Definitely Zigbee or Z-wave instead of wifi. Once you start to build out more devices you will be glad to not have gone down the wifi route.

I went with Zigbee and have Sonoff SNZB-02 temperature and humidity sensors in each room that have been absolutely flawless since the day I installed them, and they last about two years on a single battery!

I would obviously recommend them but I don’t have any experience of other thermostats or of Z-wave.

I did also install smart Zigbee TRVs on each radiator but I don’t rely on the internal thermostats of them as they don’t accurately represents the overall room temperature.

As others have mentioned the Philips bulbs are about as good as you can get but they are also the most expensive. And that you can save money by going with the IKEA lineup but the quality isn’t as good. But your third option is Innr bulbs which sit perfectly in between Philips and IKEA for quality and price.

TLDR

Philips - best quality / most expensive

Innr - medium quality / middle pricing

IKEA - lowest quality / least expensive

Note: when I say the IKEA is the lowest quality, I just mean between these three. They are still miles ahead of any of the no-name brand crap you can get on Amazon.

I use Syncthing for files/photos/videos and Nextcloud for calendar and contacts.

Amazfit with Gadgetbridge.

I bought one a couple of years ago and it works great. Gadgetbridge keeps all the smart functionality local to your phone.

I’ve heard good things about the Garmins as well which I think are mostly also supported in Gadgetbridge.

Yeah, just use the Beta, it’s extremely stable. Don’t get it from the Play Store though, as you’ve seen it hasn’t been updated in years. Just get it from their GitHub.

I’ve tried quite a few after leaving Nova a few years ago and have settled on Lawnchair. It seems to be the most stable and is under active development.

I’m staying sceptical about these rumours for now until something more substantial comes to light, as currently it is just the Telegram CEO throwing shade at Signal, and the Signal CEO throwing shade back at Telegram

Thanks llandar, I’ll have a listen

Thanks, I do run my own server so this is a possibility

Thanks. Yeah I found Barinsta but saw it hadn’t been updated in years. I’ll have a look around and report back.

Thanks MrSoup, do you have any suggestions on a good frontend for Instagram?

Good to know, thanks

Thanks, yeah I’m always on a VPN, but as you suggested, maybe nowadays it’s not about trying to live without an account, but having the account with generic/fake profile data.

Oh I hadn’t heard of Beeper. Thanks I’ll look in to that.

Thanks, yeah I had thought about using separate SIMs to sign up but then, like you said, would still need to sync contacts.

Although I hadn’t really though about only using the desktop apps.

I do run ProtonVPN on all of my devices, daily drive Linux on my PC and laptop, and have GrapheneOS as my ROM. So device privacy is not really the issue. This is more about not wanting to have accounts with the likes of Meta who have time and time again shown that they are completely against user privacy, but I feel it is more and more difficult to live without as most people don’t know/don’t care about personal privacy.

Thanks for your comment Deckweiss. To reply to your assumptions I’m not American and am definitely not young.

I’d be interested to hear about how your and your friends learn about local events without any access to the main channels that seem to be used by most venues, i.e. Facebook and Instagram, as I’d happily take some advice on this.

Also, as per my original post, it is not about meeting new people, that I have no problem with, it is about the inevitable conversation when they exclusively use WhatsApp to stay in contact.

Best alternative for WhatsApp would be Signal

I just used a throwaway email to initially sign up to get the Key, then deleted the app. Was very easy.

I’d recommend checking out Gadgetbridge. It is an open source app, with no network permission requirements, that replaces the OEM app for a large number of watches. I’m running an Amazfit GTS 4 with it and it has been almost flawless.