NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran just dropped a sober warning: the next AI crash could hit harder than the dot-com bust — because this time, the infrastructure spend is debt-financed.

His three uncomfortable points:

1. It’s not pure software anymore. Every AI query costs compute. Margins stay thin, scale doesn’t bail you out.
2. Deepseek is squeezing prices. Chinese competitors pressure margins further. Growth at bad margins can destroy value.
3. Apple’s restraint looks smart. Standing back while others burn billions on hardware that may be obsolete in five years.

Full article (German): the-decoder.de

A 3D printer doesn’t just make toys and brackets. It quietly turns your workshop into something that actually makes sense.

Many tools on my wall have their own custom-printed adapter — sized for the exact handle, the exact head, the exact angle. No more generic peg hooks holding things at weird angles. No more “where did I put that”.

And the best part: I didn’t design any of them myself. Just downloaded the models from Maker World, sent them to the printer, done.

I’m not built for routine. Bin day always sneaks up — and once the truck rolls past, you’re stuck with a full bio bin for another two weeks.

So I taught the garage camera to do the remembering. The evening before pickup, it grabs a snapshot, runs it through GPT-4o vision asking “which of the four bins are visible inside?”, then cross-references with the trash pickup calendar. If today’s pickup bin is still inside, Telegram fires off the actual photo — not just a text alert. Photo proof so I can’t gaslight myself.

Setup:

• Reolink garage cam (24/7 RTSP feed)
• GPT-4o vision call with the snapshot
• Waste collection schedule integration in Home Assistant
• Telegram bot with photo attachment

Two weeks in, zero missed pickups. One genuinely satisfying “told you so” from the smart home each pickup evening.

Full write-up with code & setup: how-i-taught-my-garage-camera-to-remember-bin-day

Charity Majors just published the clearest take I’ve seen on what AI actually changes for software engineering.

Her thesis is the opposite of most takes: code production became cheap, but engineering discipline didn’t disappear. It moved upstream. Specs, validation, observability matter more now, not less.

The line that names the whole mental model: “Code stops being an asset and starts acting as a cache: a materialized view of understanding, useful while current, disposable when stale.”

Read it →

A few days into running my Bambu Lab X2D and the AMS 2 Pro suddenly stopped pulling filament. Disappointing — the printer itself had been excellent up to that point.

I contacted Bambu Lab support, sent videos and notes about what was happening. Their response: “we’ll send a replacement hub.” I pictured a brand-new unit on the way.

When the package arrived, it was a single tiny spare part. Not a hub, not a unit — just a small component.

Owning a 3D printer means being able to repair it yourself. I disassembled the AMS 2 Pro down to the section where this part sits, swapped it, and the unit is running again. Hopefully this repair lasts.

Watch the 90-second story:

Anyone else dealt with AMS 2 Pro filament-feeding issues? Drop your experience in the comments — curious how widespread this is.

— Daniel, The Smart Home Maker

The iPhone Action Button is the most under-used hardware on the phone. I rebound it to do exactly one thing: press → speak → release → my AI captures and routes whatever I just said.

The flow:

• An iOS Shortcut records audio and posts it to my n8n workflow
• Apple’s on-device dictation handles transcription — works even offline
• An LLM classifies what I said (smart-home / work / idea)
• Smart-home stuff becomes a task in Nova (my task system)
• Work stuff is sent to my work inbox
• Random ideas drop into my notebook
• Telegram pings me with the result in about 2 seconds

What this kills: the friction between having a thought and actually capturing it properly. No app to open, no typing, no category-picking. Great for joggers, drivers, parents — anyone whose hands are busy and brain is on.

My wife’s Pixel 7a hit the floor. The screen turned into a spider web overnight — still functional, but barely usable in the sun and a glass-shard hazard waiting to happen.

Instead of sending it in, I ordered the replacement assembly, popped the back panel, swapped the OLED, reconnected the fingerprint flex, and reseated the battery in about an hour.

Bricked phone risk: real. Cost vs. a repair shop: a third. Satisfaction of handing it back working: unbeatable.

My house starts heating before I even tell it I’m coming home.

