The boring answer is that just like “shields up”, it’s there to help the audience. Maybe they did a take where she just hurries away and it looked weird so they added that line.

Or maybe she just really needed to go for a Commander Data, if you catch my drift.

I have my dock plugged into a smart plug and the laptop set in the BIOS to turn on when it receives power. I have an NFC tag on my coffee machine that I bloop while I’m making my morning brew, and that turns the dock on so that everything’s ready when I move into the office.

For turning things off I have HASS.Agent installed and sending state updates (locked, unlocked, etc, which is useful for other automations) and when that sensor goes unavailable for 15 minutes it turns the plug off. I find that’s long enough to allow it to reboot for updates and what not.

The sensor does report shutdown, reboot, and sleep states but I found that it often happens too quickly to get the change sent, so the unavailable state is more reliable.

Dammit, really?

Thanks for the re-upvote. My guess is it was someone who sets timers on their phone. 😂

Dammit, now you’ve got my head swimming with ways to improve the washing machine stuff. I bet a vibration sensor on top could be combined with the smart plug power monitoring to detect when it’s being emptied.

How did you do the Google-turning-on-the-smartplug thing? I feel like I’m missing a lot of tricks by not having HA integrated into those. I just use them for audible notifications currently.

The whole point of home automation is that it’s automated. Setting a timer on your phone is for chumps.

I have a similar thing to notify us when the washing machine is done, only without the cool presence stuff - I’ll have to look into your setup for that!

I also use a smart plug to monitor our toaster. Not for notifications but because it uses a mechanical timer that if it fails, will also fail to turn the element off, so it comes with dire warnings about always unplugging it after use. Instead I just have HA setup to turn off the plug if it ever draws power for more than 4 minutes.

Z2M. I had a ZHA setup and I’ll give it to them, it was super easy to setup (barely an inconvenience). Then I bought a set of sockets with power monitoring but found that they used a non-standard way of reporting those stats.

They were seemingly quite new and both ZHA and Z2M had ‘quirks’ submitted very quickly to make them work, but while the Z2M quirk was approved and added almost straight away, 2 or 3 months later I was still waiting for the ZHA one to be approved.

Then, like you, I wanted to change the Zigbee channel and took the opportunity to switch to Z2M where the sockets and their power monitoring have been working perfectly ever since. It’s definitely more complicated to setup initially but you get more control overall and, at least from my experience, the overall device support is much better.

Note: I did initially have loads of stability issues when making the switch, but it was due to me flashing the combined Zigbee+Thread firmware to my Sonoff stick. The fix was to turn off the OpenThread Border Router in the Silabs addon and then everything was stable again. I don’t have any Thread devices yet, of course.

Works fine with Boost.

This is the correct answer. Due to wear levelling, a traditional drive wipe program isn’t going to work reliably, whereas most (all?) SSDs have some sort of secure erase function.

It’s been a while since I read up on it but I think it works due to the drive encrypting everything that’s written to it, though you wouldn’t know it’s happening. When you call the secure erase function it just forgets the key and cycles in a new one, rendering everything previously written to it irrecoverable. The bonus is that it’s an incredibly quick operation.

Failing that, smash it to bits.

Gotta hold my hands up and admit that in my initial haste to confirm the price I fell victim to the Play Store putting sponsored results ahead of what you actually searched for and I installed some crap called minimalist launcher, which charges £70 for a lifetime license. That’s what my “insane” comment was based on.

In comparison it’s nowhere near that bad for Niagara, but it is still pricey compared to most apps, and I balk at paying a subscription for software in general so that still stands.

Might give it another go after all…

Reading the article and justification given I do actually get the idea of it. They want to levarage the parent company’s clout and connections in order to convince other app makers into implementing a way for Sesame, the universal search app/plugin, to pull results directly from those apps. For the parent company it would give them a USP in the analytics market.

In short: Think of searching for a product from the launcher and rather than it opening Google, it returns results directly from the Amazon app, or eBay, or any other app that supports the functionality. Obviously there’ll be an affiliate kickback for any click-through and you’ve got a decent revenue source.

It’s a good idea, I get it. Would I feel comfortable using it? I don’t know. On the one hand it just cuts out the middle-man of searching for and clicking through to products via Google etc. On the other hand, all of the concerns already raised in this thread!

I like Niagara but it’s insanely expensive, especially as a subscription. I don’t know how people justify it.

Edit: The above was based on me getting duped by a Play Store sponsored search result and installing some crap that charges £70 for a lifetime licence. In comparison Niagara feels like much better value, but it’s still expensive compared to most apps and I still don’t like subscribing to software in general.

Oh goddammit.

I’d post mine but it’s just the default overview. I really should put some effort into making something good.

Nah na na na na na. Nah na na na na na. How’s your father? Alright.

Where’s the Crystalline Entity?

In my head they’re just so caught up in the conversation that they didn’t notice the hill they were walking had crested, so they continued on the same upward trajectory.

Yeah I really like this. I wonder what they’re talking about.

So many Google products are either crippled or completely unavailable outside the US, it’s honestly quite ridiculous. I’m still waiting for call recording to be made available in the UK.

I have something like this setup for my porch lights. Light goes on when it detects motion, then it uses wait_for_trigger to wait until the motion stops before starting a 20 second and turning off the lights.

All simple enough so far but, crucially, the “mode” for the automation is set to restart. That way if the sensor detects motion during the 20 second countdown it cancels the whole run and starts again from the top.

Remind me? I have a vague recollection of it being a series of ever more bizarre trades but nothing beyond that.