Our dishwasher and washing machines take long enough that sometimes that notification is for the same person that started it. I’ve started the dishwasher and then gone about my business doing things, completely forgetting the dishwasher. This way I remember to go unload it and start it again. (We do a lot of cooking/baking at home, so our dishwasher probably gets ran ~2 times on a weekday and sometimes 4+ times on weekend days)

The washing machine is similar. Nice to know there’s wet clothes in the machine that need moved to the dryer so I don’t forget them. I don’t automate the dryer finishing because the clothes in there are fine if they sit.

I ordered the stuff and setup the ESPHome-Econet solution. It works really well! I actually deleted the Rheem integration just now because the ESPHome solution is so much better. It was cheap and easy to setup too. I spent about $25 US buying the parts from Mouser. (I used an old phone cable, so I didn’t have to buy that)

Finally getting back to this. I only recently discovered I can use the diagnostics port to try and control it directly. I’m probably going to attempt that but need to get some hardware.

I still don’t seem to have any issues with connecting or disconnecting.

I just upgraded to the 2024.10.1 version and I’m not currently having any issues with my Rheem Econet integration. I have nothing about it in my logs that I can see. Let me know if there’s something specific you want to see.

What I wish existed was a self-hosted version of OurGroceries.

If you want self hosted, I’d second all the Grocy comments. I don’t use it because it isn’t simple enough for my family, but I did like it.

I once heard a consultant refer to it as “The Fog” because it’s like a cloud that you’re inside of. 🤮

I’m honestly not sure. I’m doing the same kind of research myself for a new home I’m building right now and happened to stumble across this guy’s youtube channel. He does a lot of great smart home stuff. I haven’t actually purchased one of them myself yet.

It’s a year old video, but it still is pretty relevant I think.

Local Control Video Doorbells - Reolink, UniFi, Amcrest, Hikvision, Dahua. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XCu6L0xn4Y&t=904s

If you’d rather read than watch the video, he has a nice companion blog. https://www.thesmarthomehookup.com/local-control-video-doorbells-reolink-unifi-amcrest-hikvision-dahua/

And it’s really not as good at being a space heater as an actual space heater. 🤣

I’ve told my wife and family that if something happens to me, they need to start migrating all their stuff off my self-hosted services to cloud services because its a matter of time before something fails and nobody’s around who knows or cares to fix it.

Depending on your budget and location, a whole house backup generator can be relatively inexpensive. My family lives in a very rural area in the central US, so we have a backup whole house generator that runs on propane. I chose propane because those motors seem to have less maintenance, plus we have propane for the grill, etc, already on site.

I have a Nextcloud server that I setup (before Immich was a thing. I’m also running it now, but not using it for photo backup). I have accounts for my immediate family and all of our phones are setup to use the Instant Upload feature to back up photos.

Thanks for the tip on the GPU! I live in an area where power is relatively cheap, so I’ll probably go for the 3060. I really wish some of these would work better with AMD since their drivers seem to be more Linux-Friendly these days.

If I get something going, I’ll share for sure!

My opinion is that your spouse will have to get rid of any other hobby related stuff. If you’re a fisherman, she’s going to have to find something to do with all the tackle, boat/s, gear.

I know a guy that was a woodworker who had a shop full of well over $20k worth of tools. Poor guy got cancer and died, and his wife had to try to get rid of all of it. Luckily she had some of his woodworking friends who helped her price and sell the stuff. (I got a pretty nice used planer out of the deal)

The free version of Otter.ai limits you to 30 minutes per conversation, 300 total monthly transcription minutes. “Pro” moves you up to 90 minutes per conversation with 1200 total minutes for $8.33/month (billed annually). “Business” is $20/month with 4 hours per conversation and 6000 total minutes. They have an “Enterprise” version, but it is one of those “call for a quote” things.

The Pro is somewhat reasonably prices, but the 90 minutes per meeting limit is a wall I would bounce up against pretty often. Hard to justify the $20/month for me when a couple years of service is about the same price as the GPU I’ve been wanting anyway. Plus, the GPU would be a business expense now, right? :)

Thank you! I’ll make see if I can string together a few things to come up with my own homebrew version of these services. Honestly, for what they’re charging I think I can justify a new dedicated GPU. I’ve got a few other dockers/services which could take advantage of it anyway, so maybe this is the excuse I’ve been needing to pull the trigger on that purchase.

Thanks for the heads up on Danswer!

Sure!

For work I attend a lot of meetings, both in person and online. The service takes a recording of the meeting/phone call/etc, transcribes it, identifies the people who were talking and then feeds it into a “ChatGPT” style AI. It then gives meeting notes automatically and lists action items assigned to each attendee along with other pertinent information, like due dates. You can also continue to “chat” with the AI regarding anything to do with the meeting. I often will asked it to expound on various topics, write emails to participants following up on items, give me pertinent information that was shared like emails, phone numbers, etc. You are also able to go back and listen to the meeting along with the transcription. If it was a video meeting, it records the video so you can see what was being presented at the same time. (I think there’s some opportunity for OCRing power point slides too, but these services aren’t doing that yet)

One specific example was a conversation I had with a customer regarding another company we worked with mutually. The customer went into great detail about their issue with the other company and asked if I could write an email to that company to try and help solve their problem. I fed the recording of the phone call into the AI and simply told it to “write the email referenced in the conversation” and it wrote out a pretty good email with a lot of detail that was shared by the customer in it. A couple of tweaks and I was able to copy and paste it right into my email software and send it.

There’s some other features the software has that I personally don’t find as useful, like automatic sharing of meeting minutes/notes. My two biggest issue with these services is that they are charging somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 US per month for an amount of “minutes” of meetings. Also, they are taking all of your meeting data and doing who knows what with it? They do meet all the European Union and California privacy standards according to their site, but we’re all here on a decentralized self-hostable community, so I probably don’t need to expand on my issues there :)

Even if there was just a good “ChatGPT” style AI I could self-host, I could probably transcribe the recordings somehow myself.

Loved the UPS article itself. If you wanted to level it up one more time, you could do something like this: https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/automatic-transfer-switch-keeps-internet-online/

It is a automatic transfer switch, so that in the case of a UPS failure, the power can be transferred to a wall outlet fast enough that you shouldn’t experience an outage.

I told my wife when I die, she’s just going to have to throw it all away and start over.

We have separate email accounts and she knows how to get into my Keepass, so she should be able to get into whatever she needs to. I now have a daughter who is becoming interested in how these things work, so I’m hoping to slowly start training/handing off to her.