The first thing Jobs did when he returned to Apple was slash the product line down to just a couple of products. I guess that lesson was forgotten.

You don’t get logged in to other accounts. Just follow people at their address, like you’d send an email. The server does the rest.

If your question is about finding people to follow, that’s another matter. Folks on other instances won’t show up in your searches unless someone on your instance already follows them. For popular people, that’s usually no problem. For others, you might get their address from their web page. In any case, once you have their address, you just… follow them. No matter where they are, follow them from your instance and it just works. You don’t have to “log in” anywhere else; that’s the “federated” part of the fediverse.

What’s most fantastic about it is that you can often follow accounts on entirely different platforms. How well this works depends on how well the platform supports the AP protocol, and fundamental models of data. But you can easily follow PixelFed accounts from a Mastodon account, and it works pretty well. It’s as if you could follow Instagram accounts from your Twitter account; that’s the killer feature of the Fediverse, IMO. Discovery is still clunky, and how these things interoperate in “World” can be kludgy. But the possibilities are really very revolutionary.

Really? I just spun up a gotosocial instance on a VPS and was up and running in a dozen minutes. Failing that, I’d have just joined mastodon.social. Why was it a hard decision for you? As a tech person, what about “federated” was confusing? I have a second account on a spoken language-specific server, for kicks; I set both of these up within an hour of each other. I donft understand how it could be considered a hard choice.

Now, the finding people, I could understand, but since I was not on Twitter to begin with, I had nobody I cared about following. I can understand how that would be challenging, although it has nothing to do with your home server selection.

India and China have active space programs, and all other concerns aside, the more, the merrier. I really hope ESA starts demonstrating some progress; it’s about the only thing that could shame the US Gov into properly funding NASA.

No solution for you, but it’s a great idea, and I’ll be watching this space.

Thanos: it was… inevitable.

Yeah, these are what I was imagining when I posted my comment, only I couldn’t find any good looking ones. Thanks for the product names!

Ah thanks! These are the only ZWave I have that does this - I’ll check that!

I have a couple of these Zooz Z-Wave water detectors. They were recognized by zwave2js, and easy to set up and test. My only issue is that I get triggers from them whenever the Z-Wave network changes - like, when I add new devices, I get an alarm from them.

They’re tiny - like the size of an old box of (matchstick) matches. If they were cheaper, If put one under every sink.

That’s always good advice, but IME it’s not necessary with Z-Wave. And it’s only my experience, which is why I was interested in where you read it.

I wasn’t trying to attack you; I was simply curious.

Where have you seen that Z-Wave devices are iffy? I’ve never had one that didn’t work with my setup, and I’ve even swapped my controller out (now, that was a pain). I have 51 nodes in my network, from many manufacturers and a 6 or 7 different types of devices. Where are you reading about Z-Wave compatability issues?

Neat! Good to know. Like many people, we enter mostly through the garage; I use our’s for the pet sitter, so the code is entirely sufficient. If I used it more, coughing up the extra $50 for the fingerprint reader would totally have been worth it.

Wallpanel is really cool! And the author is pretty active, too. I only have to figure out the hardware.

Ugly as sin, for sure.

I don’t have the fingerprint version - you say it works ok?

Yeah, there’s obviously a learning curve here in store for me. Thank you for explaining it - that makes sense.

It means, though, that I’m stuck trying to get this thing running under Wine, which I read is possible. The post I found says you can even forward the serial port for flashing.

They’re such attractive devices, with nice form factors, it may be worth the effort. Funnily, the flashing doesn’t throw me off as much as running that editor.

Anyhoo, thanks again.

I have a couple of these. I don’t know if they’re cheap enough for you; they were the least expensive option that meet my z-wave requirement, and they seemed pretty reasonable.

They work well with Home Assistant.

Isn’t the Nextion an ESP32 display? The list of devices in the readme doesn’t mention Nextion.

Well, I’ll let you know how it goes. I don’t have access to a Windows computer, and I haven’t had a need to install Wine in over a decade, but that’s what I’ll have to resort to if Nextion is mandatory. I came across a post where Nextion outright said they’d given up on a cross-platform solution.

What a great video! I’m going to try it.

In your video, you mention the horrible Nextion Editor. That was a year and a half ago - have you tried GUIslice? I’m utterly unfamiliar with every component of this, but it seems to write the same TFT display driver needed by that hardware.

What I loved the most: when checking out the product on Amazon after watching your video (on NewPiped and over VPN, so low chance of tracking), was this beautiful recommendation:

I guess a lot of people are using it with non-SONOFF software. It absolutely restores my faith in humanity.

Believe me, I’ve thought about redneck-engineering something myself. I may get there; I’m just checking for more clever, more attractive, turnkey solutions.

I’m certainly not the only HA user who’s approached this! I do seem to be the only one without a 3D printer, tho.

Was the NSPanel hard to unlock? Did you have to register it first with the corporate servers, or did you unlock it off-WAN? These are the perfect form factor, but I think you’re talking about a different product, because those are only $80, which seems reasonable.

I haven’t looked on Aliexpress – what a great idea, thanks!

E-ink would be great, even with the unlit limitation, but yeah: it seems like a lot of work and money at the moment. The Kobos run a proprietary version of Linux (that’s the e-reader I have and love), I think, and I may troll ebay looking for used ones. That might work – the mount is still an issue.

Great ideas – thanks again!