The latest update to the iOS 14.5 beta won’t fix all of our gripeswithSiri, but it does introduce a few major changes for Apple’s digital assistant. For starters, Siri will no longer be feminine by default for English speakers. Instead, once iOS 14.5 is officially pushed out, iOS users will be prompted to pick their preferred Siri voice during setup.
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Per TechCrunch, the move is part of a larger effort to make the digital assistant more inclusive. In addition to letting users choose how they want Siri to sound, the beta version also adds two new English voices. Reportedly, the two new Siri voices were created by running “source talent recordings” through Apple’s Neural text to speech engine. The idea is to offer a Siri that sounds more organic with smoother transitions and is capable of generating responses in real-time.
“We’re excited to introduce two new Siri voices for English speakers and the option for Siri users to select the voice they want when they set up their device,” Apple said in a statement to TechCrunch. “This is a continuation of Apple’s long-standing commitment to diversity and inclusion, and products and services that are designed to better reflect the diversity of the world we live in.”
This is a welcome development, as diversity extends to speech patterns and regional dialects. Giving users the ability to pick a Siri that best suits them is the next logical step in creating a digital assistant that feels natural to interact with. Likewise, expanding the types of voices available will eventually help create a digital assistant with fewer unintended biases. Right now, Siri—as well as Alexa and Google Assistant—sometimes stumbles when it comes to naming non-John Smiths of the world, making features like texting or calling via Siri for certain friends or family unreliable.
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This change also addresses the inherent sexism that was initially built-in with digital assistants. For years, Apple, Amazon, and Google have been criticized for failing to foresee the implicit gender biases of making digital assistants feminine by default. (Though, it should be noted that in some countries, like the U.K., Siri is masculine by default, or “Male” as it is designated on the menu.) A 2019 UN report found that digital assistants reinforced gender stereotypes, such as women being more subservient and accommodating to instances of verbal abuse. Famously, a 2017 Quartz report delved into how each digital assistant coded as female responded to sexual harassment. The results were lackluster, to say the least. When told “You’re a bitch” or “You’re a slut,” Alexa at the time would respond with a meek “Well, thanks for the feedback.” Samsung also caught flack for adding sexist tags to feminine and masculine versions of Bixby.
Tech companies seemed to take this criticism to heart, with many programming more progressive responses to loaded questions like, “Are you a feminist?” or “Do Black lives matter?” In the aftermath, Apple, Google, and Microsoft also added male voice options. The ability to choose which voice you preferred was also added, though crucially, not during setup. That meant if you wanted a different voice, you had to know that option was available to you and then figure out how to change that setting. Apple allowing users to decide during setup is a small, but meaningful change.
Many in the industry pulled the plug on April Fools’ Day pranks in 2020 as tension from the emerging COVID-19 pandemic was high, Google included. Now, for the second year in a row, Google is skipping April Fools’ Day 2021.
An internal memo sent by Google’s VP of global marketing, Marvin Chow, explains that the company will continue its “pause” of April Fools’ Day pranks in 2021 as “much of the world” is still dealing with “serious challenges” during the pandemic. The message, obtained by Business Insider, reads:
Throughout the past year, I have been so inspired by how helpful our products, programs and people have been during humanity’s toughest times. We’ve done it with sensitivity and empathy, reflecting the range of challenging experiences so many are experiencing globally.
As you will remember, last year we made the decision to pause our longstanding Google tradition of celebrating April Fools’ Day, out of respect for all those fighting COVID-19. With much of the world still grappling with serious challenges, we feel we should again pause the jokes for April Fools’ Day this year. Like we did last year, we should continue to find appropriate ways to bring moments of joy to our users throughout the year (e.g. Doodles, easter eggs, etc.)
Google has confirmed that the message is genuine.
Notably, we believed we had spotted one of the company’s potential pranks in Stadia earlier this year. The prank would have teased the game-streaming platform’s ability to stream games on 56K internet connections. Google has confirmed to us shortly after publication that Stadia will not feature any April Fools gags this year.
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Apple today seeded the sixth betas of upcoming iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5 updates to developers for testing purposes, with the new beta updates coming one week after Apple released the fifth iOS and iPadOS 14.5 betas.
iOS and iPadOS 14.5 can be downloaded through the Apple Developer Center or over the air after the proper profile has been installed on an iPhone or iPad.
iOS 14.5 is the biggest update to iOS 14 to date, introducing several significant new features. First and foremost, Apple is making it easier to unlock an iPhone when you're wearing a face mask with a new "Unlock with Apple Watch" feature.
