We really do live in a boring dystopia
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We had a Google speaker thing. Got rid of it because it was crap. All we could reliably use it for was asking it to play a radio station or play Spotify, but frankly it even got that wrong enough that grabbing my phone and connecting to the Bluetooth speaker was easier.
Even privacy invading problems aside they’re just a little bit rubbish.
They’re awful if you have a weird accent like I do. Suppose there’s worse problems to have, at least I’ll never have any use for a smart speaker.
I have found that their killer app is natural language alarm-setting. something like, “google, set a timer for 30 minutes”, and having that timer appear on your phone is handy in the kitchen.
I got one for free years ago and it sits on a shelf unplugged lol.
a bit off-topic but relevant nonetheless:
i know i’m probably in the minority opinion here, but there are better privacy-respecting (and google spiting) platforms for viewing these videos than the official youtube website and rossman has been vocal in his support for these; particularly Odysee. below are 3 different projects, Odysee which is a whole separate and sustainable project, and piped & invidious which are privacy-respecting frontends to youtube. i think in future it’d be valuable to link these alternatives instead of the official youtube link.
https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/amazon-accuses-customer-of-racism-shuts:2 – Odysee
https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=NfiIXooD77s – Piped
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NfiIXooD77s – Invidious
I think you’re totally right, thank you for the links.
Reason 89327458934795 I will never have any smart home shit in my house that I can’t host myself.
“The cloud is just somone else’s computer”
Selfhosting is the way to go. All my automations are controlled by a HomeAssistant instance running locally.
Remember what “Cloud” means: Putting your data on some elses computer. No thanks.
I work in IT, and I don’t have any ‘smart’ things at home. I don’t want to come home and troubleshoot more dumb junk.
I don’t even have a smart watch. My watch tells the time, has a timer, etc and that’s all I need.
Even if the accusation had been true, Amazon shouldn’t have this ability.
Worked at Amazon = moved entire family off the public cloud. Everything is self hosted and still “easy”. I backup one of my backups to an s3 provider and call it good.
I’m on the bandwagon of no “smart home” devices that connect to the cloud. I build a lot my own little controllers with the ESP8266/ESP32 using MQTT to communicate with OpenHAB.
OpenHAB has served me well, but I started using it so long ago that I have not tried out some of the newer options like HomeAssistant.
Here is one of the devices I developed a long tome ago. It used an old chimera of a board, the Arduino Yùn. https://www.instructables.com/Introducing-Climaduino-The-Arduino-Based-Thermosta/
The code referenced in the Instructable is much older code. I don’t think I have my current and much simpler code on Github for the ESP8266. If there is any interest, I can push it.
My new code just turns things on or off and monitors temperature and humidity.
No better reason to ditch the internet of things.
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Yeah, IoT is pretty nice. But proprietary stuff can be very annoying and a huge security risk.
My bedroom lighting setup doesn’t even use ZigBee
Its all theatre DMX lighting > ola (open lighting architecture) > ArtNet > home assistant.
It’s slightly jankier than if I had built a direct ola > Hass plugin but it works quite well
I also only run lighting, and control my Chromecast on my Home assistant - and both are turned off at the power supply when I’m not home, it isn’t accessible outside the LAN (except through a zerotier VPN, though I probably should turn that off as I don’t use it much)
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