I use a Honeywell Z-Wave thermostat with Home Assistant. All local and I not only do I have schedules based on time of day, but it also adjusts the temperature based on if people are home or not.

I’m not seeing anyone in this thread telling anyone to vote third party.

When it comes down to voting for Biden or whatever racist shitbag the GOP trots out, I’m going to vote for Biden. But don’t tell me I’m not allowed to criticize him or the party. Acting like a political party is above criticism comes off as fascist.

And before you get on to me about only criticizing Democrats, I think we can all agree that Republicans are worse, but if we aren’t allowed to call out Dems on shit, then we truly don’t have a democracy anymore.

I get the impulse that talking shit about a political candidate is turning people off of voting or voting for the realistic candidate, but I would argue that doing shit like keeping old politicians in office does a lot more to turn people off of voting. If we want people to vote, then they need to be inspired by a candidate and feel good about voting. And of course they don’t feel inspired when they hear criticisms about both parties, but clearly just telling people that they have to vote for someone to keep someone like Trump from office only seems to work for reelection, but it didn’t stop him from getting in office in the first place. I’m pretty confident that Trump won’t be president again, I’m not so confident about the next guy like him.

I got a smart lock after realizing that we would simply forget to lock the front door sometimes since we typically leave via the garage. It’s connected to Home Assistant and now will lock automatically if no one is home.

Technically, I know that a smart lock is less secure, but in most real world scenarios, knowing that the lock will be locked when we are not home, on top of being notified if it becomes unlocked, I’d argue that it’s more secure now than when I had a dumb lock.