Yeah, I do something similar to Andrew; bought a few IKEA tradfri buttons and remotes, and set them up to toggle lights or media in various rooms.

Is there a reason you wouldn’t want to just get a zigbee/zwave/wifi smart outlet switch?

As someone who used primarily windows for 20+ years, used the surface pro line from the 1st through 7th iterations, and now only runs with a MacBook Air, I would say absolutely get the cheapest M1 Air you can find.

If she’s not a heavy user and is just doing word processing and light computing, it will be vastly more than enough machine, and be best in class in the most important things I can think of when thinking about a laptop for a writer:

1. nice big, bright, high res display for crisp text and easy reading/writing

2. insane amounts of battery life for writing in cafes or libraries or wherever for probably longer than she could stand to work in any given day

3. nicely portable and discreet for carrying around to places where she can write

4. decent keyboard and possibly the best laptop trackpad around for ergonomics (such as they are, in a laptop)

Getting used to MacOS will take a few days at most, and there are plenty of free/Foss apps to improve quality of life for Windows users moving to macs.

Cool, I’ve never used hall effect sensors but I’ll look into them too. Let us know how it works 😁

I’ve been thinking about this recently too!

I kind of have a very crude version of this, by simply mounting my garage door tilt sensor as high up on the door as I could. Since it would go horizontal along with the very first section of the door, it triggers as soon as the door is open about 1/5 of the way.

Response isn’t very fast, though, so if I wanted more precise control I was thinking about building 3 ESP distance/ultrasonic sensors mounted to the ceiling pointed downwards, one at the end of the track, one about 1/4 of the way from the end of the track, and one at the start (where the top of the door stops when it’s completely open).

So the sensors would detect in order of sensors triggered, “closed -> cracked -> slightly open/ing -> open”.

Tracking the previous state of the door in a variable would let me know the direction the door is moving as the sensors get triggered too.

Thanks! Although I’m using Android; and since I need aliases with mailbox.org anyway, presumably I have that covered with K-9. For MacOS I’m happy with the default Mail client anyhow; it’s nice enough to hold all my stuff that isn’t browser based.

Their web client seemed kind of crappy, but usable at least, if I remember right. Not often I need to log in from a computer that I don’t own, but once in a while it comes in handy.

Could you elaborate on what features are missing? I’m currently using mailbox.org as an email host, but considering swapping over to iCloud+