I’m probably in the middle (between Blackbird and lone-cloud):
Hence why getting my own router with OpenWRT and slapping an overlay VPN on top of it (Netbird probably) so that I can only access the LAN through the VPN! 
Try to self-host as much as possible and trust less. 
PS: I need to look into geofencing a bit more. 
Yeah I’ve been looking into the OpenWRT One, need to step up my networking game before I feel comfortable playing around with remote HA access
I’ve heard good things about TailScale, though can’t offer any user notes yet
Geofencing is the shit imo. I have some lights turn on when my wife or I come in the door if they’re off. It also automates some alarm/camera related alerting. On my phone I have a “poor man’s geofencing” where it doesn’t actually track my approximate location, but instead tracks when my phone is connected/disconnected to my home wifi network to flag me as home/away. HA has router integrations for that kind of stuff and it’s a lot more friendly on your phone’s battery life vs the real geofencing.
Very easy to use but too much telemetry to my liking.
Headscale is also not easy to setup + Tailscale’s mobile app is not FOSS, hence a pass for me. I choose violence and self-host the entire thing myself. 
Yeah, I’ll probably do wifi or something alike too. Not a fan of GPS for several reasons. 
I need to check for other solutions that might be nice while not burning down the battery.
I’m sorry for my earlier lines saying this is just a local-only thread. I was on edge after fighting with this for several days. Taking a couple of days off helped, and of course everyone can talk about it here.
Here’s what I learned over the years of dealing with home assistant:
I have a Yale Linus L2 on my door, but I have turned off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I only have NFC enabled so the tags work. In my opinion, it works so perfectly and makes life so much easier that if someone still manages to break into my new apartment building, I will take my hat off to the thief. I would let them empty my apartment and I might even help them carry things.
That’s not a bad solution, but it’s kind of like dumbing down a smart lock. Someone could still theoretically scan your NFC card and open the door through a replay attack, but at that point it’s probably easier to just pick the lock or get in through the balcony or something.
I live in an apartment building. The lock looks normal from the hallway, so a thief would really have to do some research on my life..
And here I am, the actual thief doing OSINT on you. Hahahaha 
One of my projects has been to learn how to use and optimize my radiators and an air source heat pump that is controlled by electricity market prices. I’ve been doing this completely for comfort, so high electricity bills weren’t really the reason. I’ve been adjusting this every week for a couple of months, and the result is crazy when I look at it now. I’ve managed to reduce it by -77.82%.
The main reason for this is, of course, the pump. I’ve been able to stop it from constantly starting and stopping. Now it runs steadily and only lowers the setting during the most expensive hours.
As a percentage, it sounds really big, but the electricity here is so cheap that in euros it’s maybe 50€/month. So, this project is also just for fun, like a hobby..
50€/m is quite a good deal honestly.
If you do that over a few places, it’s comfort + money back, they add up quite quickly. 
True, because otherwise the projects only ever took money. 
I hadn’t realized that removing my Xiaomi account would also remove devices that work locally. In other words, the host and tokens got replaced. I expected this to be such a pain that I spent five days getting myself ready… Anyway, it’s done now and I’ll just leave the account as it is.
So, you lost the Xiaomi devices or just needed to redo them?
That sounds bad. It means those devices were never local and were being controlled through their API. I’d check if there’s a better direct integration to control them.
I had to create a new account, add the devices to Xiaomi’s own system, and use a token extractor. The process is otherwise fine, but Xiaomi does not accept Proton addresses. I also needed a new email, because the one from the deleted account was not valid. First, I spent four days struggling with Google, which was not very easy. Then, I had to use a laptop with a hotspot because the Xiaomi website would not even open on my own computer. Brave browser showed 99+ trackers. I feel like burning the laptop that I used to visit that site.
If you come up with something better than this, please let me know.
Change house and ISP too at this point.
Damn, feels bad huh. But nice thing that I’ll keep in mind: do not buy any Xiaomi device.
I mean, not like I planned to anyway. 
man I cant deny the value of xiaomi products like the vaccum robot but if there’s something better im open to it
