As a long time plex pass user, is there anything there that would make me want to switch? Plex has just plain worked for me for years. mobile apps, everything is just great. Why should I look around?

I had a Hue remote laying around from before I started using HA. When I moved everything Hue onto my zigbee dongle from the hub I did the same with the remote. There is a blueprint out there that makes configuring it a breeze.

They have an API available so I could siphon off my data if I wanted to but then I would need to build something like it to use said data in. I’m good.

It isn’t federated but I use Trakt to manage watch lists and scrobble my viewing history from Plex. There are some discovery features and a minor social aspect.

I would be happy to have groups of community maintained blocklist filters - one for memes, shitposts, politics, nsfw (or not nsfw), music/media, etc. Then we could subscribe to the blocklists and when a new community is created that offends just one person has to add it to the appropriate blocklist for everybody to benefit.

Private equity used to buy distressed firms then build value to sell. The new norm is buy anything and suck it dry then let it fold in on itself and take the money elsewhere.

For example, the firm that bought Red Lobster leveraged everything their brand had to sell (cheddar bay biscuits in the grocery store). The individual stores which sat on company-owned land had their budgets re-configured to “pay rent” to the overlord which now owns everything including the land.

The costs of advertising and company image maintenance were passed down to the stores as fixed costs that local managers had to account for in their budgets without impacting the owners of the name.

No surprise that very few locations can turn a profit in that environment but the leeches at the top aren’t hurt by store closings.

Private equity acquisition today is simply buying something of value to slurp it’s blood then discard the husk.

I’ve only ever had 1 Shelly go out on me and it’s still installed. It’s a 2.5 that stopped speaking wifi. It was set to detached mode to keep some hue bulbs powered. Now the physical switches are no use but it still works so I just left it for now.

Oof, that was a slog - I burned out and started skipping around Thread. Also lemmy

I had never heard of Shinobi, had do duck it to find out what it is. Sorry I don’t have any help to give you but you mentioned unifi - you know that you can now add onvif cameras to Protect, right? That’s what I use for my NVR.

They integrate fine with HA - I have several PoE and one wifi and no problems. For NVR I use unifi now that they will let you add onvif cams. For day-to-day reference to video streams I prefer viewing events in HKSV via Scrypted.

My wife likes AnyList so I use it too. If you’re looking for privacy-focused group lists I would suggest Home Assistant to-do lists (assuming you’re running Home Assistant already).

When I couldn’t find anything that seemed to work for me I decided to go with a “hands-free” approach. My alarm will arm-home when everyone has been home for 15 minutes. It arms-away when everyone is gone. It disarms when someone gets home. If armed-home and an exterior door is opened with presence detected inside by that door it disarms. I haven’t had a mis-fire since I started it.

lol - that won’t work for me, I live in Texas and that means my light would always be deep, dark red. Cool concept though.

As I replied to another who suggested ESPHome - I don’t want a bunch boards and wires stuck everywhere and unless I am misunderstanding it I’ll need to get into 3d printing to make enclosures for stuff. I can see going there some day but no room for a makerspace in this house until the boy moves out.

You don’t need to unlock your phone to fire an event in HomeAssistant. My iPhone needs to be awake but will still scan and run shortcut while locked.

I don’t do NVR - my servers are all low power except my PleX and I have so much storage dedicated to that I just can’t see adding more. All cameras have SD storage and I have key events backing up to cloud.

Done all that except the Xmas stuff - my neighbor across the street puts up incredible holiday lighting all year long…literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear in play. I can’t afford to even make a showing next to that.

Yes, LEDs and water flow and voice control among other goodies.

I keep hearing ESPHome but it seems so bare metal - how do you make the little boards look like they belong? I really don’t want to have to start 3d printing stuff to make enclosures.

I do but Mrs has clearly stated that she dislikes light level automations - I have a couple FP2 presence sensors and I set up various zones so the light would follow you around and dim asa you left. I wigged her out.

Actually NFC tags were one of my first things back when I was using HomeKit. They are much better in HA because you can fire an event without any interaction with the device that scans it and that is pretty cool.

Thanks, I have a 10-pack of tags that I could deploy to do random stuff for my own enjoyment. I appreciate the reminder!