GreatAlbatross

GreatAlbatross , 2 days ago

I was eagerly anticipating "I'm looking for a gift for my aunt".

GreatAlbatross , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

I'm shocked, I say. Shocked!
The idea of an app being used to gather additional datea from a customer!

GreatAlbatross , 1 day ago

I've found this when trying to get a decent USB>9-pin Serial connector.

You think it's your software, or something weird going wrong. Then you swap over a name-brand adapter, and the thing just works.

GreatAlbatross , 5 days ago

This is good feedback, the Mint team could definitely streamline things, maybe even with a "help pick".

Because it's not immediately apparent which to use (Cinnamon/MATE/Xfce).
I'm not sure how the resolve the mirror issue, sadly.
The cost of serving the data directly would be very high, but doing so would avoid scaring people. Unfortunately, it's hard for them to 100% guarantee every mirror is safe (even though they are!), which means they have to leave instructions on how to verify.

Selling pre-loaded USB sticks would be very cool, but people would have to be interested enough to spend £20.

GreatAlbatross Mod , 6 days ago

It definitely threw me the first time I was out of the house.
I decided the best solution was just to limit alerts to non-sensitive things.
While I'm generally very big on privacy, I really don't give a monkeys if Apple/Google is relaying a message that says "Cat in garden!"

GreatAlbatross , 10 days ago

For components and wires that are made to a spec, I feel far more comfortable buying from CPC or Mouser.
Amazon sellers just feel like a coin flip if the guy is going to ship you CCA 24 AWG instead of OFC 23, in the hope you don't notice or bother complaining.

GreatAlbatross , 11 days ago

Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me

My theory is that it was used as the primary form of informal communication by groups doing something, then it felt like a community.
And since everyone was there...Why not put the documentation there? Sure, it's not indexable, but the group is open-sign-up, right? Right?

Then a few years down the line, someone suggests switching to another primary storage location...Then faces huge amounts of push-back from people comfy sitting on discord.

GreatAlbatross , 11 days ago

Or that 50% of the users on the discord only went there to find one thing, and probably won't ever interact again.
So it looks like a bigger community, while losing accessibility.

GreatAlbatross , 11 days ago

And the shoe will probably drop at some point. Something like "communities must have nitro to access posts from more than 6 months ago".

GreatAlbatross , 11 days ago

Just for context, the full database of feddit.uk compresses down to about 4GB. I am not sure what's going to happen to the ghosts long term, but I don't think storage will be a huge issue.

GreatAlbatross , 11 days ago

This is the thing, the balance of anonymity and preventing people using that anonymity to be a tit.
In my opinion, one of the answers is keeping the signal-to-noise high: Make sure that there are enough sensible people in a community that if someone starts acting up, they're alone. And then they can either correct their course, or get banned, ideally before the next moron shows up.

And part of the way of achieving that is raising the barrier to sign-up, if only a little, and rate limiting.

GreatAlbatross , 12 days ago

What's even more crazy, is Adobe has a system called something like "docusign", where you can just fill the document in in-browser.

I'm fortunate that I haven't yet hit a form I couldn't just edit in GIMP!

GreatAlbatross , 15 days ago

It depends on the version of atmos.

Full fat cinema atmos can scale to (iirc) 512 channels. (Things may have changed since I last was involved!)

In that case, it's a 7.1 bed, and all the other channels are effectively coordinates in the room, and the processor steers objects between them in real time, rather than having defined tracks.

GreatAlbatross , 16 days ago

Exactly that.
With the current ceo, it's been hyped beyond value.
One day, the value will return to the actual value.
If the ceo is changed, it will happen pretty rapidly, then the company can grow from there.
If the ceo is not changed, the hype will continue until either a breaking point, or the ceo changing.
So the shareholders have voted for the thing that preserves the status quo a little longer. Road-runner as it is.
And the ceo seems to have managed to extract a large chunk of the current hype money, in exchange for not changing the status quo.

GreatAlbatross , 19 days ago

I'm still of the opinion that the basic message app should only be SMS.
Then anything else should be its own thing. Mixing the two is a recipe for disaster, where it's a consumer product.

GreatAlbatross , 19 days ago

I tried to disable the atom cores on the £2000 laptop recently.
It took me about 10 mins not finding it in the BIOS, to discover that HP just doesn't have an option for it.

