It was useless in 99.9% of the cases. You don't need or want to have constant access to how much free ram your computer currently has, as if that even meant anything.
So, after a few steps, that leads to the question "what is useful information? How do you define that?"
A basic attempt at it might be: useful information is something that causes you to make or change a previous decision. Take an action you wouldn't have otherwise done.
If you're living in the american southwest, and it's between the months of like, march and, dunno, septemeber, you probably don't need to know the current outside temperature to decide if you're wearing shorts or a jacket when you get up in the morning (you're wearing shorts because it's always hot)
Theoretically there could be some kind of "extreme" weather, aka rain, that causes you to do something different, bring an umbrella, but it's pretty difficult to not notice it currently raining, even if you're inside a house.
So what other information do you want? There's all sorts of stuff that's considered "news", but I'd argue that at least 98% of that is basically just entertainment. We'd need some kind of article or perhaps even a book to hammer out all the nuances involved, but seeing a headline in the morning that trump has caved in to iran again or killed some more random people on a boat, while sort of important to know, doesn't really change what you're going to be doing that day.
Knowing ICE is trying to do some domestic terrorism near where you might be could be useful information, but there's not a real good way to track that.
So yeah, what kind of information is actually useful to have in the morning? Stuff like calendar appointments would count, knowing you have things scheduled at specific moments or tasks to do, go grocery shopping, etc, todo lists in otherwords, but what else? That's basically all self-generated stuff by you about you, you don't really need any outside data sources.
So ... most people.
> That's basically all self-generated stuff by you about you, you don't really need any outside data sources.
Other than the ones you just enumerated that most people are likely to use, I need to know - using external sources:
- When to expect the garbage truck (do I put the recycle out tonight, too?)
- Is it a school holiday?
- When it's cheapest for me to charge the car up; if there are any "grid stress, please turn non-essentials off or we're getting rolling blackouts" alerts.
- Same goes for nearby fires or other issues that are going to change the "when do you open/close the windows and switch to AC" math.
- If it's likely to rain in the next few days so I change what plants get watered / when
- Packages that I am likely to get in the post today
- Weather (for display, not just for use in the automations mentioned above)
- Where my power provider is currently getting its power from (so I can calculate estimated CO2 emissions, if any)
And that's about 1/2, probably. Can't be bothered to go spend 20 min pouring through my HA config to build the full list.
I also stream the npr newscast as an MP3 as part of the "good morning, while you wait for coffee..." automations, if that counts for anything.