jevans.bio

I've thought about this a lot since listening to investigative journalist Joseph Cox talk about that he doesn't have a phone and why. At that point, I already had a Google Pixel phone that I loaded GrapheneOS onto, which is the absolute best you can do in terms of DeGoogle-ing and security if you want to use Android. Since then I've been trying to see what it takes to really break away for someone who uses their phone A LOT, simply as an exercise and to learn more.

How You are Being Tracked

First, there are multiple levels of tracking to be aware of:

Table of Contents

1. The Problem

2. The Hardware

3. Making It Smart

   1. His Blue Period

   2. IR Struggles, Part 1

   3. Brought To You By Node-RED

      1. The State Machine

      2. Implementation

   4. SSH, wlroots, and PipeWire

   5. The Dashboard

   6. IR Struggles, Part 2

4. The End

5. Addendum: Cable Management Sucks

6. References

The Problem

I share a small apartment with my partner and I have a love for locally-controlled smart-home stuff. One of the biggest hurdles when trying to make our apartment “smart”, is that I want to make sure that my partner, and anyone who visits can interact with everything intuitively. This means that light switches have to work like normal switches, that a remote control does what you think it does, and, above all, that you never need to open an app to do anything you would do in any other home.

At the same, I try to avoid all-in-one devices as much as possible because they afford far less customization and control, and because they become a single point of failure that can end up being expensive and create a lot of e-waste. The biggest downside to this approach is that I often take a big hit in the “convenience” department.

It’s undeniable that integrating many parts of a system makes the user experience a lot easier. This is part of why internet service providers give customers an all-in-one modem, firewall, router, switch, and wireless access point. Managing individual devices for all of those functions for an normal user would be overkill and a nightmare to maintain.

At the same time, modem interfaces, CPU power, Ethernet controllers, and WiFi versions all evolve at different rates, and with an all-in-one device, you have to replace the whole thing any time you want a new feature in any one of those parts, or risk having to dive into the software/firmware of your device to make it work nicely with other parts and/or having the old device reduce the functionality of your new part.