I hope it’s not just a coincidence. I would love to see Home Assistant as a smart speaker platform progress.

Then he shouldn’t have asked a question if he isn’t open for answers. If an answer is obviously wrong or dismissive of some important detail I would understand it. But if the complaint is It’s not a one-click-fix or I don’t understand what you’re talking about then that’s the best way of not learning anything and not solving the problem.

On Android you have to disable the use of Private DNS (or something like that) in the WiFi settings. If this is enabled it will not use your WiFi’s broadcast DNS, but a predefined one. The reasoning behind this (you can believe this or not) is so that on public WiFis your DNS queries cannot be tracked or manipulated by setting up a local DNS.

I can imagine there is something similar for iOS.

If this only affects some apps then they have decided to hardcore their DNS servers. The only thing you can do now is to identify these and block the calls, but this may also break other stuff if the servers are not only used to resolve ad URLs.

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.)

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.

Someone complaining that Google chose “privacy over functionality” was not on my bingo card…

But what if your name is not Ian…

I think you have realized that every comment here was about your decision not to use Git. I don’t think there is much more to say about this…

You don’t have to. Absolutely not.

But: As a potential user it provides some additional features your solution lacks. I can easily fork or clone your repo and change things if I need to. If I think it benefits the project I can easily offer these changes back to you, if I don’t I can still profit from future development on your side and incorporate my changes into it. I can very easily check what has changed between two versions without relying (trusting) your changelogs or performing a manual diff.

But most importantly it is a matter of trust. Not so much trust in your intentions and the possibility of malicious code (Git won’t prevent that), but it obfuscates your code unnecessarily making it harder to continue if you at some point decide to stop maintaining it or even detect vulnerabilities as it is not easily accessible without knowing where to look for it.

Some BIOS manufacturers allow you to disable all halts on errors. As soon as you connect to the network your system should be able to sync its internal clock.

I like the idea, but may I ask why you don’t use a version control system like Git (or anything else that fits your needs)?

Well, that escalated quickly…

I think the real question is not if it’s possible (it is), but what you are actually trying to achieve. It seems like you have this idea, but I’m not sure if you really understand what it means. Maybe you can describe, why you want to host a Lemmy instance yourself…

I don’t think so. If the app is doing something useful it will stay. If it provides just a wallpaper, a static PDF to read (think of user manual apps) it will be removed.

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 first Android phones were really exciting. I got a Samsung Galaxy (no numbers, no letters, just Galaxy) in 2009. AMOLED screen - the first Android experience for me. Unfortunately Samsung dropped the update support really soon - which got me into custom ROMs - another exciting thing…