I need a modern clapper

Sounds like you need two separate phones dedicated for each specific task.

I have two switches. One on the wall by the door, and one on the floor side table.

Because of the exact same situation.

Home Assistant is entirely self-hosted. No third-party required. It can run in a container or on a raspberry pi, but it’s typically easiest (and most functional) when you use a dedicated Home Assistant Green. It connects to Zigbee, Matter, etc via USB adapters. Or if your devices are networked (instead of using a hub), it can often find them directly on your network via local device discovery. It integrates with Alexa really well, so you wouldn’t need to immediately ditch your existing smart speakers.

If you really want to get fancy, you can even set up a local machine to do local LLM processing for self-hosted smart speakers.

I personally started using it after my smart light provider (Sengled) had a few extended outages. There was no communication from the company, and lots of people were speculating that they had gone kaput. It was literally cheaper to just get the HA Green and a Zigbee dongle, and set that up (instead of replacing all of my lights with a different brand). And since it’s entirely self-hosted, it even keeps working when my internet goes out during storms.

I use some not-as-smart smart bulbs that allow me to use all sorts of FOSS alternatives to control them which I only lucked out into getting since I was planning on getting Philips Hue, but these that I got (Wiz iirc; I don't use the official software so I am not constsntly reminded of the brand) were half as expensive so I was able to get more of 'em.

I have a Zigbee controller coming at some point this week, so I can set up a bunch of Zigbee sensors and products that a friend of mine no longer needs. Proper looking forward to seeing what I can do with it all in Home Assistant.

The funny part is that blue LEDs were historically the hardest to make. Engineers tried for years, but the shorter blue wavelength was elusive. But one Japanese dude managed to figure it out, and they exploded in popularity because they were the new futuristic thing. And now they’re actually one of the cheapest colors available, because every single manufacturer was rushing to jump on the bandwagon and has the equipment to make them. Sort of like the flatscreen TV crash in the early 2010’s, when TV prices suddenly crashed because every manufacturer was getting better and better at making the (historically very expensive) screen panels cheaply.

And to answer the question on why they’re so fucking bright, it’s because blue is a very short wavelength. It takes less power to produce shorter wavelengths. When you compare the relative brightness of two different colored LEDs, shorter wavelengths will be brighter. Like if you send 1 watt of power into two different LEDs, a blue LED will always be brighter than a red one (if everything else about them is the same). That’s why so many of the cheap RGB LED lights tend to be sort of blueish when they’re set to “white”. The “white” is just all of the individual diodes at 100% brightness, which means the blue tends to beat out the other colors.

But the engineers who design those things don’t stop to consider that a blue LED needs less power. They’re just checking the “has a power light” item off of their design punch list. They could undervolt the diode to make it dimmer, but that requires extra circuitry. Just get a diode that works on the same voltage as what you’re already using (probably 5v or 12v for a wall charger) and hook it up to the same voltage that you already have. And use a blue one because they’re the cheapest option. Congrats, you’ve just designed a charger that has a fucking blinding blue LED. The whole “people will want to use this in their bedroom in the dark” thing was never even a consideration.

This is also why red (and infrared) light is better at heating things up. Longer wavelengths carry more energy, which means they heat things up more when they come into contact. The wave takes more power to make, which means it is able to carry more energy to whatever you’re trying to make. Trying to design a blue heat lamp would be an exercise in frustration, because you’d be fighting physics. It’s also why the sky is blue during the day but sunsets are red. The blue light tends to get scattered by air molecules, (which is why the sky looks blue) but red light is able to punch through and reach the surface when the sun is at a steep angle (like during a sunset).

And that's why mine are on their own VLAN with their own SSID. My TV and my phone are still spying on me though.

Here is a link to the tool that video uses. This isn't a case of someone compromising an existing smart bulb to do sketchy things, but rather someone installing this bulb covertly in your house and using it for penetration testing. the same could be accomplished by an arduino in the bushes or a guy with a white van out front.

Also most smart bulbs use zigbee or zwave not wifi. The hub could be hacked i guess, but I have mine setup to only be accessible on the local network.

Optimizing your way out of being able to sleep without aid (I do it too).

Most bedrooms I have seen have multiple light switches wiht one of them being next to the bed most of the time.