I made his lamb shank recipe a couple years ago and it was incredibly flavorful. About as subtle as a brick to the head, but still insanely delicious.

It’s great that you have the skills to do that, but we both know that most people buying smart home gadgets don’t have those skills. I’d prefer those people to have a safe by default setup, which is why I advocate for Zigbee and Z-Wave.

One thing I like about Z-Wave and Zigbee devices is that they can’t connect to the internet no matter what, because they don’t have the hardware for it.

• This means you don’t need to worry about them phoning home with usage data. (privacy)
• It means you don’t need to worry about them being used by a hacker to penetrate your network. (security)
• It means you don’t need to worry about them being a node in some botnet mining crypto for someone else with your electricity. (resource usage)

You’ve already got HomeAssistant to connect them to your Google Home or HomeKit account, so you can still turn on your closet light from the bar or whatever. You’re not losing anything by them not being connected to the internet directly. You just never have to worry about that stuff. Instead of having to keep 40 devices that were sold by some company that no longer exists up to date on their firmware, you just need to keep HA up to date.

All it costs is one $30 usb dongle.

Considering how prevalent depression is I wonder how long it will be before we find out that a common processed food additive enhances the growth of Morganella morganii over other bacteria.

Just like Facebook’s search “accidentally” suppressing Democrat searches. Firstly, why would you have that ready to “accidentally” deploy? Secondly, There’s no way something like that gets enabled without multiple levels of manager approval. Facebook isn’t some startup where anyone can push code to production.

If you buy this property you’re going to be sitting there waiting for the day they send you a letter to tell you they’re expanding their mine onto your property.

That’s a level of uncertainty that I would not be comfortable with for my home. If it’s “recreation” property, like hunting land, then maybe I would feel differently.

I have a homeassistant instance connected to a no-name Z-wave thermostat. It’s been flawless for almost 10 years.

Fascism. That’s what’s going on.

Lower, dumbass.

I interviewed a bunch of years ago with a company called “xmode social” (I was in desperate need of a job. I fortunately did not get that one.) They had a framework that they paid app publishers in to include in their apps. That framework collected your location data and sent it to xmode who sold that data. That was their entire business AFAIK.

There don’t need to be any shared features for companies to include shit like that in their apps. They just need a way to make the line go up.

About five years ago the exhaust fan on my furnace started making noise. It sounded like a bearing issue, so I figured out the correct replacement part, ordered it and installed it myself.

It cost a little under $200 all told. I know that the service call would have been at least $500.

So many of the things we own are made of generic parts that you can buy off of amazon for less than the cost of getting a guy to come look at it.

I started watching Scavengers Reign recently on a suggestion from a friend. I normally don’t go for animated shows, but this one is really enjoyable for me. Calm & explorative.

I realized I’d inadvertently crossed into Switzerland due to a wrong turn when my rental car’s navigation system alerted me to the fact. Whoops.

If my choices are a z-wave/zigbee thermostat that connects to my HomeAssistant instance and a Raspberry Pi that I have to maintain, I’ll pick the z-wave one (and I did, 10 years ago. It’s been rock solid.)

For my smart devices I prefer devices that can’t send information over the internet no matter what. I don’t want to worry about my thermostat mining bitcoin for some dude in China.

They are very much angled and it drives me insane.

I have almost no opinions on specific fonts. Except… I absolutely despise the $ and ¢ symbols in Apple’s San Francisco font. Since it’s the default font I have to look at it a lot.