Ah, the Season 4 finale of For All Mankind.

The great thing about television, is that “live” is a flexible concept.
The playback software could happily play 10 seconds ahead of what’s actually on the screen, and have plenty of time to translate like that.
In the same way that we sometimes put delays into live events to allow the subtitling systems breathing room.

We do now have PTP, which has several big improvements. But it’s a lot more involved to set up.

Ah, excellent! Thanks for that, I’ll definitely see if I can do it under ZHA.

And no problem, glad you got off the hub!

Exactly this. When you read about the metaverse in something like Snow Crash, it’s a place built by enthusiasts, very cheap to use, and people have the choice of DIY, or paying someone to do things for them.

In the facebook’s version, everything but connecting costs money, and it’s all done by facebook.

Ah, I meant I didn’t want to feel like I was condescendingly explaining things to people who already knew.

It’s free software, and supports a lot of things.

Homeassistant can be run completely locally. The on an old pc, raspi, or even a virtual machine when you’re trying it out.

Operation wise, you can use a browser, or the app for added functionality (for example, it can log the battery level of your phone)

And with the various sensors and devices you can build up automations.
So, for example, when phone battery is below 20% at 10pm, flash the bedroom light to remind you to charge.

They even have a demo based on a fake house on their website for looking at.

The only physical thing you’d need otherwise is a zigbee dongle (£20-ish).

You’ll need to have a zigbee radio on a HomeAssistant instance (maybe possible with other software).
And on HomeAssistant, run ZHA (or similar) with the zigbee radio.
Sorry if that’s teaching to suck eggs, just wanted to clarify.

If you’re already set up with that, it’s just a case of deleting a bulb from the Hue bridge, and searching for it using the zigbee integration. Once it’s deleted from Hue, it will go into pairing mode. You may need to power cycle the bulb if it does not appear in the search within 10s.

HASS was able to support my white/ambiance bulbs and colour bulbs without any issues. In fact, it responds faster. The only downside is that they don’t so much fade, as jump to a new value. The update frequency is about 2 times per second.

The good news is, most hue bulbs can be controlled directly over zigbee now. I migrated mine a few days ago, and the trickiest part was persuading Hue to delete the bulbs so they could enter pairing mode.

Now if electricity was just less than 3x the price of gas, we’d be winning.

When you mentioned it was only two people, I got curious.
Turns out, it’s a small company operating out of london, and one of the directors lives two streets away from me.
If it wasn’t weird, I would absolutely take a basket of sympathy cookies or something over.

Possibly, but previously I’ve been able to load a site, open a media-rich page in a new tab, then close that tab to go back to the original page.

On a newer build of FF for Android, that first page is re-loaded from the internet.

There was previous (german?) research that was able to do this from just well-recorded sound.
HRTF etc. wasn’t required.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7996-keyboard-sounds-reveal-their-words/ (Paywall, apologies, and it’s US, I couldn’t find the german one)

“Does your company have macs? Mac attacks are up 1000% percent. If you don’t have the IT resources to install antivirus on all your shiny macs, you can pay us to do it for you.”

What a fantastic QOL improvement!

There are some clever innovations from some tool manufacturers too.
DeWalt has launched batteries that work with both 18v and 54v systems, by having different pins on the output wired to different points in the battery chain.

(3 sets of 3 in series for 18v, or 9 in parallel for 54v, I’m assuming)

You can (mostly), but it involves more user input than the commonly advertised (google/alexa/etc.) integration.

You can choose sensors/actuators that run on protocols that don’t touch the internet. Zigbee, Z-wave, rtl_433. The communication and data are local-only, from the device, to a transceiver on your automation host device. Home Assistant is a good place to start for the host, as others have said.

For some others that require networking of some kind, you can silo them. Put them on a VLAN with limited or no internet access, or just manually set the IP address without a valid gateway (not suitable for kit that is at all suspect).

For ones that must connect to some server owned by the company somewhere, the best bet is to just not buy them! Personally, I do everything I can to avoid kit like that. I absolutely loathe the idea of a device needing to phone home for basic functionality. It’s just begging for the company to start charging, or even shut down the servers and leave you with a brick. Unfortunately, it means a lot of onus on researching kit before buying.