The way to tell so often seems to be if someone has called it AI or Machine Learning.

AI? “I put this through chatgpt” (or “The media department has us by the balls”)

ML? “I crunched a huge amount of data in a huge amount of ways, and found something interesting”

z-wave may be easier than expected, as I think the devices stay linked to the hardware dongle used. (This is just from memory, mind!). But if you need to change the dongle, perhaps less fun.

imo, it will be a bit of pain to get everything inside HA, but once it’s done, you’ll be inside a platform that is pretty open, and commonly used, with lots of other people (hopefully) posting up solutions to problems before you encounter them!
And because it’s software that will run on pretty much anything, you have the reassurance that even if something crazy happened, you could just reinstall an old version.

If it were me, I’d clear an entire weekend day, power off the old kit, and work away at getting HA controlling everything.

Because if they remaster it, they can also remaster the price.
Which is probably why they’ve pulled all the old versions.

Nice to see NC becoming involved with the board.

I don’t run that much z-wave due to cost, but I’m all for improvements and tighter integration.
Especially since when I do want to spend money, ZW works very well.

Must be the fracking residue in the water.

Or maybe something like this:

https://www.securemeters.com/uk/product/room-thermostats/hrt4-zw-asr/

The unit with the buttons on is a simple relay, which hass can control to turn things on and off, and use a heating control with a temperature sensor.
But if you hit the button on the front, it also gives 30 minutes of on, which can be handy if the system had issues.

Or you could have a hass controlled relay, but also leave the old controller wired in on a manual switch.
So if there was a failure, you could go back to the old control by manually flipping it over.

I get timber/PIR/plasterboard from the builders merchant, and also take that plus garden waste to the tip, 10+ times per year, in a 4 seat car that weighs under 1 tonne.

Anything truly massive, they just deliver it to me.

The day I discovered that a 2.4m 6*2 would fit inside was a very good day.
As was the one I bought roof bars.

This is an absolutely brilliant summary.

I thought it was.

I just got frustrated with it.

How many chapters that actually detail what happened? It felt like all it did was go

Then spends more time talking about how he is burdened and manly as a result of doing it than the actual doing.

The Hell storyline after that gave me hope, as I trudged through chapters of “cor, look at Adam’s muscular muscles muscling”, but once that finished, and we started getting storylines like “Why can’t we have guns in Folctha? Murica!”, I kinda gave up.

The main contributor continued writing it on a full novel scale at https://deathworlders.com/ .

However…Imho after about 40 chapters, it really loses it’s way (bar a couple of cool minor plots). And the author goes a bit right wing rhetoric/muscleporn-y.

It’s only Virgin Media to my knowledge who does this.
Most of the other providers are happy for you to use anything that works properly for VDSL or FTTP.

Most FTTP providers fit an ONT that puts the connection back into an RJ45 ethernet connector.
Then you connect to the provider using PPPOE. Anything past the ONT, you can do whatever you like.

You can block or disrupt communications with LEO.
But you’d need the blessing of the country’s government to pump out that much interference continuously.

Finally, a local WEEE company gets to make a few hundred bucks selling off the glorified VOC sensors at the end.

A low-wiring way to do it would be to replace the bulbs with hue/similar bulbs, then just put a battery powered button in the location you want to have the controls. £10-ish for each button, plus however much the bulbs are.

Then just have the button set to toggle the lights on/off (you can also call different presets like dim etc by pressing and holding).
Then hass just directly sends the on/off commands to the bulbs.

My first integration is going to be putting my standard “going out” dashboard by the front door.
Being able to glance and see UV index, temperature, rain probability is dead useful.

This is the thing, the balance of anonymity and preventing people using that anonymity to be a tit.
In my opinion, one of the answers is keeping the signal-to-noise high: Make sure that there are enough sensible people in a community that if someone starts acting up, they’re alone. And then they can either correct their course, or get banned, ideally before the next moron shows up.

And part of the way of achieving that is raising the barrier to sign-up, if only a little, and rate limiting.

I can’t see how anyone involved with allowing this isn’t complicit.
What possible reason did the police of a foreign nation need to be physically there for, other than physically removing someone?

When the card launched, I remember reading that Apple was keen to put their finger on the scales when deciding whether or not somebody was offered credit through Apple. Their logic, I assume, was that the increased profits would offset the increased risk.

This appears not to have been the case.

I’m pretty sure Amazon neutered the camels during the pandemic.