We recently got one of those ice cream gizmos that can (among other things) turn a brick of frozen fruit into a sorbet. It's surprising how good something incredibly basic like canned pineapple turns out.
Haven't tried any actually adventurous recipes yet.
Is dumb doorbell + separate CCTV camera a valid alternative? Even my fairly basic Reolink camera has a much better image quality than any doorbell camera I've seen, and HA can pull an image from it and push it to my phone in only a few tenths of a second whenever someone pushes the doorbell.
Hell, there were plenty of retail Christmas displays before halloween over here.
I know its too early but
Some of my neighbours have had their lights up and on for the past couple of weeks. It really does come earlier every year (not that I mind).
The sad thing is we don't even drive the Kuga that much, only for long trips. I think it would be a reasonable bet that we've spent less on fuel than we have on maintenance.
Last road trip from Auckland to Wellington, we just hired a big car (a mid-size SUV, I guess). 100% recommend anyone shopping for a car (or whatever) does a quick check to see if it's actually worth owning it vs hiring. In my case (one kid and no boat), it's way cheaper to just hire something big and flash for the occasional road trips.
Oof. I'm pretty confident that I've spent less than that servicing every car I've ever owned, which is... 15 years or so?
Japanese subcompacts are so cheap that it's more or less impossible for me to justify buying anything else.
It's the first nice day for a bit, so I rode the push bike in to work today. Forgot how slippery everything is in the wet and had a brief lie-down in the mud, but still made pretty decent time. I'd call it a fairly decent start to the day.
Tangentially related: we've got an electric sit/stand desk that sometimes needs the controller resetting, but the only way to do so is to unplug it and wait for the capacitors to discharge, which takes at least 12 hours or so. I wonder if I can just add a push button and a resistor... 30 seconds is annoying, but would be a huge upgrade from can't-move-desk-until-tomorrow...
The solar/battery models don't run 24/7 - you can trigger them remotely (so you can check the live feed whenever) or they can trigger with motion. Still perfectly useful for a bunch of use cases (e.g. just checking if you closed something, or installed somewhere that motion sensing is reliable like a low-traffic corridor) but not super useful for, say, a front door.
Just to second this - I've upgraded all but one camera to Reolink RLC-810A a few years back and they're rock solid. All offline (no internet, but connected to Home Assistant on a separate LAN), all powered by a cheap unmanaged PoE switch from PB Tech. (Edit: this one).
They're recording 24/7 to their local memory, but I almost entirely use them via Home Assistant's ability to pull a JPEG directly from the camera (because it takes a fraction of a second at 4k vs the unbearable pain of waiting >10s for video to buffer even at SD resolution).
We had good weather for once, so I went for a reasonably long (43km or so) bike ride and then climbed [a very small mountain] (https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/auckland/places/mount-william-area/tracks/mount-william-walkway/) that we've been meaning to check out for a while.
You're right in that it's a useful tool for various kinds of abuse, but so is almost every useful home automation/home security sensor.
The most obvious/useful use cases I can see are:
Both should be easy with load cells under the bed legs but rather difficult otherwise.
(Useful assuming a household of two adults in one bed that is).