No doubt there are many superior codecs. Opus is amazing, we use it for voice and video over IP. But I doubt anything will ever be as universally playable as MP3.

It’s still my preferred format. Everything can play it. At 256kbit or better it sounds fine for usual listening.

Yeah you don’t want to move to the country doing the tariffs, because everyone will tariff them back. Better to move to one outside of them like Malaysia or Vietnam.

I run Zwave and love it. Advantages:

• better range and less interference in 900mhz band with meshing
• better battery life. WiFi uses up to an order of magnitude more power. Battery in Zwave devices lasts for years, with new ones being even better in this regard
• more secure as they cannot be hacked by hacking your internet or getting on your WiFi.
• more feature rich. Zwave devices tend to be geared towards more pro use and tend to have just about every feature you can imagine
• The Zwave standards body is quite strict in ensuring devices adhere to the standard so it’s much harder to get “stinker” devices that don’t. This is a bigger problem with zigbee for example.
• fully local. You can be 100% sure they aren’t sending your data off somewhere
• Generally high quality. I’ve had quite good luck with pretty much all the Zwave devices I’ve bought. They last a long time and are reliable if your mesh is working properly (enough powered repeater nodes).