New Adventures in WiFi

After  finally getting Tasmota flashed onto a smart plug  I was able to get started on one of the smart home projects I'd been pondering for a while... a smart phone charger that could stop the phone charging when it reached a certain battery charge level. My motivation was this... I had been the owner of a Google Pixel phone which I purchased in 2017. After 2 years of use I was becoming increasingly disappointed with the battery life of the device, which prompted me to install the AccuBattery app  to attempt to quantify how poor the remaining battery capacity was. I was alarmed to find that the battery capacity was less than 50% of the original capacity (and has now dropped to less than 40% at the time of writing) So after I got a new Android phone in around May 2019, I started reading about how I could improve this. The AccuBattery documentation has some very useful articles  describing how lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries degrade under different charging...

Okay, getting this reasonably innocuous-looking device into our home required some serious deliberation and consideration, but I have finally taken the plunge and purchased a Google Home Mini. I was already regularly talking to the Google Assistant on my WearOS watch and Android phone, so uttering the "Ok Google" hotword and issuing commands to my devices was already a regular occurence. In addition, my digital life was already heavily embedded in the Google ecosystem, so there probably wasn't much about my life Google didn't already know about. However, the prospect of having a device sitting in our kitchen which listens to our every word, was daunting. I was eventually seduced after seeing a friend talk to an Amazon Alexa on their kitchen bench, and after I was able to get comfortable that the device was only sending or uploading audio after the "Ok Google" hotword was spoken .