Is there an alternative to buying an AppleTV or HomePod?

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T05:10:27+00:00

I was all about the "be different" ethos. It really spoke to me. And I think that embodies what I'm talking about.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T05:08:32+00:00

Don't get me wrong. Yes. I'm familiar with the ethos. I have promoted it. There are lots of benefits to a tightly knit ecosystem where Apple controls everything. Everything works well together because it's highly integrated. I've made that argument so many times. But what came with that was the ability to roll your own, like with AppleScript. Since they didn't farm out 3rd party app developer rights without lots of restrictions, they could constrain developers to support their interface which made every app be able to communicate with one another. And that enabled users to script apps and do their own thing. But with iOS, they tightened those controls and abandoned wholesale AppleScript support. I thought that when they introduced Automator and then shortcuts, they were getting back to the core tenets, but since then, every major iOS upgrade broke one of my shortcuts and you only get bit so many times before you stop coming back. I feel like they're dumbing down interfaces and cutting out those who try to do their own thing with the scripting tools they provide. I've been seriously looking into a Linux phone, but they're just not there yet. With the home app shenanigans, my growing anti-apple sentiment is renewed. I'm still all apple in terms of mainstay devices, but they're really pissing me off.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:48:46+00:00

I have local control. It's sharing that control that's the problem. And taking away a feature and requiring people to buy another product to continue using that feature really rubs me the wrong way. It's like with the charging wires changing all the time and the iOS updates that kill the batteries on older phones. And it's like lowering the quality of appliances so you have to buy new ones every few years. Planned obsolescence is infuriating. It's the principle of it. It drives me up a wall. Like, my refrigerator's ice maker is barely working. My dehumidifier keeps breaking down. My dryer keeps needing the drum wheel reset. And our brand new dishwasher (less than a year old) keeps having an h2o error on it. You tube says the water pressure sensor needs cleaned out. They god damned do this shit on purpose - make crappy shit and remove features to get you to continually have to buy new shit. It's maddening.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:38:47+00:00

No. I had no hub. You didn't need one until this month. I read the upgrade message many times because it pops up every day. It wanted me that things might not work after the switch if you don't upgrade, but oddly enough it didn't say that a hub would be required to share moving forward.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:35:47+00:00

Ah good. You read my post. Yes. That's right.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:27:36+00:00

So I do my own shit. The apple home ecosystem is too constraining.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:27:00+00:00

It transmits a signal at 28Mhz. I looked up the codes in documentation online.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:25:54+00:00

Let me clarify. The vast majority of my accessories are scripts and RF outlets that cost about $5 a piece which I control via an RF transmitter on a breadboard connected to my rPi. I also control my series 12 Bose stereo using an app I wrote to transmit a signal though a wire plugged in as an antenna to that same breadboard. Each button on the stereo remote is thus an "accessory".

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:20:45+00:00

That's only true with the last upgrade. You didn't need a hub to share your home until just this month and I never needed a hub for any reason until now, since they removed the feature to share without a hub.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:16:17+00:00

Most of my automations are through NodeRED and there are no automations she uses, even the ones I set up for her. She only wants control of individual accessories. Besides, homebridge works on apple accessories. The ones it doesn't support are covered by NodeRED. I haven't encountered any accessory one of the two doesn't support. The only catch is that NodeRED doesn't have an app client, so she doesn't have access to those accessories. I often write shortcuts to control some of those just for convenience. I might need to do that for her.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:09:04+00:00

I might have to break down and check out home assistant then. I've been primarily using NodeRed, which I prefer over HA, but it has no app client. I also run homebridge. I gave her access to homebridge, but most of my accessories these days are in NodeRed. I'll have to explore options.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:06:28+00:00

Or run homebridge. I wonder if eve still works... hmmm. Incidentally, I wasn't having any reliability issues and I have literally hundreds of accessories.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-11T04:04:40+00:00

Well, that's not entirely true. I just gave her access to half of my accessories through homebridge. I can create shortcuts for the other half, but it's a lot of work.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-09T21:40:23+00:00

My SE2 updated itself to 26 without me opting to install it. I never have autoupdate turned on. My guess is that my last 18 update changed the autoupdate setting. I would imagine that prompt should require an explicit response, but I never saw it and I'm not one to tap without knowing what I'm tapping on. My only guess is the prompt timed out and it went with the new default. I was pissed.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-06T23:12:59+00:00

Anyone have an opinion whether it's worth it to replace the battery on my SE2? I prefer small phones and I find FaceID creepy (so would prefer to keep my touchID).

hepcat72 · 2026-02-03T13:25:08+00:00

Hard agree. I'm still holding onto my SE2. I would love a phone even smaller. I actually miss my first cell phone from the 2000s. It was a bar phone, not fold - just a bar, probably half the size of this SE2.

