Used to have my VPS' with OVH a few years back but noticed the performance was significantly worse than similarly priced Hetzner ones. Not sure if that changed.
Regarding alternative VPS providers, Infomaniak in Switzerland have decent prices on their Lite range [0]. I'll stick with Hetzner but if I move some day, I might try them out.
Over a decade ago, I already saw a music festival using Bluetooth tracking to monitor crowd movements [0]. There's an assumption that people just leave their Bluetooth on out of convenience.
When I set up my iPhone and it asked who's iPhone it is, I thought it would be funny to put in Kim Jong Un. Now it shows up as "Kim Jong Un's iPhone" when I enable my hotspot. Or even better, it says it out loud when I connect to some Bluetooth speakers.
Got the UniFi Doorbell from Ubiquiti and I'm really happy with it. It's hooked up to my Dream Machine, records video on disk and I access it via Tailscale. Not paying any subscription and it doesn't live in a cloud.
That's a lovely idea! I wanted to build something similar for safaris but the lack of network in remote areas makes it a bit tricky to use online image recognition models. I never went down the rabbit hole to use offline ones.
When my parents built a new house, they wanted to get smart home features and got quoted 12k CHF (pretty much same as USD) for a crappy proprietary system.
I asked them for 1/4th of that amount to buy hardware and do it myself. My philosophy when designing it, is that everything that is "smart" should have a non-smart backup. You can trigger the lights via an app or the tablet, but the switch on the wall also works. The garage can be opened remotely and automatically when the car approaches, but there's a physical radio remote that still does the job independently of the smart home system. You can set the blinds exactly at the level you want from the app, but the remote is always around if you need it. And so on.
The idea was that if the system goes down, everything should still work. But it also made me realise that the convenience of having both options is what my parents love the most. They mostly interact with things using the non-smart controls, but love to know that they can monitor and interact with these same things from anywhere.
Yes in my opinion the benefit of smart home stuff is not controlling things from my phone or tablet or some touchscreen on the wall. But instead having the same physical switches and controls as one normally would, with the ability to automate things in the background.
Smart home setups where a failure stops you from turning on a light or opening the garage is the worst possible combination.
The trend of smart devices that require internet access to function even when on the same local network as my phone or smart home system are a good example of very poorly designed products.
Everything must fail back to "dumb", not "unavailable". Smart Switches are a huge QoL improvement IMHO and if Home Assistant goes down, you can still use everything like normal. Fans/lights should be voice/app controllable but also have wall/remote controls. Any guest in the house should be able to navigate it without knowing anything about the smart features. Progressive enhancement, if you will.
I never want my house to fall apart because HA is down.
Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it. Especially paired with door sensors to auto-lock/close the door. I can pull up, have everything unlock, walk in, close the door, and have it lock behind me.
I also like motion lights, dimming late at night instead of full brightness, etc but those all "fail" back to just normal dimmable lights that I have to manually switch in the "worst case".
"Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it."
I pull into my driveway, press a button on a $15 remote, and the garage door is opened by a thing that is worth about $200. Nothing "smart" about it, and hard to see how being "smart" would improve it.
I get that some people seem to like the idea, but I have just never really understood the appeal of "smart home" stuff. I mean, "for the low, low price of several thousand dollars, we can make it so you don't have to flip light switches anymore!" is just really not an appealing offer. Flipping light switches is not a problem.
A friend of mine's place is fully automated via HA. It's like living in a haunted house. Everything switches itself on and off or locks and unlocks or starts and stops via a bunch of magic triggers and timers and Node Red scripts that he's spent about a year fiddling with and still keeps finding edge cases where things go wrong. Each time it happens it's hours of debugging trying to figure out why the EV isn't charging or all the stuff in the house that's been automatically turned on is drawing 120% of its power budget or the garage isn't locking itself despite his wife having done the right silly-walk three or four times over. And even when it's working it's a madhouse, because everything is automated you're never certain whether something has been reliably activated or not, and every time I'm there it's "X hasn't happened, honey are you sure you did Y?".
The worst thing about it is that it removes the sense of agency (if you're not familiar with that, and I hate giving Wikipedia as a reference for anything but most of the writing on it otherwise is academic papers, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_agency). That's the very reason why we have placebo buttons in elevators and street crossings and progress bars that indicate nothing, it's to provide the sense of agency that we require.
It's just 1 more thing I don't think about. Like walking up to my car and it auto-unlocking when I put my hand on the handle. As I pull up to my house, the garage is opening and I pull right in. Same with auto-locking the door, I just close it and it will lock behind me. I like little bits of "magic" sprinkled into my day.
I bought a Fairphone 3+ years ago and, as much as I want to support this company, it was a huge disappointment. I switched to an iPhone after using it for less than three years, which is less than the life span I was hoping to use it for.
Within a year, the USB port wore out. Contacted the support as the phone was under warranty and was given two options: Order the replacement part online and get reimbursed for it. Or send the entire phone back, but it would get wiped clean.
I had some data that wasn't backed up and didn't want to loose, and because I couldn't charge it, I decided to go for the first option. It's supposed to be easily reparable, why go through the hassle of sending it back? Well the problem was that the part was unavailable on their store for months. I even looked at third party stores, that specific part couldn't be found anywhere in Europe. After three months of having a "repairable" paperweight on my desk, the part was finally available and I could change it (replacing it took seconds and I've done it while sitting at a café, gotta give credit to Fairphone for that).
Meanwhile, I see my friends with their iPhones getting them repaired within a few days or even the same day! Battery change, charging port replacement, screen change, etc. All could be easily and quickly done by a local repair shop.
In the end I realised it's not about how easy it is to repair your phone, it's about the availability of spare parts. iPhones, especially a few years ago, make it difficult to be repaired. Yet, they are the easiest to get repaired. Fairphone's spare parts are specific to their phones, and even specific to some models. Using generic parts or having some compatible across models would create more need for them = more parts available.
Eric's answer is just don't buy it if you're not happy with the warranty [0].
I'm still willing to take the risk because Pebble smartwatches are the only ones I like and wear. I managed to give my OG Steel another life by replacing the battery. Unfortunately that seems to be harder with the Round 2 as there won't be any screws. I'm still a bit split on whether to change my Time 2 pre-order for a Round 2.
There was a number of games that allowed similar things in these days. My favourite was San Andreas Multiplayer. All you needed was a copy of GTA: San Andreas and download the client, the server was community scripted. This gave birth to a number of unique servers: racing, deathmatch, role play, etc.
Multi Theft Auto (another GTA multiplayer mod, still alive today) allowed for similar things. And so did the source games (Counter Strike, HL2: DM, Day of Defeat, etc.).
Apart from all the awesome annoucements, what really makes me happy is how quickly this went from internet drama to both parties moving towards doing whats best for the community.
Props to Core and Rebble for making Pebble what it is today and casting a bright future for theses watches. Been happily wearing my Pebble Steel for the past month after replacing its battery, looking forward to the PT2!
Regarding alternative VPS providers, Infomaniak in Switzerland have decent prices on their Lite range [0]. I'll stick with Hetzner but if I move some day, I might try them out.
[0] https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/vps-lite
reply