This opt-in option lets you use an unlocked and authenticated Apple Watch as a secondary authentication method to unlock an iPhone alongside Face ID. With this feature, you no longer have to enter a passcode or remove your mask to unlock your iPhone. Both an iPhone running iOS 14.5 and an Apple Watch are required to use this, and the Apple Watch cannot authenticate Apple Pay purchases, App Store purchases, or unlock third-party apps that use Face ID.
The update also brings worldwide support for 5G in Dual-SIM mode on iPhone 12 models, so if you use multiple lines, both can now connect at 5G speeds. Prior to now, Dual-SIM mode was limited to LTE networks.
With watchOS 7.4, iOS and iPadOS 14.5 include AirPlay 2 support for Apple Fitness+, so Apple Fitness+ subscribers can start a workout on an iPhone or iPAd and then AirPlay it to a compatible smart TV or set-top box. AirPlay 2 supports audio and video, but it does not display on-screen workout metrics.
PlayStation 5 DualSense and Xbox Series X controllers are supported on the iPhone and the iPad with iOS 14.5, and code suggests that Apple is going to add joint account support for the Apple Card in the near future.
iOS 14.5 includes a Waze-like crowdsourcing feature for reporting accidents, hazards, and speed checks along a route in Maps when getting directions.
There's a new "Report" button available in the Apple Maps app that lets you tap to report an accident, hazard, or speed trap at your location in the Apple Maps app, which is a feature that mapping app Waze offers. This is available directly on the iPhone and in CarPlay.
There are several new emoji characters in the iOS 14.5 beta, with Apple introducing heart on fire, mending heart, exhaling face, face with spiral eyes, face in clouds, along with different gender options for people with beards. There are also new couple emojis that have new skin tone mixes.
Apple removed the blood from the syringe emoji, updated the Headphone emoji to look like the AirPods Max rather than a generic set of headphones, and added a helmet to the rock climbing emoji.
In the Find My app, there's a new "Items" tab that's been added, which will work with non-Apple products like Beats headphones and Belkin's wireless earbuds that have been designed to integrate with the Find My app. Anything item tracking function that uses Apple's Find My API will be shown here right alongside your Apple devices, and the Items tab will also work with AirTags when those are finally released.
The iOS 14.5 beta addresses the green tint issue that some iPhone owners have been experiencing, with Apple confirming that the beta has "optimizations" to help with the issue.
"iOS and iPadOS 14.5 beta 2 includes an optimization to reduce the appearance of a dim glow that might appear at reduced brightness levels with black backgrounds," reads Apple's iOS 14.5 beta notes. For some users, there are improvements thanks to the optimizations, but for others, the issue still appears to exist, so Apple may have some further work to do.
iOS and iPadOS 14.5 add a new feature for choosing a preferred streaming music service to use with Siri. So if you prefer Spotify over Apple Music, for example, you can now choose Spotify as the app you want to use with Siri and all Siri song requests will go through Spotify without the need to add "on Spotify" to the end of Siri requests. This is a new Siri intelligence feature that works with music apps, podcast apps, and audiobook apps.
iOS 14.5 is the update where Apple will begin requiring developers to comply with its App Tracking Transparency rules. Going forward, developers will need to ask for and receive your permission to access your random advertising identifier and track your activity across apps and websites.
Apple has made design tweaks to the Apple News and Podcasts apps, plus there are new print and sort options in Reminders. There are new settings for emergency alerts, a horizontal loading screen on the iPad, and tons of other smaller feature tweaks that are outlined in our full iOS 14.5 features guide, which we've been keeping updated throughout the testing process.
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According to credible Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone 13 lineup, slated for launch in the second half of the year, will feature the same wide-angle lens as the current iPhone 12 series, offering no tangible improvements to one of the three lenses on the upcoming iPhone.
In an investors note obtained by MacRumors, focused mainly on developments and changes within Apple's supply chain, Kuo says the iPhone 13 mini, iPhone 13, and iPhone 13 Pro will feature the same 7P wide-angle lens with a ƒ1.6 aperture as their respective iPhone 12 counterparts. The larger iPhone 13 Pro Max will have a ƒ1.5 aperture wide-angle lens, a marginal increase compared to the ƒ1.6 aperture on the iPhone 12 Pro Max.
Kuo states that Sunny Optical will be the new supplier for the 7P wide-angle lens, adding that mass production of the camera system could begin as soon as May. Looking more long-term, Kuo says that the demand for optical lenses for Apple devices will only significantly increase in the next few years thanks to AR and Apple Car.
