vghaisas

Yeah, will probably have to consider something like that.

Yeah this would have been my answer, except for one catch: what do I do with the existing integrated button on the Blink doorbell?

Oh, can a Dash button talk to my Google home mini? I imagined it would be the same problem I currently have.

A zigbee button/doorbell would work well, but then we'd have two buttons on the front door unless we hid the Blink's integrated button somehow.

Yeah, a Blink chime is definitely a solution. But after feeling like I got a great deal on a cheap doorbell, I didn't want to buy yet another thing from them. I also thought it would have been easy to play audio on the Google home and so I started tinkering and then got carried away.

MQTT was an option, but it actually felt like overkill to add an MQTT server on my VPS than just a tiny Express server. (But who am I to talk about overkill here.)

When I started my search, I thought this £30 doorbell would be good enough and I wouldn't need the £180 Nest doorbell. Little did I know...

It's just a few seconds and a lot of that is the HA polling interval.

It takes a few seconds, but a lot of that is just the HA polling interval.

Oh our London flat has no pre-installed doorbell at all! This is surprisingly common and everyone just knocks.

But yes, there were definitely other ways to solve this problem.

I thought it was finally time to write up the story of my absurd home doorbell implementation, especially because the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing means things will have to change soon.

Suggestions welcome!

Interesting info about the cameras, thanks!

> I'm surprised GPT didn't suggest a local HA setup

I had already bought the Blink doorbell at the time, so I was specifically asking: how do I make it play a sound on my Google home mini?

That was actually the original title! It's still the URL though :)

Yeah, a local solution is probably the way to go. This was at the beginning of my home automation journey so I didn't have Home Assistant and Zigbee set up yet.

But even if I replace the actual doorbell with a zigbee button, I still need a solution for the camera portion too.

I thought it was finally time to write up the story of my absurd home doorbell implementation, especially because the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing means things will have to change soon.

Suggestions welcome!

Got an email:

Picovoice is sunsetting its Free Tier and moving to a 7-day Free Trial for product teams. This change will take effect on June 30, 2026.

Got an email:

Picovoice is sunsetting its Free Tier and moving to a 7-day Free Trial for product teams. This change will take effect on June 30, 2026.

Oh I did read the README, but still have the question: while it does save on cost, latency and complexity, the tradeoff is that the agents can't run whatever they want in a sandbox, which would make them less capable too.

This is very cool, but I'm having some trouble understanding the use cases.

Is this mostly just for codemode where the MCP calls instead go through a Monty function call? Is it to do some quick maths or pre/post-processing to answer queries? Or maybe to implement CaMeL?

It feels like the power of terminal agents is partly because they can access the network/filesystem, and so sandboxed containers are a natural extension?

This is very cool, but I'm having some trouble understanding the use cases.

Is this mostly just for codemode where the MCP calls instead go through a Monty function call? Is it to do some quick maths or pre/post-processing to answer queries? Or maybe to implement CaMeL?

It feels like the power of terminal agents is partly because they can access the network/filesystem, and so sandboxed containers are a natural extension?

I've collected a list of fun stories of this form and post them when this comes up:

- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt

- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...

- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

You might enjoy these AI generated clocks: https://clocks.brianmoore.com/

In 2021, between jobs, I did some light data analysis and visualisation on the topics that Matt Levine writes about in Money Stuff and enjoyed seeing some trends, so I blogged about it!

I also emailed it to Matt, who included it in his "Things Happen" section!

Came across this list in the comments of this discussion, lots of great stories here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466030

My personal list of stories of this kind includes:

- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt

- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...

- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

- Wi-Fi only works when it's raining: https://predr.ag/blog/wifi-only-works-when-its-raining/

I collected a list of fun stories of this form a while ago!

- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt

- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...

- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

- The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining: https://predr.ag/blog/wifi-only-works-when-its-raining/