The scariest part of this recent news is that TM Signal seem(ed) to be interoperable. People using TM Signal could interact with actual Signal users. How are you to know whether or not your groups have people using bastardized versions of Signal? Are things like Session interoperable with Signal?

I currently have a lot of my light automations setup by first having an automation that turns the light on at a certain time, then another that turns the light off at another time. This works, and it has for years, but I'm imagining there must be blueprints or other methods to do this on/ off behavior in a single automation rather than having them in pairs (this is not scaling very well).

Anyone have suggestions? The image is a blueprint I have for turning lights on/ off based on a time window which is very handy, and I'm hoping there's something similar out there for my needs.

I realized I have some old hue bulbs laying around, and they're working well enough with my Zigbee controller (no bridge), but if I decide to scale up I definitely don't want to pay the Hue premium.

Anyone have a Zigbee bulb brand they recommend? I hear Third Reality is nice?

I previously hacked together an Ikea sensor which worked well for the price, but was not weatherproof, and my solution caused the temperatures to be very inaccurate.

I'm looking for something that can be used offline (connects to HA via WiFi, Zigbee, etc but does not need WAN access) and is plug and play. I see some solutions like this, but am not sure if they will work in an 'offline' mode. Anyone have any suggestions? Something with wind speed, etc would be awesome.

I am looking for a privacy respecting (and ideally E2EE supporting) email/ calendar/ contacts provider.

I had previously used ProtonMail up until a few months ago when the CEO started getting political (bummer).

I've since been using TutaMail, and while it's a bit rough on the UI/UX, I do appreciate that the team behind it seems very privacy focused. One problem here though, is that family that is also using this is ending up in spam folders when emailing others (I guess Tuta is more likely to be flagged as spam).

Does anyone have any suggestions for alternate providers?

I am looking for a simple to use VoIP provider that I mainly plan to use for 2FA (when a cell number is required). I know there are checks that sometimes prevent VoIP from being used but I figure it's worth a shot.

MySudo looks nice but they require Google play services to be installed, VoIP.ms looks nice too but I've had a hard time getting a hold of anyone there to help with activating my account.

Anyone have any recommendations?

I've used Graphene OS for years, but only recently started taking advantage of the profiles feature.

Currently the Owner profile that you log into on first boot is my main profile, and I have a secondary decoy profile that I can switch to. Is this the best way to do this, or should it be the other way around so that on first boot you go into the decoy, which also allows you to end the session of the main profile?

I have a SearXNG instance running locally, and I have a proxy entry for this (search.home). When I go to https://search.home/ in Firefox, it works as expected and brings me to SearXNG, however if I try adding this as my default search, it instead resolves to the IP and not the hostname, which fails because the IP does not have a cert on it and it tries to hit it with https (as would work with the hostname).

This works in Firefox mobile, and every other web browser I've tried on desktop, just not Firefox for some reason. I've tried various about:config changes but so far no luck. Anyone else have a workaround for this? It would be nice if Firefox showed you what it actually has saved for the url/hostname/IP of the search engine in the Search section of the Settings, but sadly it just has the name and shortcut listed.

When charging a phone wirelessly, there is sometimes significant heat generated. That combined with higher charging rates that are now coming out with the Qi 2 standard make me wonder what the ideal charge for the battery would be.

Most of the time I just toss my phone onto a wireless charger before bed, and don’t really care how quickly it charges. Would it be better to use a 5W brick with a charging pad? Should wireless be avoided and usb used instead?

Some friends of mine have a Google map going where they pin locations of interest (restaurants, etc).

I was wondering if anyone knew of a non-Google project that might allow for something similar? The goal would be to have a shareable map that a group of invited/ allowed users could add locations and possibly notes to.

I've been wanting to get a privacy screen protector so that you can't see it from the sides, but all the ones I've tried have this 'oily' type of look to it. Maybe this is inherent to the technology, but does anyone know of any that do not have this oily appearance, especially on white screens?

My office/ lab at home uses around 600W when fully running, and I see that there are quite a few power stations that will comfortably handle that, and foldable 4 panel setups that can generate 300-400W.

Would there be any issues plugging a UPS (my lab has a few of them) into a solar power station such as this?

Is there some sort of feature I want to look for such as sin wave, etc to have this work reliably, or does a UPS not really care since the controller in the power station should be normalizing voltage, etc?