Ok Creed

Have you looked up what “planned obsolescence” is?

I’m using a WH2650A weather station, and I believe it does not need an internet connection to work at all, and I have been able to connect it to HA locally.

Because they don’t go on the public roads, or don’t consider lives of ordinary Russians to be important enough?

Yeah, that would definitely help

How does running your music service through a VPN improve privacy?

Why do you need to be behind VPN?

Maybe if you’d read the replies to your question you wouldn’t be creeped out. There are a lot of good use cases and I haven’t even though how it could be misused before you brought it up.

Can one change iOS focus modes from home assistant?

Turn on the lights in the bedroom based on presence sensor, but only if the bed occupancy sensor detects no one is in bed.

This. I bought a few myself, but didn’t have time to put them together with ESP32/program them with ESPHome

I am using a few of self-built assistants using https://github.com/formatBCE/Koala-Satellite/tree/main - which was heavily inspired and uses a lot of very similar hardware to HA Voice. I have to say my speakers turned out pretty great.

From Zigbee devices I’d highly recommend the ones from Ikea (Somrig, Styrbar, Symfonisk - depending on what you’re going to use it for), and there are a lot more on AliExpress.

Another route might be using ESPHome and program something like Cheap Yellow Display (5-10$ on AliExpress) with LVGL.