TrenchcoatFullOfBats

Depends on the fridge, in my opinion. I don’t need any door sensors because my fridge will beep at me if I leave a door open for 12 microseconds, and the freezer is pretty reliable, it’s just the fridge that needs adjusting from time to time.

I just use a ThirdReality smart plug with energy monitoring primarily so I can see power consumption, but I still contend that this combined with the temp sensor is enough to let me know if there’s a problem when I’m not home.

Also a 20 year IT person, but on the Linux server side. I do have an isolated network for IoT things that don’t have local alternatives (pfsense hardware firewall, 24 port managed switch in the rack and ruckus APs), but I hate (hate) the enshittification of perfectly good hardware with software that exists solely to harvest my data so a corporation can have an additional revenue stream for the shareholders, and I will go pretty far out of my way to avoid giving money to companies that do this. Dreading the day my beloved dumb LG plasma TV dies.

What hardware are you running your HA instance on? Mine runs in an HAOS Proxmox VM with the USB port for the zwave dongle (for the locks) passed through. ZigBee coordinator is ethernet, so it’s just plugged into a switch in the living room.

I’ve been using a cheap Aqara temp/humidity sensor in my fridge for years. Works fine, as I said. Many others do the same. There’s a lot more plastic in fridges than you might expect.

My ZigBee devices use an ethernet based coordinator which communicates with my Home Assistant install via MQTT. The coordinator software is called Zigbee2MQTT. The coordinator does not send any data anywhere except Home Assistant.

There are many easy ways to keep your data local and private while still allowing notification when you’re away from home. In my case, I pay $65/year to Nabu Casa to access my Home Assistant when I’m not at home.

I use a very similar setup to keep an eye on my mom’s place from 500 miles away, including many sensors and multiple camera feeds, which are also local only with no cloud component. Frigate NVR is installed as a Home Assistant add-on, which runs detection on each camera feed and records clips when a person is detected on any feed and also pops a notification at the same time. If she wants to save a clip, she can download it, otherwise it’ll be deleted after 5 days (configurable).

There are other ways to get access to local data remotely. If you don’t want to pay for Nabu Casa (which funds Home Assistant development), there’s also Tailscale/headscale, ZeroTier, Cloudflare, DuckDNS, reverse proxy, etc.

You could also just have Home Assistant send you an email when an event is triggered, like a rise of 2 degrees in your fridge in an hour, or a drop of 20% in energy usage over 30 minutes.

Or you could just have a notification pop in the Home Assistant app on your phone, which will work remotely with most of the methods I just listed.

EDIT: Didn’t respond to your last paragraph:

I get that you’re very afraid of the security implications of iot devices, but none of the ideas you’re proposing are actually solutions to the problems a truly connected device can solve.

I’m not “very afraid”, I’m simply aware of better alternatives. Why would I risk the security of my network by giving Samsung or GE or LG a backdoor into my network when I can get most of the same information their app can give me by using cheap sensors and Home Assistant?

IoT is essentially a catch-all marketing term, like “organic”, and if I’m not mistaken, the “I” in IoT stands for “internet”. ZigBee devices cannot connect to the internet. Doing so requires a hub or coordinator that contains WiFi or ethernet connectivity. There are many ZigBee coordinators that lack this functionality, which allows your data to stay local, on your own network, without exposing it to the internet.

I never claimed that a smart plug could monitor the temperature inside a fridge, but there are certainly ZigBee temperature devices you could put inside your fridge to do that, and they would work just fine.

A ZigBee smart plug with energy monitoring would certainly give you enough information to determine if the compressor had failed, as the compressor is the component that uses the most power. If the energy usage of the fridge dropped significantly, it could indicate a compressor failure. While this method isn’t foolproof and won’t detect all possible fridge issues, it can serve as an early warning system for major problems like compressor failure.

You can get 4 ZigBee smart plugs with energy monitoring for $35. These are not IOT devices and if you just want to know if the fridge is running, these will do that, with the added benefit of allowing you to leave the fridge’s WiFi disconnected, which is a security gain.

The internet certainly forgets…but a Usenet service with good retention will remember for about a decade

My Gen 2 only had whispernet, which relied on the Sprint EVDO network, both of which no longer exist (the company and the network type).

FWIW, Amazon deprecated mobi files recently and epub is the new “sideload” standard. You still have to email the file to the kindle address to be able to read them, or convert to azw3.

If you’re already using Calibre, check out Calibre-Web, which essentially uses a Calibre database as the back end. The interface is so much nicer than Calibre.

With a wifi fridge for example I can know if it stops working

You can also do that with a simple smart plug with energy monitoring. You can get a 4 pack for $35.

Roe v. Wade worked, until it didn’t. Legalizing something via SCOTUS has lately proven to be as permanent as the political views of a majority of the justices on that bench.

The only correct way to fix this problem is via a Constitutional amendment, and that’s never going to happen because Republicans have rage boners for state-sponsored killing, or in this case, murder.

I’ve moved to Garmin now, but I have an ocean’s worth of salt over Pebble as well.

LET US LISTEN TO YOU IT WILL BE FINE.

IGNORE ME!

My solution to this problem is Jellyfin, fed by usenet-backed sonarr/radar and Tubesync to pull in YouTube channel subscriptions. Those are added to a Jellyfin library which is accessible right next to movies and tv shows.

This is all through the Jellyfin app on a 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro. It’s a perfect couch-friendly setup. For just regular YouTube browsing, SmartTube can be installed on the Shield and on your phone. You can then cast to the SmartTube app on the Shield instead of to the YouTube app.

You may also want to look into Usenet instead of torrents when you’re researching. Sonarr/Radarr/Readarr etc all work (in my opinion) better with Usenet.

You’ll need to pay some, but the reliability is amazing, which is extremely helpful for the partner acceptance factor. I pay for two providers (newsdemon is primary and eweka is a backup) and two indexers (drunkenslug and nzbfinder), and everything has been rock solid reliable for years. Download speeds are also MUCH faster than torrents.

Combine this setup with overseerr (or jellyseerr) so your partner can find their own things to download and you might be able to get them back on board.

Plus, no flaresolverr required!

Seward has entered the chat

Confused man it sounds

It’s in there:

Tubesync has you covered

I heard that he wanted to get Officer Thomson and his lamp on the case, but the request form was incomplete.

“Fine” being (arguably) marginally better than attempting to decipher a scrambled cable channel that could be either the softcore channel or a travel documentary - either way, you’re looking at something that rhymes with “complicating crank”.

“Would you kindly vote against your interests?”