TrenchcoatFullOfBats

The Mupprix

Preventing cam-out with a Phillips screw is like learning the ways of the Force. It takes patience and skill, something the Empire’s rigid Torx would never understand.

Fantastic Fourplay

Two things:

1. I was expecting a recipe at the end of that
2. CUT YOUR HAIR, JOSH

Judging by the profile pic, probably factually incorrect animal documentaries

…in their cabins, into piles of money

The joke is also that the burning car was a Tesla, and if Elon could, he’d push a patch to copy/paste his face onto any memories of firefighters found in a Neuralink customer’s brain

Thanks, but lately I feel more “Oh no, not again”…

That’s exactly what I was going for, but I changed watch house to police station for the non-Discworld enthusiasts.

The Thieves Guild punchcard: Get 12 muggings and the 13th converts your mugging to a light burgling at the address of your choice! [*]

[*] You must present your punchcard before physical violence begins. If the address to be burgled is a police station, the next mugging will be upgraded to murder. Management takes 75% of all tips. Do not make Management sad. You wouldn’t like Management when it is sad.

Depends on the fridge, in my opinion. I don’t need any door sensors because my fridge will beep at me if I leave a door open for 12 microseconds, and the freezer is pretty reliable, it’s just the fridge that needs adjusting from time to time.

I just use a ThirdReality smart plug with energy monitoring primarily so I can see power consumption, but I still contend that this combined with the temp sensor is enough to let me know if there’s a problem when I’m not home.

Also a 20 year IT person, but on the Linux server side. I do have an isolated network for IoT things that don’t have local alternatives (pfsense hardware firewall, 24 port managed switch in the rack and ruckus APs), but I hate (hate) the enshittification of perfectly good hardware with software that exists solely to harvest my data so a corporation can have an additional revenue stream for the shareholders, and I will go pretty far out of my way to avoid giving money to companies that do this. Dreading the day my beloved dumb LG plasma TV dies.

What hardware are you running your HA instance on? Mine runs in an HAOS Proxmox VM with the USB port for the zwave dongle (for the locks) passed through. ZigBee coordinator is ethernet, so it’s just plugged into a switch in the living room.

I’ve been using a cheap Aqara temp/humidity sensor in my fridge for years. Works fine, as I said. Many others do the same. There’s a lot more plastic in fridges than you might expect.

My ZigBee devices use an ethernet based coordinator which communicates with my Home Assistant install via MQTT. The coordinator software is called Zigbee2MQTT. The coordinator does not send any data anywhere except Home Assistant.

There are many easy ways to keep your data local and private while still allowing notification when you’re away from home. In my case, I pay $65/year to Nabu Casa to access my Home Assistant when I’m not at home.

I use a very similar setup to keep an eye on my mom’s place from 500 miles away, including many sensors and multiple camera feeds, which are also local only with no cloud component. Frigate NVR is installed as a Home Assistant add-on, which runs detection on each camera feed and records clips when a person is detected on any feed and also pops a notification at the same time. If she wants to save a clip, she can download it, otherwise it’ll be deleted after 5 days (configurable).

There are other ways to get access to local data remotely. If you don’t want to pay for Nabu Casa (which funds Home Assistant development), there’s also Tailscale/headscale, ZeroTier, Cloudflare, DuckDNS, reverse proxy, etc.

You could also just have Home Assistant send you an email when an event is triggered, like a rise of 2 degrees in your fridge in an hour, or a drop of 20% in energy usage over 30 minutes.

Or you could just have a notification pop in the Home Assistant app on your phone, which will work remotely with most of the methods I just listed.

EDIT: Didn’t respond to your last paragraph:

I get that you’re very afraid of the security implications of iot devices, but none of the ideas you’re proposing are actually solutions to the problems a truly connected device can solve.

I’m not “very afraid”, I’m simply aware of better alternatives. Why would I risk the security of my network by giving Samsung or GE or LG a backdoor into my network when I can get most of the same information their app can give me by using cheap sensors and Home Assistant?

IoT is essentially a catch-all marketing term, like “organic”, and if I’m not mistaken, the “I” in IoT stands for “internet”. ZigBee devices cannot connect to the internet. Doing so requires a hub or coordinator that contains WiFi or ethernet connectivity. There are many ZigBee coordinators that lack this functionality, which allows your data to stay local, on your own network, without exposing it to the internet.

I never claimed that a smart plug could monitor the temperature inside a fridge, but there are certainly ZigBee temperature devices you could put inside your fridge to do that, and they would work just fine.

A ZigBee smart plug with energy monitoring would certainly give you enough information to determine if the compressor had failed, as the compressor is the component that uses the most power. If the energy usage of the fridge dropped significantly, it could indicate a compressor failure. While this method isn’t foolproof and won’t detect all possible fridge issues, it can serve as an early warning system for major problems like compressor failure.

You can get 4 ZigBee smart plugs with energy monitoring for $35. These are not IOT devices and if you just want to know if the fridge is running, these will do that, with the added benefit of allowing you to leave the fridge’s WiFi disconnected, which is a security gain.

With a wifi fridge for example I can know if it stops working

You can also do that with a simple smart plug with energy monitoring. You can get a 4 pack for $35.

Proton purchased SimpleLogin in 2022 and the creator/dev has been working there ever since. Also, you can easily create random email aliases in Vaultwarden/Bitwarden via the SimpleLogin API.

Another vote for Runbox. Been using them for almost 5 years now with no issues. They are also an employee owned co-op if that is of interest.

See Dick run. See Jane run. See Sally run. See Spot run.

See Dick run with scissors. See Jane run with scissors. See Sally run with scissors. See Spot run with scissors.

Spot is a good dog.

Spot runs in front of Jane. See Jane trip. See Jane fall. See Jane fall on her own scissors.

Oh no, Jane!

See Dick trip over Jane. See Dick fall. See Dick fall on his own scissors.

Oh no, Dick!

See Sally trip over Dick. See Sally fall. See Sally fall on her own scissors.

Oh no, Sally!

See Spot panic. See Spot stab Dick. See Spot stab Dick 13 times.

Oh no, Spot!

Spot is a bad dog.

You should not trust Amazon. Multiple Ring privacy failures, including giving video footage to police without consent, Amazon employees watching Ring video footage without consent, then there’s stuff like Sidewalk that uses your home network as part of a mesh network, collection of biometric days via palm readers at Whole Foods for checkout, which they then use for their Amazon One service that they sell to businesses to verify age and identity, the whole “AI powered” Just Walk Out tech in physical Amazon stores that turned out to be not AI at all but a bunch of Indian subcontractors watching video cameras, etc, etc, etc…

Maybe their cheap Kmart deck was so heavy they couldn’t really do anything with it but put some cool Powell Peralta wheels on it and some rad grip tape.

…or so I’ve heard…