A friend was dumping stuff prior to a move. I took all his electro gadgets just to prevent it becoming e-waste.
In the pile of stuff is an Amazon Alexa. Fuck #Amazon. I boycott Amazon and also have principled objections to their snooping, business practices, etc. My choices seem to be:
- trash the Alexa
- donate the Alexa to charity
These are both lousy choices. Donating it as-is would ultimately put it in someone’s house which then feeds Amazon.
Is there another option? I did a quick search and see no FOSS to replace whatever garbage Amazon has on it. It could be attached to the LAN with an egress firewall that blocks cloud access, but I suppose then it is useless, correct?
(update) I added a link to an article that shows what the thing looks like. The article is otherwise irrelevent.
New extra requirement: the user must be able to say “Oh, yeah, no, for sure” without the thing exploding into flames.



Which model?
https://www.androidauthority.com/echo-show-5-jailbreak-lineageos-3636721/
I don’t have it in front of me but it’s the cylindrical fabric speaker that looks like this:
https://www.cravingtech.com/best-alexa-smart-speaker-for-the-price-with-great-sound-bass-amazon-echo-3rd-gen-2019-review.html
That will be nice if I can put Lineage OS on it. Though I have to wonder how useful a headless unit could be… if I could get a remote display on my PC that would be cool.
Theoretically possible
https://github.com/Dragon863/EchoCLI/issues/15