Closed APIs really suck for consumers. It’s the leverage these companies try to hold over our heads. Sooner or later, shareholders’ demand for forever growth inevitably causes corporate executives to notice the attractive lever of profit that comes from a closed ecosystem. Every for-profit company will inevitably close every API that they can (while still maintaining a functioning product). Sometimes they don’t even let the function part stop them!
Yes, there were things that have been free for a long time that seem like it’s inevitable to charge for. Smartthings was great for my first years of smart home use, helped me automate a lot of stuff, keep track of a sketchy landlord, etc. But it’s time to move on
How is it clickbait? This will cause problems for people. I’m going to have to reset all my old Smartthings zigbee gear to connect to HA directly, which is a solution and alternative I’m glad is available (and I’ve been procrastinating on doing) but is going to take me at least a couple hours to set up. So it is annoying that Samsung is doing this
I do something similar, except on the Kobo I run KOReader which can interface with Calibre-Web over OPDS
I think the point is to be easier than frigate. Eg a full image like home assistant, not needing to fiddle with docker.
I started with Raspberry Pi and Arduino for a scientific project that later became a published paper. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0278752
Now I have a couple Pis and ESP32s around the house doing all sorts of jobs, and am managing Docker-hosted shiny dashboards at work
It has had trouble with some subtitles. That’s the biggest issue I’ve had
It is a little convoluted how it’s set up, but I have a debt of gratitude to the Calibre community for their various add-ons freeing my legally purchased books of their DRM! Which is what enabled me to have centralized library in the first place, since they were all on different services. But now I’ve quit Amazon and have everything accessible from KOreader on my Kobo, via Calibre-web
Syncthing so you never have to mail files to yourself again.
FreshRSS for RSS reading
Readeck for saving articles for later (or wallabag, many alternatives)
HomeAssistant
Calibre-web for ebooks
PiHole
Joplin for self hosted notes
Searxng is fun for self hosted metasearch but has sadly been having trouble with Google lately
It’s handy to share media with my family! The Roku app works OK
Might depend on your graphics card setup. My work laptop has pretty underpowered integrated graphics
Video effects randomly stop working sometimes, and frequently has choppy video
I posted this a year or two ago and got hit by a huge wave of furious Brave users lol. Occasionally to this day someone will stumble on it and post some tirade
I think some people won’t be able to switch just because they’ve passed the point where learning new tech is possible. But I do think for those with the will to change over, it will increasingly actually be happening rather than being muttered a threat to Microsoft, especially because the main pain points of the past (software exclusivity) is starting to break down. Some games are now running better on Linux. MS Office is increasingly being superseded by alternatives like Gsuite, Libreoffice, or just learning to code in easy languages like Python/R. And unlike in the past when Microsoft overplayed its hand and changed course to regain users with Windows 7, 10, etc, this time it seems like they aren’t going to change. They are in too deep.
You can only abuse your customers so much before they move on. I have long enjoyed using Windows, but when they announced my perfectly usable laptop wouldn’t be able to get 11 thanks to no TPM, and I had to go through a complicated set of hoops to manually install it, that was my breaking point. I will keep Windows for some limited stuff on dual boot on one machine, but elsewhere I’m going Linux only
I considered setting up a Pi for WireGuard at my mom’s house (her router doesn’t support VPN), so we could share subscriptions still, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and risk that they would start VPN detecting from the client: could just imagine them sending her emails about it that would confuse her lol
I use Wireguard via PiVPN and it’s pretty much foolproof. I don’t bother with Dynamic DNS but have in the past
I just moved 20k bookmarks from Pocket to Readeck, and can sympathize lol. A lot of the links are dead. I found a cleanup script I’m going to run but it’s still a huge curation challenge
Yep, that’s what I’m doing with my door sensors. Just bought the adapter