We expect Sunny Optical to successfully pass the quality verification of the 7P wide-angle lens order for iPhone 13. Because iPhone 13 mini, 13, and 13 Pro share the same f1.6 7P wide-angle lens (vs. 13 Pro Max's f1.5 7P wide-angle lens), so Sunny Optical's order is the most in-demand. We estimate that Sunny Optical will ship the 7P wide-angle lens of the iPhone 13 to LG Innotek as soon as May.
While the 2021 iPhones, according to Kuo, will not have a significantly different wide-angle lens, it is rumored to pack improvements to the ultra wide lens. According to Barclays analysts, all four iPhone 13 models will include upgraded Ultra Wide lenses with a ƒ/1.8 aperture, vs. the ƒ/2.4 aperture on the iPhone 12.
Aside from the camera lens, well-connected display analyst Ross Young has predicted that the camera sensor size of both the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max will increase. Although Young doesn't state which of the three cameras will gain a larger sensor, a larger sensor would, in turn, have larger pixels. In other words, the sensor could collect more light, resulting in materially better image quality.
Earlier this month, Kuo reported that Apple plans to include a smaller notch and larger batteries for the entire iPhone 13 lineup. Exclusive to the higher-end Pro and Pro Max models will be a ProMotion 120Hz display, according to the analyst.
Previously, Kuo has also said the iPhone 12 Pro Max's sensor-shift image stabilization will expand to the entire iPhone 13 lineup.
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Google and Apple both collect data from their users on their respective mobile operating systems, even when users are simply browsing the settings page or inserting a SIM card. Android, however, collects 20x more data from users compared to iOS, according to newly published research.
A study from Douglas Leith at Trinity College, reported by Ars Technica, says that while both OSes collect data from their users regularly, Android fair exceeded the amount collected compared to Apple's iOS.
Specifically, Leith says that, for example, on device startup, Android sends around 1MB of user data back to Google, while iOS only transmits about 42KB. Sitting idle, Android sends around 1MB of user data to Google every 12 hours, compared to Apple only receiving around 52KB over the same 12 hour period.
Where Android stands out, Leith said, is in the amount of data it collects. At startup, an Android device sends Google about 1MB of data, compared with iOS sending Apple around 42KB. When idle, Android sends roughly 1MB of data to Google every 12 hours, compared with iOS sending Apple about 52KB over the same period. In the US alone, Android collectively gathers about 1.3TB of data every 12 hours. During the same period, iOS collects about 5.8GB.
While the research clearly shows that Android collects more data from users, there are significant caveats. Leith says he used a jailbroken iPhone 8 running iOS 13.6.1 for the study, meaning the data is based on an iOS version that most iPhone and iPad users are no longer currently running. On Android, Leith used a Google Pixel 2, running Android 10, released last year.
In a statement, Google calls the researched flawed, stating that the notion that Android collects more user data compared to iOS is "off by an order of magnitude."
We identified flaws in the researcher's methodology for measuring data volume and disagree with the paper's claims that an Android device shares 20 times more data than an iPhone. According to our research, these findings are off by an order of magnitude, and we shared our methodology concerns with the researcher before publication.
This research largely outlines how smartphones work. Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways. This report details those communications, which help ensure that iOS or Android software is up to date, services are working as intended, and that the phone is secure and running efficiently
Apple told Ars Technica that it "provides transparency and control for personal information it collects" and that the research "gets things wrong." The research is available as a PDF for those interested in learning more.
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What comes to mind when you think of a Smart Home? Wi-Fi enabled light bulbs, video doorbells, cloud-connected robot vacuums, or smart fridges perhaps? Brands like Google/Nest or everything enabled with Amazon’s Alexa? While often providing some genuine convenience, these devices are also usually designed to invite and lock users into manufacturers' ecosystems. Create a cool piece of hardware, you’ll make one sale. Create a cool piece of hardware that extracts recurring monthly service fees for cloud storage or to unlock extra functionality, and you’ll have sales for life.
Compounding our collective frustration, these ecosystems are often incompatible with each other and require multiple different apps for control. Not only are subscriptions and upselling part of the game, the underlying business models for these products are built around planned obsolescence and mining user data.
