musk is their CEO and forget it.

Musk is a self-correcting issue though. The board will oust him once the share price drops enough. If it can happen at Boeing, it can happen here too.