100 km out, a proximity sensor reads my phone’s GPS — the heating leaves vacation mode and slowly ramps the house back to normal. 5 km out, the boiler goes to full temp. By the time I unlock the door, the alarm has disarmed itself.

No app opened. No buttons pressed. Just Home Assistant noticing.

In the Short I walk through the full setup.

Every evening at 8, my house sends me a text. Today’s energy use, solar production, alarm status, whether anything weird happened. I’m on vacation — the briefing follows me wherever I go.

Only rule: tell me what matters. Anomaly → ping. Quiet day → still a short check-in so I know the silence is real.

📺 Watch the full Short:

On vacation, yearly heating maintenance was due. Old me would have cancelled. Instead I generated a temporary access code on my phone — technician let himself in, did the job, code auto-expired afterwards.

Smart locks earn their keep on the days you’re not even there.

📺 Watch the full Short:

A joystick transplant saved my kids’ RC monster truck this weekend. Both original sticks snapped off — I spent hours suspecting the wrong patient (the truck itself) before catching it. Then desoldered the dead sticks, wired in a generic 2-axis KY-084, cut its PCB to fit the housing, modded the top cover. Not fast, not pretty. But the truck rolls again.

📺 Watch the full Short:

Our smart home knew we were stressed before we did. A 0–100 family stress score blends six sensor signals — living-room mic peaks, motion bursts on the ground floor, time of day, who’s home alone with the kids, plus a weekend modifier — into one number that quietly reshapes the house. When the score climbs over 60, lights warm automatically, music suggestions get softer, notifications get held back.

Today the score ran exactly the curve you’d expect: calm morning, red zone in the late afternoon, back to quiet after bedtime. Watch the 50-second walkthrough for the full breakdown.

Another one of my kids’s toys broke. A cheap fire truck with sound and lights — dead in months. Like always.

I won’t buy a new one. I’ll fix it. Not for the money — for the lesson my kids take away: broken doesn’t mean trash.

Maker mindset > consumer reflex. 🔧

▶ Watch on YouTube

#ToyRepair #RepairDontReplace #MakerMindset #SustainableParenting #DadProjects

My house is smart. My terrace? Stone age.

Every tile stains constantly — moss, pollen, dirt — and the only fix is hours of manual pressure washing. There is no smart-home automation for any of this.

We have robot vacuums, mowers, pool cleaners. Where is the outdoor cleaning robot? Who is building this?

It is time to automate the driveway. 🤖💦

▶ Watch on YouTube

#SmartHomeGap #OutdoorAutomation #SmartHomeMaker #RobotEverything #PressureWashing

Tightened the loop with my home AI assistant: I dump rough ideas into it, it drafts proper concept notes from them — and now sends me a Telegram message with Implement / Refine / Discard buttons whenever a draft’s ready. Click → it picks up the next step. No more concepts vanishing in the chat scroll. 🧠

#HomeAssistant #LLM #AI

Smart-home ghost: the sleep-mode notification claimed “activated! score 45%” — but my trigger requires 80%. Both were technically true: 80% at fire-time, 45% half a second later (after motion sensors picked up me going to bed). Fix: log the score at *trigger time*, not when the message gets sent. More on this AI-driven sleep mode → https://the-smart-home-maker.com/sleep-mode-with-ai-smarter-than-any-rule-in-home-assistant

#HomeAssistant #SmartHome #DIY

Smart home automation fighting itself: my stair light wouldn’t stay off at night. Sleep mode turns it off → motion sensor turns it back on → fine, except the automation also tried to “restore the previous state” after motion. Problem: it kept saving the *current* state, including its own “ON”. So restore = no-op. Light stayed on all night. Fix: only save the state when the light is OFF. 🤦

#HomeAssistant #SmartHome #DIY

🎉 Celebrating 20 years of the Maker Movement! From DIY projects to innovative tutorials, this community has transformed how we approach Smart Home tech. What’s your favorite maker project or hack? Share your experiences and let’s inspire each other! #MakerMovement #DIY #SmartHome #20YearsOfMaking

People ask me how many automations I run. Current count: 275+ 🤖 148 Home Assistant automations and 127 n8n workflows. Some save energy, some save time, and some just make me smile. What’s YOUR count? 👇

#HomeAssistant #SmartHome #Automation #n8n