I now follow the rules. Speeding, parking, etc. I am never going to be late to something. It’s honestly just easier if you don’t make waves.

Also tall guy here. Realize that most back pain is actually inflammation. Yes, I have some blown discs in my lower back and I used to have to get shots in them to reduce the swelling. Manage your inflammation and you will have fewer troubles. Of course, you have to stop lifting those heavy things in a stupid way.

Get a cheap travel router that can use “bridge mode” to receive the wifi and pass along the connection through it’s ethernet port to your computer.

Salesman at the door button and routine exported to HomeKit. My doorbell camera shows a PiP of a person detection on my AppleTV. If I say “Siri salesman at the door” then HA will briefly turn on the flowerbed sprinkler zone to chase it away. Never gets old.

The piddly light on my phone is no match for a real flashlight, though.

Flashlights - I am never without one within reach.

We normally don’t gift unless an excellent idea comes up. We were struggling with our ice maker not keeping up (Ice water constantly, cocktails in the evening, etc) and my wife got me a countertop nugget ice maker (chewy ice). It is no good for daily ice water which needs big cubes to melt slowly but I turn that sucker on every day a 3PM and my evening drinks are much improved!

Do you waffle about before taking a slipper to the roach that snuck in under your door-jamb? No, you smash that repugnant shit and scoop it up with a piece of junk mail to toss it in the toilet. That sentient bug is just not food to you. The fact that a lobster is food does not make it a more elevated being.

Yes, they feel every moment until the knife slices their pea-sized nerve center of a brain in half. That took about 1/2 of a second. It’s done and now we can eat.

This is a left/right thing?!! WTF? This just a food thing and if you are left/righting it you are a world-class dolt!

It’s a fucking bug! Boil it and eat the shit already.

I worked at Red Lobster for a number of years as a young’un. A large part of my work in the prep kitchen initially (after I graduated from the dish ring) was to slice live Maine lobs in half to make “princess lobsters” (half a lobster with body cavity stuffed with yummy). These stupid bugs are no more sentient than a cockroach that you smash with a shoe.

Why would anyone spend even a second considering the feelings of a fucking bug?!

“A woman is only fertile during about 5 days each lunar cycle. Unfortunately those days are the most fun but the other 24 are safer.”

Can confirm that these are the best days to get wiggy with it - ask me how I know…kids.

Fair enough, I knew my take wouldn’t be a popular one here. In all fairness if you are using Apple products the iCloud sync brings all of the metadata with the data on every device that accesses it.

While I don’t have any illusions that Apple has my back they do have a lot invested in keeping people’s trust in their ecosystem. The automated on-device CSAM scanning kerfuffle that they backed away from shows that they are sensitive to the threat of people leaving their walled garden.

Another fairly easy to implement local solution that wouldn’t be an admin headache is to put a Mac mini with a bunch of attached storage on the network and use it as a file server. I do that for my PleX.

This will be an unpopular suggestion here but why not just go all in on iCloud? It’s reasonably inexpensive for not data-hoarding amounts of data, reasonably secure and E2E encrypted. Given the low cost, zero setup if they’re already Apple people and lack of admin I think it is ideal for them.

I pay for iCloud storage because I want HomeKit Secure Video cloud storage (I also have a local copy on disk).

Regarding your myQ, get away if you can. You can find an inexpensive HK device from Meross that will likely work for you.

If you want to use HA then you will end up migrating all of your HK devices to be paired with HA and then you can bridge them all (and more) back to HK so your family does not have to learn anything new.

Holding a thing to your face to talk to another human will seem like cave-men aping for a mate in the future. If I forget my bluetooth headset in the morning my day is shot - I’m sure the future is much brighter.

My response is likely to be unpopular but it’s how I feel. I had ungodly gobs of physical media years ago - VHS, DVDs, BlueRay, CDs, etc. It got to where it was more of a hassle to dig through and find the item then slub it over to the equipment just to enjoy my media.

I digitized everything and stuck it on a home media server. Now it’s as simple as grabbing the remote and pick what I want and it’s done. I’m much happier now.

I can tell you from experience make sure that if the outlet you plug in to is GFCI protected have power loss alarm rigged up. Get a small generator for power outages. Nothing more frustrating than throwing away an entire chest of spoiled food.

A package of blue-tack - it is basically sticky play-dough that is completely opaque and you can use wads of it to blunt the pain of stupid LEDs on on your tech shit. I am currently sitting in my living room looking at my TV and various components including router and stuff…easily 20 gobs of blue-tack masking 20 blinking LEDs.

Get some blue-tack and blind all those blinkers!