The author mentioned they would be moving towards local smart-home solution but doesn’t mention HomeAssistant even once https://www.home-assistant.io/
I have a Google Hub and 2 Minis , would I be able to repurpose them for HA or do I have to start from scratch...? If they can't be reused, I might as well stick to Google until they get bricked (which I'm sure will happen at some point).
Currently, no, but HA will integrate with them and expose any devices to Google’s ecosystem (even if they don’t natively support that). You can also use devices with a screen as dashboards for HA.
I was amazed - in a bad way - when we were looking into getting solar for our home and almost all of the systems relied on some kind of mobile app for their UI, often via a cloud service. These are systems that should have a working life of decades ! What mobile or cloud platform today will even still be here and fully compatible in ten years? Want to bet tens of thousands on that?! (Plus of course all the usual "sma…
And worse still these things get inflicted on the next home owner. I bought a house with a "smart" boiler and the UI and app are absolutely atrocious. Worse still it doesn't have basic functionality like my parent's manual system had 40 years ago like temporarily being able to turn it on without changing the schedule, doesn't have a weekend setting, requires me to send my email address and address to a third party wh…
I don’t disagree with you on shitty UI, but I’m going to question “a treasure trove for thieves”. I just don’t believe there’s some sort of house thieve’s Union running attacks on boiler infrastructure in order to work out who’s on holiday this week, especially given the low penetration on those things meaning you’re going to get visibility into one in a hundred homes. It just seems so low value compared to driving round the block for a few days and seeing who’s car hasn’t moved.
Investing? To me it implies stocks. You are not investing in anything, you are consuming goods and services. When people buy loads of crap and call it "investing in a [good] ..." is that some sort of coping mechanism? No, you don't own boot futures. You bought some boots and you wear them.
It’s my money, it’s always an investment hoping to get some return, either happiness or convenience. It’s not meant to be taken literally.
Would you invest in a sandwich? Or a foreign holiday?
I feel like I've been slowly de-Googling for many years now. A decade ago I was all-in, Chromecast Audio, Android, GSuite for a personal domain, Photos, Maps, Home products when they emerged. I'd made a bet that software could improve faster than hardware and chose to be as free in my choice of hardware as possible (Linux on a variety of machines and to bet on web software) rather than choosing a potentially more pol…
Last time I tried Plex for photos it was pretty terrible.
Clearly not their focus. I still use it for audiobooks and live tv, but I migrated photos to photoprism which is great.
Also check out photo structure. The author posts here sometimes. Both are great apps.
Jup. A family member has Nest thermostats. Server went down. The thermostats cranked up to 30C / 86F as the failure mode. Just makes no sense. I get that you don’t want freezing pipes, if the server goes down, but come on.
That sounds a bit far fetched to me, I have had my Internet go down multiple times and never have a Nest problem. In fact I don’t even think an Internet connection is required if you just want it to be a dumb thermostat. The default safety settings on my nest is 45F for heat and 95F for AC. This setting is user adjustable so maybe your family member override it.
The author mentioned they would be moving towards local smart-home solution but doesn’t mention HomeAssistant even once https://www.home-assistant.io/
I have a Google Hub and 2 Minis , would I be able to repurpose them for HA or do I have to start from scratch...? If they can't be reused, I might as well stick to Google until they get bricked (which I'm sure will happen at some point).
I use Google devices with my HA setup just fine (although I want to move away). HA just added integrated assistant support, so I'm keen to try that out when I get back from vacation.
In this sense, we live in a giant laser printer, and are all RMS: lacking source code makes it ridiculously hard for us to function in the face of product discontinuation.
Thought balloon: should companies be legally forced to escrow their source code with the government, so that the public is left less in the lurch?
The author mentioned they would be moving towards local smart-home solution but doesn’t mention HomeAssistant even once https://www.home-assistant.io/
That's presumably because HA is categorically outside the author's field of view, not being a branded corporate plug'n'play product with a marketing budget, but open-source with "DIY" in the first paragraph on the page. I don't think the author is interested in providing alternative solutions at all. This article reads like a cry for attention directed at Google and no one else.
While touring the house we eventually bought, my wife spied a Nest on the wall and said, "Oh, that's one thing bitwize is gonna want to rip out." Hooking your home up to the cloud and depending on cloud services for its operation just strikes me as the king of dumb ideas. You've got private, intimate data flowing to who knows where, cloud malfunctions affecting regular home operations (this has already happened at le…
To me, the funny thing is that google could use brand awareness to engender trust. When I buy some new fangled toy, I often look for a trusted name, instead of something made overseas, with an incomprehensible name. But it is almost the opposite. Fly by night names and resellers on amazon, are more stable than google. Some even have far better support! Just bizarre. Someone should tell google that outside of SV, peop…