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.

  • plateee@piefed.social
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    8 hours ago

    I’ve done something similar - repurposing old 90’s boomboxes with hifiberry - it works relatively well (but does require some tinkering.