GreatAlbatross , 25 days ago

Cutting dev time, because instead of having to use smoke and mirrors to create...smoke and mirrors, they can just use GPU manufacturer's libraries to render it in real time.

GreatAlbatross , 28 days ago

I stopped recommending kagi on lemmy after the umpteenth person accused me of shilling.

Maybe I should take a screenshot of the £20 leaving my account each month!

GreatAlbatross , 28 days ago

That's not an unreasonable reason not to subscribe.

I do have a bit of a fear that the company may hit a turning point. And he'll either tone it down a bit, or they'll lose a lot of people, both staff and subs.

GreatAlbatross , 30 days ago

Oooooooh, I'd buy that.

GreatAlbatross Mod , 26 days ago

This is a really nice guide, and covers everything from source source to sea, so to speak.
Ideal for someone installing for the first time, thanks for sharing!

GreatAlbatross , 1 month ago

There is a guy fighting Newport council to let him dig through a landfill at the moment: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-67297013

GreatAlbatross , 1 month ago

Admins that access the post through their instance can currently see the votes.

Someone explained it to me that a lot of the downvoting is people browsing all, then getting annoyed and downvoting when they see things they're not interested in :|

GreatAlbatross , 1 month ago

Five guys do unlimited refills, but the cup is 5 fucking quid. Similar tale in Marugame Udon.

And that's on top of a tenner each for the burger. At least they don't police whos cup is whos.

GreatAlbatross , 1 month ago

And how many are the site completely re-jigging their CMS with no forwarding set up.

GreatAlbatross , 1 month ago

I'm curious to see what the quality is like. If it's a similar case to the Enviro hat, and gives good reliable results for less, fantastic.
If it's like the other cheapie thermal sensors on alibaba, less so.

GreatAlbatross Mod , 1 month ago

Security wise, while I love automating everything, I personally would just give them a physical key to the front door. (Or an RFID keyfob system).
What you'd be achieving is the equivalent of keyless car entry, with the additional downside that your son can't choose not to open the door if something sketchy happens.
And instead of entrusting them with a traditional key that they can treat responsibly, you're just putting something in their backpack that they don't have to think about.

If you really want to do it, basically anything in homeassistant that has wireless capability and a state would probably work.
A zigbee radio, and pretty much any device doing anything would do it.
When device_name becomes available, activate door opening.

GreatAlbatross Mod , 1 month ago

I'm curious to hear what people come up with, as I quite fancy one too.

I would be wary of installing anything that actually touches the water that doesn't come from an accredited manufacturer, however. As you don't want Ali-express grade metal in your drinking water.

Which unfortunately means the options will be either expensive, or building off the back of other equipment currently installed (water meter, etc).

GreatAlbatross Mod , 1 month ago

Your meter may have some kind of magnetic flux that occurs as the dial spins, which you might be able to sense and interpret.

GreatAlbatross Mod , 1 month ago

That's a pretty neat bit of kit. If they did it in metric sizes, I'd be tempted.

GreatAlbatross , 1 month ago

It's funny like that, isn't it?

You catch lightning in a bottle in 5 minutes using Reaper, then spend 100x the time on another song that just vanishes.

Peaches most popular song was a tape recording off the sound desk in a German bar.

GreatAlbatross , 1 month ago

This is one of the reasons I went to Apple TV for my streaming box.

All the streaming services seem to be in a race to make the slowest, worst looking, least consistent application possible. And Apple at least has a bit of a hand in making them reign it in a bit, and keep the players consistent.

"ooh, we're averaging only 75% cpu use, we can cram another shitty effect in here..."

GreatAlbatross , 1 month ago

It's the same with machine learning.

People persuading ChatGPT to spit out some code, then getting offended when coders point out that you can't rely on GPT enough to use it blind.

GreatAlbatross , 1 month ago

This is pretty much what happened with HomeAssistant. Tying all the integrations together in one platform.

It's now at the stage of "copy these files to a pi/buy this box we make"

The overall aim is to integrate most open things, and find ways to work with/around more closed off products.

!homeassistant

GreatAlbatross Mod , 2 months ago

Asking questions is always good, don't worry! Feel free to ask more, heck update the thread and ask questions as you go along if you like.

If you list the devices you want to migrate, I'm sure the community will happily highlight any tips, or which will be the easiest to get you started.

GreatAlbatross , 2 months ago

Thirded. I set Mint as the default boot, then have a copy of windows available as an alternative OS option when required.

