have you heard of HASS? https://www.home-assistant.io/

it seems like the perfect fit for you.

There's also OpenHAB https://www.openhab.org/

OpenHAB is still a bit user unfriendly from my experiences working with it. My existing stuff will talk to Google or Amazon's assistants, but getting OpenHAB to talk back and forth with those devices and Google/Alexa is proving to be a pain in the ass.

I like that cloud access is free, and Alexa integration works for me, although I prefer to keep my automation stuff relatively simple.

For me, I like the OpenHAB scripting, I personally found HomeAssistant to be too complicated to do some things because it was focused on being easy to use. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to get HomeAssistant to do what I wanted with my zwave smart locks, and it was much easier to do it on OpenHAB. So obviously, YMMV based on your preferences and requirements.

I see a lot of people using NodeRed also, which I guess is cool, but I found NodeRed incredibly frustrating compared to writing a script from scratch.

Hass translates to hate in german

This is probably part of why they stopped referring to it as "hass", although many who have been a part of the ecosystem (and probably don't speak German) continue to use the term.

i know, I'm German myself. It's just the acronym used for the service.

who do you mean with "our"? where I live there are a lot of family owned businesses who export worldwide and often the owner of the business has worked there in his younger years and only inherited (not sure if that's the right word) the business after the original owner died/retired.

that's scary to hear. where I live there was a very short lived experiment with facial recognition at a train station and when it ended it showed that the general public was not in favour of it.

they are moving away from medieval to more metal-like music tho

cant say im surprised honestly. as sad as it is, Messing with Putin himself rarely leads to a positive outcome.

The man is ex-KGB, installed himself in power for life and somehow his critics have a way of getting killed or tripping on some soviet nerve agents.

It's hard to tell who installed Putin into power. I suspect ex-soviet agents in Germany, Schröder[0] and Merkel, which may help him.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der

German elections are considerably more legitimate. For one, opposition politicians aren’t poisoned.

Except she was voted without cheating, never killed the opposition or controls all branches of government and media.

Voted by who?

German chancellor is elected by Bundestag and not directly by the people.

I guess in terms of USA that would be like Democrats and Republicans coming up with a president.

> I guess in terms of USA that would be like Democrats and Republicans coming up with a president.

That's totally normal, and happens in a lot of places. For instance, in Canada, you vote for your local representatives (MPs), the party that ends up with the most MPs (roughly speaking) gets their leader installed as Prime Minister. Then, of course, the Head of State is actually the Queen who's represented by the Governor General, who is in turn nominated by the Prime Minister.

None of that matters, of course, wrt: freedom.

> 4 years break

Right...

Wasn't he the 'prime minister' during those 4 years? I thought he more or less just switched positions with Medvedev for those 4 years.

Yes, while they did a little bit of Constitutional refactoring.

Yes. Who do you think was really in charge