BitAcadie @BitAcadie@bitacadie.com

Yesterday we published our 2022 Financial Report. When people saw Thunderbird raised $6.4M in 2022 from donations, one question was asked frequently: "Do you have mega-donors?"

Nope. We just have awesome people 💙

Some stats we didn't publish in the report:

-We had 76 donations that were $500 or above, which is less than 1% of total donations.

-95% of our donations were less than $100.

-The largest donation was €3000.

-Our average donation amount $15.78.

Thank you #Thunderbird family!

Here you go with the reason why I decided to never purchase proprietary hardware in my smart home, why I never bothered to implement support for Nest and Echo products in Platypush (unlike Home Assistant), and why I advise smart home enthusiasts to build their own products (and I try and provide them with plenty of instructions to do so).

You buy a nice expensive piece of smart hardware, just to see that company purchased by Google/Microsoft/Amazon in a short time, features being removed with no notice, new developments stalling, APIs being changed with no notice, plenty of "where's the button to do this thing gone in the Google Home app?", and your smart routines in your own home on your own dearly purchased devices are at the mercy of a clueless product manager in Big Tech who needs to find ways to get their quarterly bonus.

I will never build integrations for Nest and Echo in Platypush because to me it makes sense to build integrations only with products that embrace openness and back-compatibility. Building integrations with products that only care of communicating within their own walled garden (or, worse, bring up the "certified partner"/"works with" bullshit), and not in an integrated open system with open protocols and APIs, is just a waste of time. It's me wasting my development time chasing vendors who aren't interested in building an integration with me, because private tinkerers aren't their profitable market segment. This is not what a connected home is supposed to be, and everyone should stay away from these mediocre products.

I'm also still very skeptical about #Matter: while it aims to be the unified protocol for smart devices that everybody had been waiting for years, it's also been mostly developed and pushed by the companies that caused the problem. I don't believe that we'd have the Internet that we have today if Google and Microsoft had been primarily in charge of implementing TCP/IP, and I don't see why it should be different with Matter.

A thermostat can be easily implemented with a relay, a temperature sensor and an Arduino. It's literally just an electric finger with three wires that closes a circuit if temperature goes below a certain threshold. And the logic to turn it on and off can be customized to the extreme on a Raspberry Pi. No need to spend $300 for it.

And a Nest camera can be easily replaced by a PiCamera that costs <10% of the price tag. You even have some native apps to stream a PiCamera. You put Platypush around it with an ffmpeg dec/enc, and you've got your HTTP cam on par with Nest. Again, no need to spend hundreds of bucks. I've set up 10 smart cameras in my house for the same cost of a single Nest camera.

https://9to5google.com/2023/05/07/google-failing-nest/

Google Summer of Code 2023
The chosen projects of Google Summer of Code have just been announced, and we are excited to announce that, although it is the first time FreeCAD is participating on its own to the program, we have been awarded no less than 4 slots this year!

The four projects that will happen this summer are:

UI tool for fetching online content, by Amulya Paritosh: A library management add-on
https://blog.freecad.org/2023/05/04/google-summer-of-code-2023/
#Announcement

A douchebag posts this morning about how you should be wearing a mask, you should keep your distance, and you should be vaccinated, and constantly washing your hands to stay safe. Where have you been? None of that bullshit works. Blocked. It's too early in the morning.

Coming Soon: FreeCAD 0.21
"Releasing JAXA's HTV7 cargo vehicle from the ISS" by Astro_Alex is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Last week a group of FreeCAD administrators, maintainers, and developers met to discuss the next release of FreeCAD. We decided to begin the process of creating our next release now. The timing is appropriate because:

It has been almost a year since the 0.20, which was released on 13
https://blog.freecad.org/2023/04/28/coming-soon-freecad-0-21/
#Announcement