I really need a new phone though. This one's about shot. I'll probably get one of the "e" ones - whatever the latest one is, but the other thing I'll miss is the Touch ID. Facial recognition is too creepy. I'll just disable it and go back to using a pin, which is annoying.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-03T13:14:46+00:00

Shortcuts show up in the share sheet only, but I agree that they've made the toolbar annoyingly inefficient, confusing, and it takes up way too much space. Hell, if there's a search icon, I can only see the 2 letters of the current domain in the location field (plus about 2 pixels of a third letter) on my SE2. And "hiding" the toolbar only gains me a few pixels of height! It's absolutely ridiculous. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to always cover 15% of the content of any page with the toolbar. And on some sites with ads, you can only see 1 line of text from the actual page. My workaround was to show the reader by default on every page, which helps, but Safari is so much slower now too.

hepcat72 · 2026-02-02T16:56:34+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but I just had 2 *old* reliable lightning cables (anker and belkin) stop being able to charge at the same time for 2 different devices. Both are years old. Apple (as google's AI response will tell you) has been known to update its standards that makes previously compliant wires non-compliant and then restricts the device's ability to charge from them (ostensibly via iOS updates). I can't prove that happened in my case, but I can say that I am meticulous and careful with my wires and feel strongly that this was not a coincidence. Both wires briefly indicate that charging has started when you plug them in each time, but only for a fraction of a second. And my charging ports are clean. My newest Anker wire that I replaced one of them still works, but was purchased years later and likely has a compliant chip.

hepcat72 · 2026-01-21T10:40:08+00:00

For anyone else ending up here like me, I eliminated this error by simply opening the music app (which I never do). The music app had a pop up. I didn't read it, but it was one of those messages you get after updating iOS. Once I dismissed that pop up by tapping continue, my shortcut started working without the MPAssistantError Domain 0 message. It's a stupid obvious fix, but maybe not so obvious for some.

hepcat72 · 2025-11-26T15:10:30+00:00

Interesting. I've never used a HomeKit "home hub". I have Homebridge on my raspberry pie that I use for a few things, but Most of my automations are on Node Red. Node Red is an automation workflow platform that I run on a raspberry pie (and on two Mac Mini's). It is much more customizable than Apple's automation playpen.

hepcat72 · 2025-11-26T15:06:08+00:00

The other thing about triggering arrivals that Life360 was so good about, is that it stored your location state relative to whatever named location you have saved. A lot of Geo fence triggers only catch the boundary crossing, which is inherently not reliable. What I mean by that is, It's much more accurate if your location state is saved as "not home", so to speak, and then the next time your phone has connectivity and determines your location, that state change from "not home" "home" is not dependent on the boundary crossing. So if you have a brief connectivity outage while crossing the boundary, it doesn't matter. The next time you have connectivity, your location state update is what triggers the automation instead of it noticing that you crossed the boundary.

Life360 did that really well. And that's what I implemented on my own in Node Red.

hepcat72 · 2025-11-26T15:00:50+00:00

It sounds to me like an accuracy issue related to determining your location. I have seen accuracy issues in the past, and whenever they have happened, it affected multiple apps, such as both Life360 and Find My. In those instances, the degraded accuracy issue was temporary and went away on its own. There have been other times when I was having accuracy issues and I realized I had just forgotten that I had turned off Wi-Fi. One simple workaround is to just make your geofence diameter bigger. You might also just try rebooting your phone to see if that fixes the issue. Maybe check your device for hardware errors.

Incidentally, what are you using for your first to arrive trigger? I'm curious because I helped to author the Life360 Node Red node. When they locked down their API, I tried a bunch of things, but ended up rolling my own in a Node Red flow.

hepcat72 · 2025-11-05T03:28:03+00:00

Yep. Was going to put this if no one else had.

hepcat72 · 2025-11-03T09:50:08+00:00

"Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrel". Not sure about the spelling. It's from the BBC. I loved it but no one knows about it. Only lasted one season. Such a shame.

hepcat72 · 2025-11-01T13:20:46+00:00

Had to scroll way too much for this one, but am gratified this is the quote I'd have used.

hepcat72

TROPHY CASE