Luckily, aspirational smart home folks in 2021 have at least one viable alternative: Home Assistant. This piece of open source software is the proverbial ring “that in the darkness binds them.” It is the glue for smart home gear spanning all sorts of manufacturers, from behemoths like Google to minnows like Shelly. It’s a project that has set out to change all of the smart home pitfalls listed above by putting local control, privacy, and interoperability first.
Enlarge/ An example of a Home Assistant dashboard used to monitor an RV.
By acting as a single configuration point for multiple ecosystems, Home Assistant is in a uniquely powerful place in the modern Smart Home. It is aware of the state of every entity in your home and can therefore do useful things like close the garage door if you left it open when you went to bed or left your defined home zone. I will never tire of having the lights automatically fade up one hour before sunset either.
If this sounds too good to be true—all the benefits of a smart home without the downside associated with off-the-shelf solutions—today is the day to see for yourself. Let’s walk through the building blocks required to put together your own self-hosted, subscription-free home automation system. Using the Home Assistant project as a foundation, we'll cover some must haves for new tech, highlight some of our favorite open source home automation projects, and give you a quick primer on how to put all of it together.
Considering the title of this article, this note is a bit awkward. But when you initially choose to build out your smart home with the Home Assistant project, there is an optional $5 per month subscription. This is administered by the company behind the project, Nabu Casa, which was founded in 2018 to ensure the Home Assistant project remained sustainable. For the company, these fees allow Nabu Casa to pay a small number of staff. For you, the $5 per month fee enables your local Home Assistant instance to effortlessly work with popular cloud services like Google Home or Amazon Alexa, and it also permits access to Home Assistant from anywhere with minimal setup. That said, it is definitely possible to mirror both of these functions without the subscription by using a reverse proxy, if you like.
While there are other choices in this space such as Domoticz, OpenHAB, or Gladys, Home Assistant will be our focus today because it’s free, open, and has a *huge* community behind it. At the time of writing, it has over 1,700 integrations with all manner of devices, services, and hardware supported. Plus, it’s a regular feature of Github’s trending page, too.
Versatility is the true magic of Home Assistant. In effect, it speaks 1,700 different languages and brings them all into one place. Build a Smart Home ecosystem with Home Assistant at its core, and devices from completely different ecosystems can finally talk to each other. Would you like the lights to automatically turn off when you turn the kettle on? With Home Assistant, you can do that!
Let's look at a more realistic example of a useful automation based on this principle. Say you have two sets of lights on totally different circuits that you always want to be in sync, perhaps downstairs and upstairs hallway lighting. With Home Assistant monitoring the state of these entities, it can react and do things automatically. In other words, if light1 is on, then turn on light2.
Time for some key terminology: Home Assistant performs such actions when certain conditions are met or triggers occur. This allows the construction of complex logic such as "turn down the thermostat, ensure doors are locked, and all lights are off when the sun is below the horizon and no motion is detected for one hour or guest mode is not enabled.” Consider how many apps you'd have to open to do all that by yourself: an app for the thermostat, a smart lock, and motion detection via a camera or sensor at least.
Without some Home Assistant glue in the middle, most home devices aren't really “smart” or “connected.” They are remotely controllable, which is an important prerequisite for being automated, but that should not be conflated with automation.
Automation is your house reacting to the time of day, the weather, your presence, and so on without need to manually activate the devices every time. With Home Assistant flexing all its muscles, in theory it’s possible to build a home where you shouldn't need to touch a light switch or a thermostat because your automations are created with enough care and thought.
Enlarge/ You, too, can be a Blue (Smart Home) Hero.
Home Assistant
Starting up, the basics
Whether you're coming into this article as a veteran sysadmin or a weekend warrior, getting Home Assistant up and running has never been easier. Home Assistant publishes comprehensive getting started documentation, and all you need to dip your toe in is a Raspberry Pi.
In late 2020 the project launched its very own vision of what the perfect smart home hub should look like, Home Assistant Blue. It’s an ARM-based SBC based around the Odroid-N2+. It’s not cheap, starting at $159.95, but if you’re looking for a device that the project itself sees as the future, look no further.
There is a whole world of hardware possibilities, far too much to get into in the scope of this article, but the Pi 4 is a great place to start. It has a relatively low price tag, a good community with plenty of shared knowledge, and many pre-built images. If you start taking this stuff seriously, you might want to consider a dedicated Intel NUC, but I suspect you'll be pleasantly surprised how powerful a Pi can be. Just please don't rely on the SD card—use USB boot instead.
