The vast majority of people have already activated Windows with an email address. I have several friends who have done so and for them this cost nothing.

Not something I’m willing to do, but it’s not a problem for most users who entered their email address long ago.

How do you figure?

It’s not just companies. Amazon started pushing ads to subscribers who pay for ad-free Prime video content. Some idiot here on Lemmy actually insisted it wasn’t an ad at all, but a “promotion.”

Companies are getting their customers to make infuriating, ridiculous corporate statements for them.

I think you are severely underestimating how computer illiterate most people are. Many people I know struggle to use their Iphones. Not long ago a friend asked me to help him turn on subtitles on a streaming service on his smart TV.

2nd the SSD suggestion. I switched to one after a couple of microSD failures and it is very stable and way faster. A 240GB SSD is around $30. Even if you eventually decide to go to a different HA platform the SSD will make the Pi much more useful for other things.

The only thing keep in mind is the power limitation of your Pi. Make sure whatever you buy doesn’t draw more than the Pi power supply can provide.

This week Amazon starting pushing ads to customers paying extra for ad-free Prime Video.

Corporations are now so powerful they don’t have to abide by reasonable norms, contracts, or laws any longer. Any fines are just a cost of doing business and are a small fraction of the profits they generate.

What are customers going to do anyway? Go to other businesses that are doing the exact same things on different days?

Yes. I had them blocked via my firewall because of the constant traffic they generated and blocking Internet access causes constant bulb resets. The resets are known to TP-Link and according to a couple of sources they created a private firmware release that fixed it. TP-Link failed to publically release that firmware, and last time I checked deny it ever existed. I replaced the bulbs with 3rd Reality Zigbee bulbs that work perfectly.

I didn’t get that far. When they demanded I log in I just removed it. Jellyfin is working OK without having to figure out how to bypass defaults.

When I was in the market for bulbs Hue was just starting that BS. They lost that sale and I’ve been in the process of removing network access for everything possible and severely restricting it when not. My old Honeywell wifi thermostat is gone, smart appliances are disconnected from wifi, and TVs are blocked by my firewall when they aren’t actually being used. Next up, Graphene OS.

Sometimes I’d like to move to a tropical island with no news or Internet at all.

This is why it’s a great idea to refuse to install everything that’s possible, including smart switches, cameras, lights etc. that rely on the good will of some company to keep running.

Honeywell wifi thermostats worked great until they didn’t. Now their servers are often slow or down. TCP-Link smart bulbs reset regularly if their Internet access is blocked because TCP-Link desperately needs to keep track of when everyone’s lights are on and off. Plex wants us to log into their servers to watch content we’re hosting ourselves. Too bad if their servers are down. Security camera companies have been disabling local storage options without warning for years.

Logitech actually planned to introduce a subscription mouse. Hopefully at some point people will get sick of this shit, refuse to put up with it and their sales will tank.

I had something similar happen with Google a few years ago. Even though I had my password and access to my email they decided I was trying to hack my own account and locked me out. Like you I immediately started to look for other solutions.

Syncthing file sharing is really easy to install and use. There are no ports to configure on your router and everything is encrypted in transit. I have my phone’s DCIM directory set up to sync to my home server and PC so new photos are backed up and available everywhere in a few seconds. I installed Syncthing intending to move to another solution eventually, but it works so well (aside from one or two files that occasionally don’t sync) that I’ve just stuck with it.

For passwords Keepass & KeepassXC work really well on just about every platform. I share the password file using Syncthing and in years of doing this I’ve never had a problem that I didn’t cause myself and those were minor.

You can get both of these up and running with very little effort and quickly limit your reliance on Google, then move to other solutions if you find they’d work better for you.

I have them installed in 2 houses, one 120V and one 127V. Electrical panels in NA are pretty simple (although not as simple as the UK) and have the 2 phases split on the 2 sides of the box. The breakers for 120V or 127V circuits on the right are on one phase and those on the left are on the other.

The panel wiring wasn’t something I thought about when I put the power line adapters in and they were plug and play in both locations. I’m guessing some brands work much better than others and these Netgear adapters have worked flawlessly. Or maybe I got lucky.

That said, I’d have Cat6 cables installed if it didn’t require tearing apart the walls and ceiling.

My experience has been different. Wifi extenders were not very reliable. Wifi devices were better, but powerline extenders have been rock solid. Ping times are right in line with wired Ethernet too.

In my experience powerline extenders are a reasonable alternative to Ethernet for home users in places where running a cable isn’t an option.

You can install a W11 VirtualBox VM on an old, unsupported processor without any special configuration. I have it running under Linux on a 10 year old AMD processor and it works fine.

For the washer a smart plug with power monitoring. The current draw goes to almost zero when the cycle’s finished. A Zigbee vibration sensor for the dryer (or another smart plug if it’s a gas dryer) and temperature sensor for the fridge. All in they were less than $20.

The timers on washers are notoriously inaccurate and moisture sensors make drying timers useless, but if you had your own washer and dryer you might know that.

Your extreme cognitive bias is indicative of someone completely lacking in a sense of sonder. (Look it up, it is certain someone with main character syndrome has never heard the word before.)

Anyway it’s been fun, but we’re done.

Egocentric bias - the tendency to focus excessively on one’s own perspective, leading to a distorted view of reality where individuals overestimate their own importance and fail to adequately consider others’ viewpoints. This cognitive bias affects how people recall events and interpret situations, often making them see themselves as the center of attention.

LOL! You actually believe all fridges work exactly like yours? You believe everyone’s laundry is installed within hearing range exactly like yours? Some people even have washers & dryers without audio alerts. The laundry notifications allow us to get 6+ loads done in 1 day rather than 2.

There are millions of households in just the U.S. and nearly every single household is very different than yours. You need to get out more and stop admiring your own navel.

My HA smartified washer & dryer save us more than an hour every week because we are informed immediately when their cycles are complete. My refrigerator temperature monitor has alerted us more than once that the door wasn’t completely closed saving us hundreds in spoiled food costs. It would do the same if the compressor fails.

Everyone has different needs and sometimes those needs include smart appliance features.