My Dungeons and Dragons campaign stopped just being dungeons in the last session and we met our first dragon!
I've been trying to draw some of the more memorable bits of our sessions in my notebook to keep it more interesting and I really like how the dragon has come out 🤩🤩 #DungeonsAndDragons#DnD#5e#watercolour
Here you go with the reason why I decided to never purchase proprietary hardware in my smart home, why I never bothered to implement support for Nest and Echo products in Platypush (unlike Home Assistant), and why I advise smart home enthusiasts to build their own products (and I try and provide them with plenty of instructions to do so).
You buy a nice expensive piece of smart hardware, just to see that company purchased by Google/Microsoft/Amazon in a short time, features being removed with no notice, APIs being changed for no notice, plenty of "where's the button to do this thing gone in the Google Home app?", and your smart routines in your own home on your own dearly purchased devices basically become dependent on what a clueless product manager in Big Tech needs to get their quarterly bonus.
I will never build integrations for Nest and Echo in Platypush because to me it makes sense to build integrations only with products that embrace openness and back-compatibility. Building integrations with products that only care of communicating within their own walled garden (or, worse, bring up the "certified partner" bullshit), and not in an integrated open system with open protocols and APIs, is just a waste of time. This is not what a connected home is supposed to be, and everyone should stay away from these mediocre products.
A thermostat can be easily implemented with a relay, a temperature sensor and an Arduino. It's literally just an electric finger that closes a circuit if temperature goes below a certain threshold. And the logic to turn it on and off can be customized to the extreme on a Raspberry Pi. No need to spend $300 for it.
And a Nest camera can be easily replaced by a PiCamera that costs <10% of the price tag. You even have some native apps to stream a PiCamera. You put Platypush around it with an ffmpeg dec/enc, and you've got your HTTP cam on par with Nest. Again, no need to spend hundreds of bucks. I've set up 10 smart cameras in my house for the same cost of a single Nest camera.
Liberec hackfest didn't go exactly according to the plan, but @bilelmoussaoui did manage to refactor the whole icon sheet loading in Symbolic preview. It's now non blocking and sporting a nice progress indicator.
I just sent an image link from my RSS reader of an image on the Inner Ring cycling website and noticed the hosting is on Tumblr. Do they operate as a CDN now?
So, habe jetzt beschlossen kurzfristig mein @greentechstartups Podcast ruhen zu lassen. Das könnte auch mit einem neuen Projekt zusammenhängen, das ziemlich spannend ist. Aber vor allem sind 20 Zuhörende pro Folge einfach zu wenig. Das Thema ist mir wichtig, aber ich suche noch nach dem richtigen Anpack.