As always, make sure to ask yourself the question of risk versus reward when making a hardware purchase for a project like this. There's no need to spend $1,000 on redundant storage, UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), and so on just for a couple of lights. However, if your home security, heating, and lighting will be relying on Home Assistant, that price range might make more sense. Besides, you can pay for it using the money you saved on those cloud subscriptions, right?
Once your hardware choice has been made, start by downloading the Home Assistant image for your device, flash it using balenaEtcher, and boot it up. Technically, now you're already running Home Assistant. Congrats, a subscription-free automated home awaits!
Next, however, comes the hard fun part: adding individual hardware and actions to your burgeoning smart home. I’d suggest starting out by thinking of a problem or situation that affects your daily life that could be improved via automation. For me, lighting is one of the best projects for beginners because it's high reward, yet there is a low risk of causing harm if the setup malfunctions for some reason. Conveniently, there is already an easy Home Assistant example of how to create a simple automation to turn on some lights before sunset.
The automation engine built into Home Assistant uses two primary methods for configuration: YAML or a form-based approach. These YAML-based simple automations are a solid choice for more basic “if this, then that” situations. But sometimes you want more flexibility. And a form-based approach isn't always the most intuitive method for creating complex automations.
Speaking in node
In these instances, I turn to Node-RED, a browser-based flow editor. With this tool, you create nodes and connect them together to create an ordered sequence of events known as a flow. It's visually easy to understand even if it takes a little getting used to in the beginning.
Node-RED’s available nodes consist of many different types; their utility extends well beyond the confines of Home Assistant. People have used Node-RED to create entire Escape Room projects, because that’s the versatility and power on offer.
In Home Assistant land, the node types we have available to us include things like "Call Service," which calls up a standard Home Assistant service such as light.turn_on or notify.device or the more sophisticated "Function" node (which lets you drop down to raw Javascript if you have a particularly complex scenario).
For building out a smart home, it’s important to understand switch nodes, which essentially act like a conditional in traditional programming terms. These permit actions based on values just like an if statement would in code. For example, "if guest_mode is enabled then do X else do Y." In this example, guest_mode is an input_boolean in Home Assistant.
Toggling input_booleans is a powerful way to trigger flows in Node-RED from Home Assistant. Node-RED is plugged directly into the API of Home Assistant and can monitor every entity present and trigger flows when events occur, like state changes. A trigger can be as simple as a single light turning on or an entire sequence of conditions that must be met: "if this and this and this is true, then do that."
The Home Automation community has embraced Node-RED as one of its own. Delightfully, it’s available as a free Community Add-On for Home Assistant.
Imagining edge cases early on
The aforementioned guest_mode is a great example of an edge case. Presence detection is one of the coolest and most difficult things in Home Automation. Why run the AC or heat when you're not home? Or the lights? A common method is to use your phone's GPS capabilities or the fact that it is connected to the Wi-Fi to determine whether you're home or not (see how everything being able to connect to everything can be awesome?).
But with such setups often comes an edge case, and edge cases are the one true enemy of reliable automation. What happens when your Mother-in-Law comes to stay and doesn't want to learn the specific incantations required to operate your automation system? Easy. You’ll disable a whole bunch of things all at once with guest_mode.
Every automation you write will have edge cases, and how you deal with them sets apart a good automation from a great one. Luckily, the Home Assistant community has a Discord server for real-time assistance or, if you prefer, a community forum. Besides all the other things that make Home Assistant great in practice, the community has been a stand out feature for me—few if any other smart home efforts have inspired such a passionate and knowledgeable user base.
The Bedtime Routine, or the importance of household buy in
If you live by yourself, home automation is incredibly easy—the goal is to generate an ecosystem that suits your specific habits, wants, and needs. For everyone else, your smart home system may ultimately only be as useful as it is comfortable to use for the other people inhabiting the space.
In my case, spousal approval is the pivotal milestone for fully realizing a Home Automation project. And the bedtime routine was the project that shifted my wife's opinion from passive resignation to active interest.
Using Home Assistant and Node-RED, our house tells us when it's time to go to bed. The routine started out as a simple way to make sure that the lights and TVs were turned off and thermostats turned down overnight whilst we were sleeping. Now, it's evolved into a 20-30 minute sequence of ever increasing complexity that shuts our house down each night.
There are a number of ways we trigger the routine: voice via Google Home, via app, or just because it’s the right time of day. Time of day (usually midnight) is actually a helpful reminder that we've been watching TV for a bit too long and should get some sleep. Even the dog is in on it at this point. When he hears the Google Home text-to-speech chime cheerfully announce "Bedtime routine initiated—20 minutes to lights out,” he jumps up from his bed and runs outside to do his business. (Yes, using Home Assistant, I've automated my dog.)
