Fuck. I almost wish I didn’t read this.

There’s a great automation integration in home assistant that uses the suns position and time of day to automagically set the color temp throughout the day. It’s super nice to have the color temp get warmer as the sun sets.

For sure. That one is a bit harder to get right, but is good to keep testing and striving for.

Pretty hard to replace weather info without internet. I don’t have any automations that rely on weather info, and I have a cheap rain gauge that a friend 3d printed for me. It uses a simple zigbee door sensor to detect rain accumulation. Pretty clever device (not my invention.)

So eventually I want to automate the watering of my garden, and I intend to use the rain sensor to help there. But honestly, it never rains in the summer here in the PNW, so my 3rd reality moisture sensors are more useful than actual weather data.

Tasmota is awesome. I flashed all my early Shelly devices with it. But now the native Shelly firmware is amazing, and it allows you to turn on local mqtt only. So I’ve stopped using Tasmota for everything besides the few devices flashed early and behind my wall switches. (I’m too lazy to pull them out)

Is it hard to flash bulbs with Tasmota? Don’t you usually need access to the pins? Or have an OTA option for updating the firmware?

Like the other user mentioned: depends on your setup.

I have recessed lighting throughout my house, so swapping to bulbs for all of them would have been an expensive pain. So I opted for smart switches. I got innovelli reds, because they were the best there was at the time. You can get them with any protocol you want (zigbee/zwave/wifi)

With a smart switch, you can control lots of lights with only one device. Originally I just added Shelly relays behind each switch, but I wanted the dimming capability of the innoveli.

If you do still want bulbs, nothing beats hue. But they are by far the most expensive.

I think you gotta fix the door before you can have complete confidence.

My automated deadbolt can ‘force’ its way shut when it has full battery. But when it gets low on juice, the door needs to be ‘fully shut’

So your best bet is to better align your strike plate so the door doesn’t need shimmied to close fully.

Door locks and garage door openers are sweet to automate. My instance knows if I left by car/bike/foot, and welcomes me home with the proper unlocking/opening.

Also, never having to worry about if I left the door unlocked or garage door open is nice.

You can tell it’s an IT guy’s home assistant if there’s no hardware that requires someone else’s cloud.

My home automation philosophy is that everything in the house should work with or without internet. It’s going well so far.

looks like it might be another trip down KDE tinkering lane for me! Thanks for all the tips.

Cool. I’ll give it a go. I do often manually resize windows though, so maybe that’s where I went wrong. Thanks for the tip

What’s your preferred way to turn KDE into a tiling WM? I tried something in the past, but every time I tried to resize a window smaller than 25% of the screen, it would pop it out into floating mode.

I am still using sway because I need to know that there are no hiding windows anywhere. That shit drives me berserk.