GreatAlbatross , 2 months ago

Stock splits

"Holy shit guys, it's cheap now, buy, buy, buy!"

GreatAlbatross , 2 months ago

If I hear code yellow, I assume I need to grab a mop and bucket.

GreatAlbatross , 2 months ago

I would love to see a fork of this that makes it sound like a Geiger counter.
Maybe with scale options, so it doesn't just become a humming sound.

GreatAlbatross , 2 months ago

When Broadcom announced the purchase a year or so ago, I abandoned all further VMWare certs, and put the time into getting my head around the alternatives.
I still have to use VMWare for 90% of my job, but I'm absolutely treating it like a locked-in platform, and assuming that anything I learn to do in VMWare, I need to understand the underlying concepts, not just their interpretation, and how I can do similar things on other platforms.

GreatAlbatross OP Mod , 2 months ago

My "What's the internet connection up to?" card:
https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/b89692da-9812-4257-88b9-e6808013ba93.png

My "Leaving the house" card:
https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/0dcda459-8b47-4c3c-b85c-75206d168cf6.png
It's nice to compare the local predicted temperature, and local sensor.

GreatAlbatross OP Mod , 2 months ago

Currently, it's using a Waze integration.
The coolest thing, is that it's given me a really nice data set for when are the bad times to drive across town are. (Sadly, it's during the morning and afternoon school runs).
It also reveals that the travel time on average is impacted significantly by the school holidays, and the weather.

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/851febdb-5813-4dee-9205-f4bf45779df4.png

GreatAlbatross OP Mod , 2 months ago

It is indeed! Mostly just fiddling around with the settings.

@smeg, here is a paste of the config so you can play with it:
(If you click show code editor, then paste in, you can then go back to visual editor with things configured)

Speedtest needle gauges and ping with colour change:

type: horizontal-stack
cards:
  - type: gauge
    min: 0
    severity:
      green: 80
      yellow: 50
      red: 0
    entity: sensor.speedtest_download
    max: 100
    needle: true
  - type: gauge
    min: 0
    max: 20
    entity: sensor.speedtest_upload
    severity:
      green: 16
      yellow: 10
      red: 0
    needle: true
  - type: gauge
    min: 0
    entity: sensor.speedtest_ping
    severity:
      green: 0
      yellow: 15
      red: 20
    max: 100

Air quality with lots of different colours:

type: horizontal-stack
cards:
  - type: gauge
    entity: sensor.oxford_air_quality_index
    needle: false
    min: 0
    max: 500
    segments:
      - from: 0
        color: '#00e400'
      - from: 51
        color: '#ffff00'
      - from: 101
        color: '#ff7e00'
      - from: 151
        color: '#ff0000'
      - from: 201
        color: '#8f3f97'
      - from: 301
        color: '#800000'
    name: 'Air quality: PM2.5'
    unit: µg/m3
  - type: gauge
    entity: sensor.external_environment_f
    max: 40
    severity:
      green: 18
      yellow: 25
      red: 30
    needle: false
    min: -10
  - type: gauge
    entity: sensor.oxford_uv_index
    max: 10
    severity:
      green: 0
      yellow: 3
      red: 6

Once you've got your head around horizontal stacks (lets you put multiple small dials together), it's mostly picking thresholds and settings colours.

GreatAlbatross OP Mod , 2 months ago

It was broken for a few weeks of 2024.2 (I think).
I ended up learning how to do a manual downgrade while they fixed it!

GreatAlbatross , 3 months ago

Kagi has been doing a decent job for me, with the downside that it's paid, and does use results from other places.
They go into detail about how they work, but it's them paying for results from lots of engines, plus their own engine, then heavy duty filtering of the results.
Plus a ML results summarizer you can press after searching.

GreatAlbatross OP Mod , 3 months ago

I'll pop this as a top level comment, as so many people have made recommendations, thank you everyone!
Valetudo absolutely sounds like the way forward.

After more digging, it looks like mopping, unless you spend lots of money, is kinda basic on all models.
So I've gone with a basic second hand machine that works with Valetudo, and has simple mopping.
Hopefully it'll let me get a good idea of what is/isn't possible, and if a £600 full on mopping device is worth it!
And who knows, if spending that much is worth it, I can have one on each floor, like a fancy rich person.

(I also need to find out how well machines deal with poo!)