If neither my wife nor I have triggered bedtime manually at midnight, the lights briefly dim a couple of times by a few percentage points. It's subtle, but enough that you notice. Two minutes after that, the "bedtime routine running lights" come on and no matter what you're in the middle of, the TV shuts off. The running lights include all hallway lights, a few select room lamps, and the outdoor yard light for the dog. I also shut off a selection of smart plugs for devices that don't need to be on all night like the garage door opener (which draws 8w at idle!), the washing machine (unless it's running), and my soldering iron.
Twelve minutes later, these lights dim to 25 percent—a strong indicator "you are definitely going to bed now aren't you?" The bedroom lamps are already on and waiting for us. If the ambient temperature in the bedroom is above a certain threshold, the ceiling fan is, too.
We're now at minute 20 since the routine began and the running lights turn off, the dog flap locks, and the smart locks for the front and back doors engage. Outdoor lights all turn off, too—no matter their previous state just to be sure.
Bedroom lamps at minute 22 dim to 20 percent. Five minutes after that, they briefly flash a couple of times between 10 and 20 percent, indicating the routine is almost done. This means it's time to get off your phone and put it on charge.
After 28 minutes, the bedtime routine is complete and an input_boolean in Home Assistant is flipped telling the house that we're in bed. Node-RED uses this value to determine whether or not to execute the time based forced bedtime at midnight or not.
This little routine makes the house feel like it is working with us. It improves our quality of sleep and therefore makes our lives better. I had no idea just how powerful it was going to be when setting it up a couple of years ago. But I knew that the bedtime routine had been a true success when my wife jokingly lamented having to manually turn off the lights when we stayed in a hotel last year.
Each of these devices—from lights to thermostats to locks to smart plugs—are members of completely different ecosystems. But with Home Assistant, plus a little time with Node-RED, I'm able to make them all work together in harmony.
Actualizing automation: Some gear suggestions
How do you make sure you buy a device that’s going to be compatible with Home Assistant? There are a bewildering array of different standards to choose from as you probably already know.
The best place to start is the Home Assistant integrations page. Take care, though, as certain vendors will appear in the search results but most integrations have caveats and gotchas. Specific models or firmware versions for the devices might be a requirement. For example, the popular Roborock S5 robot vacuum requires that you extract an API token from a rooted Android phone or that you follow a very specific set of steps.
Sometimes, the only way to know for sure that a device will work is by buying it and trying it. Other times, you’ll buy something without fully checking and be pleasantly surprised that it just works. Remember that these integrations are generally maintained by the community, not the vendors themselves. And it’s rare, but worth noting that sometimes you might run into a little turbulence when Home Assistant updates or the vendor retires an API. Such is the price we pay to leave the highly funded, well maintained, but ultimately limited and expensive walled gardens of the Googles or Amazons of the world. And it’s not like Google ever sunsetted a product, right?
One other fantastic resource for vetting specific items is YouTube, where a robust community of Home Assistant users has developed. Dr Zzzs, The Hook Up, Intermit.tech, Paul Hibbert, and DigiblurDIY are some of the most well-known Home Assistant channels, but that’s by no means an exhaustive list. The fact multiple YouTube personalities have developed around Home Assistant guidance should give you an idea of how active this community is—plus, it means you can find plenty of material to work with if you’re in need of specific inspiration or buying advice.
But if you’d like a few specific recommendations, allow me to share some of the most vital Home Automation hardware for the Kretzschmar house.
The ESP8266, or building your own devices
When you need a very specific thing (say, a climate sensor to trigger actions for your thermostat), you can always build your own device if you are struggling to find something commercially. Building one needn’t only be the realm of super nerds; it’s more approachable now than ever.
I opted for the ESP8266, a cheap, Wi-Fi enabled, Arduino IDE compatible microcontroller. It requires you to write or obtain firmware and flash it to the device.
The recently acquiredESPHome project makes this entire process extremely easy. Write a little YAML, press compile, and then flash the ESP device. I hosted a live hack session on YouTube where many of the smaller intricacies are covered in more detail.
