• 2 Posts
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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Both!

    The native automation is perfectly cromulent for what I want, usually, but there’s a couple of cases where the integrations either don’t exist or don’t return meaningful data.

    FOR EXAMPLE, the video playback in the living room thing. Sure, the roku integration says “something is playing” but it’s shockingly wrong and unreliable. What happens is it falls into ‘idle’ status between videos, or if you’re fast forwarding sometimes and thus the automation was not doing exactly what I wanted.

    The Jellyfin API, though, can look at the living room tv user and is spot on as to what is going on with play/pause/stopped statuses, so I have node red yank that data direct from the API and it works great.


  • big fan of mini PC’s

    Same, but just be careful if you venture outside of the “reputable” vendors.

    I bought one recently from Aliexpress, and while it’s perfectly functional, it’s using an ethernet chipset that doesn’t have in-kernel drivers so I have to keep compiling new drivers for it every time the kernel upgrades.

    Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that I could do without, and not something a slightly more expensive version of what I got would have.


  • I’ve gone way too far down the automation path.

    All manner of temperature, humidity, occupancy, motion, and air quality sensors make all sorts of things do appropriate responses.

    For example, I’ve got a mmwave motion/occupancy sensor in the bathroom, and if there’s no motion/occupancy and the humidity is more than 5% higher than the hallway sensor, then turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.

    Or, if the air particulate count in the kitchen is too high, turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.

    Or, if the living room is occupied, and the tv is on and playing media, turn the overhead lights off and turn the RGB accent light on very dimly. And if the media is paused or stopped, increase the brightness of the RGB lighting so you can see where you’re walking, and if it stays paused or stopped for more than 10 minutes, turn the main lights back to whatever state they were in before media playback started.

    No dashboards though, since the goal is essentially that you don’t have to think about what is going on, because it should Just Work™ and never be something you have to deal with.

    …though, really, I’d say we’re at like 80% successful with that.

    For manual interactions I’ve got a bunch of NFC tags in various places that will trigger the appropriate automation in the case that you either want to do it by hand or it fails to do the needful, plus the app is configured to allow manual control of any device and to trigger specific automations.


  • Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place,

    They’re also subject to interpretation, regulatory capture, as well as just plain being ignored when it’s sufficiently convenient for the regulators to do so.

    “There ought to be a law!” is nice, but it’s not a solution when there’s a good couple of centuries of modern regulatory frameworks having had existed, and a couple centuries of endless examples of where absolutely none of it matters when sufficient money and power is in play.

    Like, for example, the GDPR: it made a lot of shit illegal under penalty of company-breaking penalties.

    So uh, nobody in the EU has had their personal data misused since it was passed? And all the big data brokers that are violating it have been fined out of business?

    And this is, of course, ignoring the itty bitty little fact that you have to be aware of the misuse of the data: if some dude does some shady shit quietly, then well, nobody knows it happened to even bring action?


  • How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?

    I think what they’re saying is that the ideal wouldn’t be to force everyone to host their own, but rather for the people who want to run stuff to offer them to their friends and family.

    Kinda like how your mechanic neighbor sometimes helps you do shit on your car: one person shares a skill they have, and the other person also benefits. And then later your neighbor will ask you to babysit their kids, and shit.

    Basically: a very very goofy way of saying “Hey! Do nice things for your friends and family, because that’s kinda how life used to work.”


  • This is kinda old information, but my understanding was that there were 3 issues with dasiy-chained UPSes.

    The first is that you’re potentially going to cause a ground loop, which is not healthy for the life of anything plugged into those UPSes.

    The second is that there’s a potential for a voltage droop going through from the first to second UPS, which means the UPSes will flap constantly and screw their batteries up, though I’d be shocked if that was necessarily still true for modern high-quality units.

    And of course, the UPS itself won’t be outputting a proper sinewave when it’s on battery, which means your 2nd UPS in the chain will freak out (though again, maybe modern ones don’t have that limitation).


  • Yeah, it doesn’t appear that PSSR (which I cannot help but pronounce with an added i) is the highest quality upscaling out there, combined with console gamers not having experienced FSR/FSR2/FSR3’s uh, specialness is leading to people being confused why their faster console looks worse.

    Hopefully Sony does something about the less than stellar quality in a PSSR2 or something relatively quickly, or they’re going to burn a lot of goodwill around the whole concept, much like how FSR is pretty much considered pretty trash by PC gamers.