I can certainly understand your motivation. To be honest, while money is helpful from the start, beyond a certain point it no longer improves your life. I currently support my own family with the money I earn. I’m even able to invest money for my boys so they can get a good education. But millions? These days, I prefer time. It's something which get more worthy every year.
I've had this feeling for a long time that the more things I own, the more time I waste dealing with things instead of creating and living life. Stuff is this ever-growing entity that drags you down. I don't buy stuff. I actually don't have a dresser in my closet. I have a carry-on suitcase on the closet floor that I keep all my clothes folded in, after owning the same house for 8 years. But I have a girlfriend, and therefore there's stuff everywhere. Stuff is just stress.
I’ve thought about this a lot in the past, too, because my parents didn’t exactly come from loving homes themselves; their upbringings were defined more by strictness.
I grew up the same way. There was a lot of arguing—it rarely turned physical, but they didn’t take much interest in me, either. I had to sort out many of my own issues on my own. Fortunately, I had grandparents on one side of the family who loved me dearly and made me feel like I belonged. They also always encouraged me and supported my talents.
Now I have children of my own and think about this a lot—especially since my wife’s experience was similar, yet different. We decided to do things better with our kids, and we try to put that into practice every day.
Here’s something that crossed my mind: I’ve certainly achieved a degree of success in life, partly because I had to be very independent from a young age. If I wanted something, I had to take care of it myself—at least in most cases. But I’ve come to the conclusion that while my sons might turn out to be more "normies" or conventional, the psychological toll of that kind of upbringing—the low self-esteem and the lack of pride from one’s own parents—far outweighs those benefits.
I think it solves a problem for you, but I’m not sure if it’s general enough to be useful to others as well. Most of these points can also be addressed directly via Home Assistant and relevant plugins. Nevertheless, I encourage you to continue developing it so that it gains broader appeal.
P.S.: I have developed custom apps for my family myself, so I can certainly relate to the original motivation behind this.
My Sony TV also faced some issues in the past, which at least let me start some investigation. Unfortunately it confirmed my assumptions that the hardware is very limited and already runs on full load most of the time. Still thinking about putting some more effort into this, but killing the device was also one of my concerns.
A really fun project was extendending the abilities of my reMarkable Pro. I missed a decent Manga Reader on the device, so I created a native one which makes use of my custom server.
Generally, I'm with you, but over the past decades I often saw companies being lazy about their software. So I think chances are good that we can make use of this situation. Not long ago, you had to accept certain decisions or servers going down with leaving devices useless. I'm hopeful that more stuff can have a 2nd/better life in our hands.
That's the downside of the medal, but let's face it. A tool is a tool. You can forge helpful stuff or weapons, but this is not the fault of the tool itself. So we're currently at the stage where we were on the internet 30 years ago. Let's see where this leads too.
I fixed a lot of stuff over the past couple of years. Recently I put alot of our shellys back to life. They were taking care of our rolling shutters, but died due to a low quality capacitor. I soldered quality ones in it and they now do their job as expected again.
Similarly, even the higher-priced Logitech mice often use tact switches that are only rated for a relatively low number of clicks (probably 1 million?), so many of them started failing on me after about two years. Replacing the switches with higher-rated ones (50 million clicks) is trivial on all the mice I have disassembled so far. The switches and replacement glider pads (which need replacing after removing the screws hidden below them) are often just a few bucks but make the mouse last for several more years.
I've done this fix on at least 3 MX Masters, just going in through the rubber on the side to remove the switch, since disassembly through unscrewing everything is more work.
Needing to replace the feet every time you open the mouse is pretty frustrating.
I feel you. Here in Europe you have to pay around 100 bucks or more to get some decent quality from Logitech. In the past I used mice like the G9 which was build like a tank. Nowadays it's something like a throwawy part, even in the higher price range. Same goes for keyboards, which I tend to build now on own.
Yes, I no longer pay extra money for Logitech. If the quality is as bad as a cheap offbrand from China, why wouldn't I pay less for the cheap offbrand?
I'm glad to pay for quality, but Logitech no longer seems to offer good quality.
Personally speaking: I could not find anything that would be a match in terms of quality and ergonomics for the MX Vertical. Tried a small number of cheap vertical mice, none of them felt right.
