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whitlock

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Do_not_track 3 months ago

Love it. This is an annoying problem and likely the actual solution than asking folks to use a universal one. I'll put something together as a starting point.

The statistics cited by Local Babysitter are ten years old, collected in 2009 by Nielsen. This doesn't reflect how media has changed in the last ten years, along with how children consume it. It would be nice to have a more updated source explaining what has changed in the last ten years, since obviously Nielsen is collecting this data.

Cheap boards like the ESP-12F (ESP8266) allow you to remotely control a device or receive sensor data, like that from a DHT11 temperature-humidity sensor. Instead of paying a lot of money, you can flash your own firmware on a device and make your own custom IoT device.

MQTT is a messaging protocol used to communicate with the device. You can use something like Mosquitto to communicate with your new IoT device. It is lightweight protocol and easy to work with.

You'd use something like an ESP32 – which has Bluetooth – if you want a simple BLE beacon, otherwise if you don't need Bluetooth then an ESP8266 device would likely work better.; If you want to look at related videos, I'd suggest looking at the YouTube channel Andreas Spiess publishes with various devices. He has a few videos on BLE and ESP32 (ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNoFdKgvskU) where he goes into detail.

Like you hinted, flashing Sonoff-Tasmota firmware on ESP8266 hardware lets you get A LOT of home automation equipment for fairly little. They make many devices and someone getting started should checkout the Sonoff-Tasmota for supported devices AND check out Sonoff.

If you don't want to use a Sonoff Basic or maybe the bigger 4 channel option, I'd suggest getting some of their wall adapters like the S31 (think Wemo wall plug). There is a confirmed flash for Sonoff-Tasmota & ESPurna for it and would let someone dip their toes into cheap home automation with MQTT.

"They even offered a token bounty of 5000 rupees in BigBasket credits, which we have not accepted."

That's a pittance for such a critical flaw in their purchasing system, especially for a company valued at over 180 million USD. 5000 Rupees is, by the way, worth $77.19.

There is no upgrade path from OS Luna (previous release) to Freya. Their own web site states, "elementary OS Luna users should back up their data and perform a clean install". Given that the operating system is built on Ubuntu I should be able to upgrade from Luna to Freya without too many issues.

Disappointed? Yes. I wrote this post on my Cr-48 running Elementary OS Luna. Instead of running Apt to update my laptop now I'm browsing DistroWatch in another tab to see what else has come out.

Thank you for answering my question. I was afraid you'd skip it if there was truth in what NPR had presented.

I'm probably not the only person who felt that you and Pete are misleading people with the story of Pete's online profile after that interview. In some ways it may have done more harm than good overall.

Have you done anything since then to try and get NPR to correct or update the article?