What’s up dog?

Unsure on the sharks but a lot of the roombas have an open source project (ha980?) that lets you run all the Apis locally and cut it off from the internet fully. Mines managed through home assistant now, it’s not perfect but it beats the heck out of that shitty iRobot app

I have one of those cheap TCL Roku TVs, I think it was something like $130 for a 55 inch a few years ago on sale.

I put it on a VLAN then added a rule just for it to only ever allow communication to my Jellyfin server. No internet, no other devices, Wireless AP isolation, just able to access that port on that address.

It works ok but it does nag me that it’s not connected when opening Jellyfin, cheaper than adding a dedicated TV box to it though! I tried a similar setup with an old Fire TV and it really doesn’t like being “offline” like that and makes you navigate through the settings to open any of the apps.

If I were buying new I’d try to go for a monitor for sure, it’s just not worth all the potential issues.

Mull with ublock origin, always on VPN to my house with pihole for DNS.

I use Firefox for the “installed” web pages for quick access to internal things like Sonarr since Mull would log me out fairly often.

Using this fairly regularly. Its decent but the wireless integration does seem to need USB reconnected occasionally before it works for me on GrapheneOS. Pretty stable otherwise occasional choppiness but most likely my network

Home assistant really is a game changer. Not having ten different apps is great, finally got our roomba fully offlined with rest980 and it works better than the official app and doesn’t take forever to load or abrupty stop when there’s an aws outage

Have you tried lately? I do specifically remember them requiring it however the most recent one I made did not ask and it gave me a somewhat randomly generated email address. No recovery email or anything like that either could be a requirement if you’re on TOR or something though still maybe difficult to say when they require it

You’re assuming they don’t just kill you on the spot to make sure you don’t take it back

I had to just make a new burner google account for Aurora. The rate limiting on the anonymous account seems to always be hit when I try to use it.

Yeah it’s a tough one, I’m honestly shocked it’s THAT difficult to do without Google or some shady app. I really wish these devices at least did HDMI out

I tried for a bit and gave up on this. Seemed like you needed Google home and some permissions I wasn’t willing to grant to Google.

Currently using scrcpy over wifi on a laptop with HDMI when I need to cast to the TV. It’s reliable but it’s not ideal still

This is by no means a quick replacement but it is private. I went with wyze cams, wz_mini_hacks firmware, put them on a vlan with no access outside of it including the internet. I have Frigate pulling the video from them and doing detection with a Coral USB accelerator and homeassistant for alerts. Amcrest doorbells seem good but honestly I stuck a ZigBee motion sensor by the door and between that and the two cameras watching the front I know who’s there and if I don’t want to answer I just ignore them. The only way it will be private is if the data never leaves your network so it’s unfortunately a bit of work but a fun project if you’re into that kind of stuff!

Not worrying about bait&switch with a company removing device features and forcing a subscription is why I did it after those stupid Canary cameras burned me.