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.



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