Not a problem we welcome fresh converts in Apples walled garden. ;-)

I might give Home Assistant a try after reading this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/buol9s/homeb...

Home Assistant may be my favorite open source project. The community is great and incredibly active too.

Home Assistant is amazing but you really have to read the release notes for every release to make sure something you're using isn't going to break. I appreciate the improvements it has seen over the years but it's definitely not something you can just update and assume all is well.

I’d encourage anyone who enjoys these projects to check out Home Assistant. It’s an incredible open source project with support for countless devices.

I'm a student, and can't afford to pay to watch Mixergy. But I still enjoy watching the videos while they're available for free, and I don't begrudge Andrew for wanting to make money off his own hard work.

"HOME OF THE AMBITIOUS UPSTART" - I love that line.

Home Assistant is the clear winner, in my mind. It's a very robust project (four full-time devs, plus a huge community), very actively developed (https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/categories/release-notes/), and has a very healthy and helpful support community.

Thannks for taking the time of reading it and submitting improvements, I checked Home Assistant and it looks amazing.
Also, thanks for noting on the speed limits, I totatlly forgot about RPI adapter limitations. I was having slow speeds (~2-4mbps) so +100mbps didnt seemed that bad in the beginning.

There is a really popular project (disclaimer: I'm an occasional contributor) that also has an excellent Raspberry Pi story named Home Assistant:

https://home-assistant.io/

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant

They also have a full Pi distro named Hassbian:

https://home-assistant.io/docs/hassbian/

You might be interested in this analysis (that I co-authored) showing Home Assistant as one of the 20 highest velocity open source projects: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open...

As well as music, he also broadcast Home Truths [0] where he interviewed non-celebrities who happened to have interesting stories to tell. This could be extremely poignant at times and although I didn't specifically plan to listen to it, when I did hear it I always liked it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Truths

Check out Home Assistant [1], exactly what you're describing.

http://home-assistant.io

yep. the book that started it all for me was called "superfoods" by david wolfe. the book is loaded with great info, specifically the index which has an amazing breakdown regarding specifics i.e: amino acids, vitamins, minerals, etc: https://imgur.com/a/mW9Oj

excerpt on gbooks:

http://books.google.com/books?id=N1DTZ18N-_YC&lpg=PA1&pg=PT1...

also, remember cyanobacteria was one of the first organisms to turn the sun for its energy. here is excerpt from Home documentary by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, that mentions cyanobacteria:

http://youtu.be/jqxENMKaeCU?t=5m47s

hope this helps.

Home by Bill Bryson - not the first thing you might think of but tells fascinating story of Frederick Tudor who spent a fortune in 1840s taking ice from Lake Wenham in New York State and persuading the world you could refrigerate food from America across the Atlantic.

With the completion of the Erie Canal, buffalo, cattle and wheat from the Great Plains could arrive in Chicago, be butchered, kept in giant ice warehouses then shipped in box cars and boats lined with ice across the lakes, down the canal, out NY harbour and across to a Europe that was experiencing a massive population growth (1848 revolutions).

This first wave of globalisation dropped food prices globally causing (by the 1870s) massive economic collapses and shifts away from failing farmlands. British landed gentry never recovered, and the links to WWI are clear.

The US civil war would have been very different without the Erie canal if the worlds food supply went south down the Missiippi to get out to the Atlantic

All because someone liked Christoph in Frozen and want to sell ice.

Bryson is a brilliant author and this one of his best.

Thanks for your kind words and your project! I have no idea how I missed Home Assistant, written in Python3 and so popular (my usual complain about HA projects is "where're Python projects?" and "where's critical mass?"). I wish it would have caught my eye earlier.

My journey with MicroPython actually started with my smart home project needs - I wanted to use one of those small inexpensive Linux routers as a central controller. With only 4MB of flash, full Python wouldn't fit there, and USB port would be taken by Bluetooth dongle. I tried, really tried to get in love with Lua, but that didn't work, then I hacked on another small language called Squirrel, but when MicroPython campaign was announced, I really rejoiced. Well, that was more than 2 years, and since then, we had big progress with MicroPython, and I had much less progress with my home automation project ;-).

How I explained it to myself, is that, OK, I'll concentrate on uPy, to make it fairly complete and really cool, and that will enable other folks to make cool projects with it, which I myself will like, will be able to pick up, use, contribute to - instead of writing my own. Reading your message, I get a feeling that it might as well be true, and before I grow old ;-).

So, thanks again for your links, Home Assistant is at the top of my list to look into (and I have couple of dozen projects in it). And well, we'll try to do everything to uphold your hopes for MicroPython on ESP8266!

In the early 20th century, British children's educator Charlotte Mason emphasized the importance of air quality, outside air, and frequently changing one's inside air:

"Unchanged Air.––Parents of pale faced town children, think of these things! The gutter children who feed on the pickings of the streets are better off (and healthier looking) in this one respect than your cherished darlings, because they have more of the first essential of life––air. There is some circulation of air even in the slums of the city, and the child who spends its days in the streets is better supplied with oxygen than he who spends most of his hours in the unchanged air of a spacious apartment. But it is not the air of the streets the children want. It is the delicious life-giving air of the country. The outlay of the children in living is enormously in excess of the outlay of the adult. The endless activity of the child, while it develops muscle, is kept up at the expense of very great waste of tissue. It is the blood which carries material for the reparation of this loss. The child must grow, every part of him, and it is the blood which brings material for the building up new tissues. Again, we know the brain is, out of all proportion to its size, the great consumer of the blood supply, but the brain of the child, what with its eager activity, what with its twofold growth, is insatiable in its demands!" (Charlotte Mason, "Home Education, p. 31. Availible online,
https://www.amblesideonline.org/CM/vol1complete.html#031)

I am a documentary filmmaker and the one title I am surprised not to have seen here is American Movie. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181288/

True documentary classic- incredible characters, editing, treatment. Just an overall gem.

And if you dig that, check out Home Movie, a follow up from Chris Smith & excellent example of the vignette approach to a feature doc https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275408/

Home Automation is what first came to mind when I read the title. With this in mind, reading the blurb on the website sounded like, oh they're talking about building home automation software...

"build automation, IT automation, deployment automation, etc" would have saved me some confusion. Or simply compare yourself to other solutions out there will help me understand what category this new piece of utility and name fall into.

I agree with the spirit and most of the letter of your comment. But....

Why is the day of the beginning and end of WW2 such a stand-out piece of trivia that you would expect every person who puts "some effort into their education" to know it? You say it as though you find it hard to believe that any responsible adult could lack this particular fact. For myself, I fancy that I know a lot of trivia, including a lot of war-history trivia, but I don't know the day of the year on which that war ended (in fact, the only war start/end date I can recall at the moment is the date of the WWI armistice, because my government reminds me every year).

More generally, I did not see a single question in the list in TFA that I would condemn a person for not knowing that particular question, although I definitely "would like to live in a world where people actually put some effort into their education", and in fact I see some practical value in knowing a lot of trivia.

EDIT: Wait, I just read your top-level comment. You believe that ALL of these questions are "common knowledge that an average human being should know"?? Did you read the list? The AVERAGE HUMAN BEING should know the third-smallest State in the United States of America?!? The average human being should know which country consumed the most tea before WWI? You think it's common knowledge (or was in 1921) who wrote "Home, Sweet Home", and the voltage of street cars, and Lincoln's birthplace, and the wood used in axe handles and kerosene barrels? Seriously? That is batshit insane.