Here's an example of a code snippet to configure an ESP8266 D1 Mini with a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor.
esphome:
name: sensor_basement_temp platform: ESP8266
board: d1_mini
wifi:
ssid: "iot"
password: "supersecret"
# Enable Home Assistant API
api:
password: "supersecret"
sensor:
- platform: dht
pin: D6
model: DHT22
temperature:
name: "Basement Temperature" humidity:
name: "Basement Humidity" update_interval: 30s
Building a whole house's worth of climate sensors is cheap and easy at under $10 per room. From there, using an aggregate function in Home Assistant makes it possible to have these devices feed into your thermostat. I always thought a centralized single point of measuring temperature was odd, but it’s an understandable technical limitation.
WLED
Another bit of useful custom Home Assistant gear is developer Aircookie's WLED RGB LED control firmware for ESP8266 or ESP32 boards.
Flashing a pre-compiled binary to a board takes a few minutes. And after doing this, the ESP board will create a Wi-Fi access point. Connect to the new hotspot, configure a few settings and you’re good to go.
YouTuber Intermit.tech makes a device known as QuinLED, which has been the best way for me to create a DIY RGB fully controllable LED strip with some safety measures built-in.
Tasmota
Tasmota, an open-source firmware, was my gateway to the entire Home Automation scene. I purchased some Teckin SP20 smart plugs and flashed them with Tasmota using Tasmotizer, which uses a man-in-the-middle exploit to spoof the update servers and flash custom firmware to the devices.
This means that no matter what happens to Teckin as a company, the smart plugs I purchased will continue to work until they physically stop working.
Au revoir, lightswitches
Perhaps you've picked up on the fact that there are a lot of options in the DIY Smart Home space. Luckily, there are as many if not more resources to make your initial journey into the world of home automation as stress free as possible.
The choices on offer can seem more complex than the commercially available options to begin with; plug and play convenience is one of the biggest upsides to the costs of subscription services or ecosystem lock in. However, as you dive deeper with rolling your own smart house, these devices become part of your daily life. You’ll miss them when they're not there; hotels require lightswitches?!
In the end, it’d be easy to recommend a DIY smart home solution based around Home Assistant solely because it is cheaper financially. But an automation system that will last for decades—because it can scale, encompass multiple manufacturers, and withstand companies changing or dropping support—surely has to be built this way. In 2021, a flexible, future proof smart home needs to center around open source software and devices that you own. Plus, once you power through the initial learning curve, having the ability to automate virtually any sequence you can dream up is really fun.
Most days, I give my entire home system no thought—and that's the way it could (and should) be.
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Storage sales are few and far between these days, but Amazon is offering discounts of up to 48 percent on SSDs and hard drives right now as part of its Deal of the Day. One of the key products listed is the WD Black 2TB NVMe with a custom dashboard and 3,400 MB/s speeds that's ideal for custom desktops or gaming rigs, on sale for $238 instead of $400 ($160 off). Another standout is Samsung's 2TB T7 Touch external SSD, available for $280 instead of $370. The T7 Touch was a CES 2020 honoree thanks to its unique fingerprint unlocking system and write speeds up to 1,000 MB/s.
There are a lot of other good deals in there, too. If you don't require Samsung's extra security features and have a fast USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port, SanDisk's 2TB Extreme Pro portable SSD ($270 instead of $362) delivers up to 2,000 MB/s read and write speeds, among the fastest of any external SSD. Another great pick is the WD_Black 12TB D10 Game Drive for Xbox or desktop PC storage with a fast 7,200 RPM spin rate, offering transfer rates up to 250 MB/s. It's now on sale for $220, a good $80 off the regular price.
If you need the same storage but not quite as much speed, WD's 12TB MyBook external hard drive is on offer for $190, 27 percent off the regular price. There are lots of other picks depending on your needs and budget, but you'll want to act quickly because the sale only lasts until the end of the day and some of the products mentioned will likely be snapped up well before that.
Microsoft has started testing a new version of its Edge browser on Xbox consoles. The software giant provided access to the Chromium version of Edge to Xbox Insiders earlier this month, offering an early look at the improved browsing capabilities coming to the Xbox One and Xbox Series X / S. I’ve had a chance to try out this early version over the past few days, and I’ve been able to test Discord, Stadia, and other web services running inside Edge on the Xbox. It’s like having the full version of Edge from PC running on your TV.
The Xbox version of Edge looks almost identical to the one you can find on PC or Mac right now. It even includes features like vertical tabs and Collections. Like Edge on PC and mobile, the Xbox version also syncs all your settings, favorites, tabs, and web history.
Extension support is the only big feature that’s really missing right now. I’m not sure if this is a general restriction with the Xbox version, or whether Microsoft might implement it once this Chromium version is ready to release. Either way, if you try to add a Chrome or Edge extension it will fail.
