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Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

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Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#91

Heck yeah! Love the VisiData shoutout. Echoing other people's desire for a web UI, mostly so I don't have to be the sole Maintainer of the Truth as the only resident household technomancer. EDIT: alternatively, exposing the data/functionality via MCP or similar would allow me to connect this to an agent using Home Assistant Voice, so anybody in the house could ask for changes or add new information.

This makes me want to use visidata for my databases.

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#92

Just want to say, I appreciate your work on Ibis. I’ve been looking into building sort of a dbt-esque alternative on top of it and noticed how involved you’ve been with its development. I think it’s a cool piece of tech that deserves more attention.

Thanks! Curious to see what you build with it.

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#94
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My overall philosophy for (my quite extensive) Home Assistant setup is “amy time a human interacts with the HA UI in any way whatsoever, that is a failure.” I don’t want dashboards, I don’t want a user interface at ALL other than for setting up new automation. The point of HA for me is the house should feel like the correct things happen by magic (and should be essentially unobtrusive and natural).

Oh that's not my philosophy at all. I don't like too much automation because I'm very fussy as to what I want at one moment. It all depends on my mood which home assistant doesn't know. Sometimes when I enter a room I want the lights on, other times I don't, stuff like that. Like when the curtains are open and I'm walking around half naked. And sometimes I just like the dark and sometimes I need bright lights. Someti…

I'm similarly unpredictable in my home. Add to that the others in my house, and it's impossible to even guess what everyone's intentions are at any given time.

Sometimes I daydream about a "solo mode" where the timings on lights are tighter and my music can follow me around the house when I'm up at night and nobody else is. But most times I'm trying to find the get-out-of-way averages that keep everyone happy.

Some things work great: Automated lights everywhere. Automated dimming of lights at night or sunset or whatever. Notifications when the laundry is done, or the cat litter is ready to be changed, or someone is at the door, or the garage door has been left open - all great. What music to play in what room at any time? Always changes. When to "dim all the lights" because Plex started a movie? But my son is building Legos in the dining room, and my wife is knitting and needs the couch light on. Sometimes I want it, but not every time.

For those things having a single button press is still a huge win over opening multiple apps and getting the right things set the right way for each participant.

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's possible to do sensor fusion of all the outward facing cameras from your home Is that legal though? I'm guessing it the US it might be, given the amount of cameras of public places you can see in various communities, but wonder how common that is. Where I live (Spain) it's not legal to just stick a camera on your house and record public places, you need to put the camera in a way so you're only filming your pr…

The US gives you no expectation of privacy in public places and private property is generally do what you want. It gets murkier if your cameras are pointed at other private property (your neighbors). Not a legal expert just what I’ve heard.

As I understand it (which probably isn’t well), expectation of privacy on private spaces in the US gets pretty wonky. Like being in plain view on a front lawn wouldn’t have expectation of privacy but being behind a fence would even if the fence doesn’t do a good job of blocking sight lines.

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been building https://homechart.app for years (without GenAI...) and folks just don't realize that home managers exist as an app. They're too used to single purpose solutions, so they don't think to look for more comprehensive options. There's also the inherit struggle of being everything for everyone with an app like this, and focusing on features 80% of your users want and leaving the other 20% niche features…

I checked out HomeChart, and boy howdy it feels like its doing way too much.

Thank you for ironically proving my point, I guess. The main value add here is everything is integrated into one app. I always wonder if folks said the same thing when Salesforce or SAP were created.

Anyways we document our reasoning here: https://homechart.app/docs/explanations/architecture/#separa...

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#99

I think/hope the whole "home manager" category is going to take off soon. On a cost basis, it no longer makes sense--practically--not to use visual/text/audio intelligence to manage such a large asset. We just don't have the user-friendly mass-market interfaces for it just yet. It's possible to scan every manual, every insurance policy, ingest every local bylaw. It's possible to take a video of your home and transfor…

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#100
Thank you for the `nix app`!

Being able to launch it with:

     nix run github:cpcloud/micasa     
Is super convenient.

Actually we could go further and serve `micasa` via ssh:

    users.users.micasa = {
      isNormalUser = true;
      shell = pkgs.bashInteractive;
      openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = ...
    };
  
    services.openssh.extraConfig = ''
      Match User micasa
        ForceCommand ${micasaPkg}/bin/micasa
        AllowTcpForwarding no
        X11Forwarding no
    '';
Then we could put this in a nixosModule in your flake.nix. Would you be interested in a PR which does this?

    services.micasa-ssh = {
      enable = true;
      authorizedKeys = [ "ssh-ed25519 AAAA..." ];
      port = 2222;
    };
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