I laughed so hard when I read this, but then I realized something. Dude, you have a really cool mom. But I'm "that Dad". For home-related projects, about 25%

I laughed so hard when I read this, but then I realized something. Dude, you have a really cool mom. But I'm "that Dad". For home-related projects, about 25% of the stuff I replace with "home-built" ends up being the things my kids show off to their friends[0]. The other half is duct-tape and rubber bands. Unfortunately, the duct tape exists in the worst places -- like DHCP, and my routers, so while they don't require extra effort to use, they flake out on some of their devices[1]. My favorite is when I have to be called over to explain that, no, Son is not lying us doing that ourselves. He used to walk into his room and hit a few keys on the remote, which would trigger Plex to play a song, dim the regular lights and enable some really slick music visualizations. Hit pause/quit the app and the room goes back to previous state. If his phone started ringing, the app would auto-pause[2] and play-back after the phone returned to idle state. [0] It goes something like: "Son: Can I buy this (overpriced) LED/gaming PC thing?" and usually ends with me saying "... or, we can buy $10 worth of things I don't already have and make something that when you're friends as 'where can I buy that', you can say 'You can't, but I sell them for (overpriced) if you want to buy one!'". . [1] Recently better -- ESP8266 devices and Android devices didn't play well with one of my DD-WRT based routers. [2] Home Assistant and Android allowed me to read phone state. It worked but there was horrible delay and after a phone update, it just broke entirely, causing it to interrupt playback constantly. I ended up wiping out every related piece of that automation with the intent of doing it right (with a bluetooth sensor in his room which would allow me to trigger actions when he arrives/exits the room) but haven't completed that, yet.