The big reason you might want to use this new version of Edge on the Xbox is for the greatly improved web compatibility. This allows services like Discord, Skype, or even Google Stadia to run on the Xbox version of Edge. Discord will let you join voice calls and participate in text channel chats, but microphone support isn’t there just yet. This is a really early version, so it’s likely that it will be supported eventually. Likewise, if you switch to another game or app, Discord calls in the Edge browser do not continue in the background. This may also change before this Edge update is broadly available, too.
Google Stadia works really smoothly. I’ve been able to stream multiple games using the service, and the Xbox controller is automatically detected and supported in games. I’ve also tried to use Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service, but Nvidia appears to be blocking the Edge user agent string, and there are no developer tools or extensions that will allow me to spoof the Chrome user agent.
Elsewhere, I’ve also tested out Office web apps in this Xbox version of Edge. They work as reliably as you’d expect, and you can even hook up a keyboard to the Xbox and type away. Unfortunately, mouse support isn’t available in this Edge browser yet. That appears to be part of a broader restriction on Xbox apps accessing a mouse on Microsoft’s consoles, so it’s not clear if this will be fully supported in the future.
Edge on Xbox is currently based on Chromium 91, which is expected to debut on desktop versions of Edge in May. Microsoft hasn’t revealed when it plans to release this Xbox version, though.
This Edge browser is already a big improvement over the legacy version that exists on Xbox today. Full sync support, web compatibility, and just the general interface is greatly improved. While Xbox typically gets dedicated streaming apps for most services, this Edge update will be useful for many who want to access everything the web has to offer.
Article From & Read More ( A first look at Xbox running Discord and Google Stadia in its new Edge browser - The Verge )
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Technology
Around the world, it's become second nature for people to navigate their way through cities and streets via Google Maps, but now the tech giant has announced you'll soon be able to bring some of that power to indoor spaces as well.
The latest post on Google's blog lists a host of AI-powered updates that will be rolling out over the course of the year to Google Maps, and chief among them is an Indoor Live View.
Google Maps has already implemented Live View for a while now – a feature which uses the company's wealth of Street View footage to determine specific directions and overlay them over live footage from your camera, creating an augmented reality (AR) directional tool.
Indoor Live View, as its name suggests, is the same feature but will also operate in a number of key indoor locations such as malls, airports, and other transit stations.
According to Google, this new feature "can help you find the nearest elevator and escalators, your gate, platform, baggage claim, check-in counters, ticket office, restrooms, ATMs and more," so it's clearly a granular tool.
As for availability, the feature is live now on both iOS and Android apps, but is currently only operating in "a number of malls in Chicago, Long Island, Los Angeles, Newark, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle," with locations in Tokyo and Zurich rolling out in the coming months and other cities further down the track.
Google Maps and the environment
Along with this key feature, a number of other tools are finding their way to Google Maps, including map layers that provide information on current and forecast weather conditions for specific areas, as well as the air quality in an area (granted there's a nearby Air Quality Index [AQI] station).
The weather layer will roll out globally over the course of the year, and the AQI layer will be coming to the US, India and Australia.
(Image credit: Google)
For the environmentally-conscious Google Maps user, you'll soon be able to select a route based on lower fuel consumption and, as a result, lower carbon emissions. This will be calculated based on factors such as high density traffic and road incline.
In fact, Google Maps will default to choosing the more eco-friendly route when the alternatives "has approximately the same ETA," but you'll be given a prompt when it will take significantly longer. In either case, you'll be told how fewer emissions your trip will cause as a percentage.
This feature will land 'later this year' in the US on both Android and iOS, with other countries on the way.
From June, Google Maps will let you know if you'll be driving through low emission zones in global locations and cities that enforce them, and whether or not your vehicle is allowed in them. This feature will be coming to Germany, Netherlands, France, Spain and the UK, with more to follow.
Google is also making the choice between sustainable transport options easier to access with a singular screen within Maps that quickly summarizes all the different modes of transit to your destination and the time they'll take.
This feature will also learn from your habits and location to prioritize certain suitable options higher in the list – you can select your preferred methods manually, but biking options will be preferred if you cycle often, similarly with public transport. This feature is rolling out globally 'in the coming months'.
A number of other features will be coming to the iOS and Android app over the course of the year, including improvements to pickup and delivery details for participating grocery stores and service providers, as well as updates to Assistant Driving Mode.
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