They’re top-down/bottom-up, tie into my smart home setup (whole topic in itself)
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I wish I could still buy plain old corded blinds. I managed to find someone selling the precisely correct size for my apartment on Amazon despite the rule against it but now I’m staying in a house with windows of different sizes and no window coverings at all, and I’m misdirecting my spite towards my neighbors by forcing them to see me rather than buying cordless blinds.
Despite being a software developer, I don’t like “smart home” stuff. I recently spent several hundred dollars getting a couple of three-way light switches wired up (I wanted to be able to control the light from multiple locations) and people told me to get the much cheaper and more flexible smart bulbs and wireless switches, but for some reason I can’t put into words I didn’t want that.
(I suppose this is the same urge that pushes me to buy a car with a manual transmission, which in 2025 is severely limiting my options.)
When I got started with my smart home setup, my primary concern was privacy and local control, so I went with an ethernet zigbee coordinator and zigbee bulbs, motion sensors, switches, plugs, etc. Everything runs from a micro PC running Home Assistant OS. It’s been rock solid for years, with no reliance on cloud services, and with no data leaving my house.
The only tricky bit was automating some can lights in the bathroom, but I solved that one by installing a wifi Shelly 2.5 dual channel roller shutter relay, with one channel connected to the light switch and the other to the bathroom fan. This was also the project that led to my discovery of WAGO connectors, which are vastly superior to wire nuts. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
