TedZanzibar

@TedZanzibar@feddit.uk

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TedZanzibar,

That was pretty much his speech this afternoon, too.

TedZanzibar,

Haven’t seen armour this good since the Scale Brigade set. Definitely a buy from me!

TedZanzibar,

Yeah I’m running a Cloudflare tunnel for external access (which is why I need DNS based LE certs), but that’s another thing that I don’t really know what it’s doing beyond basic reverse proxying.

I have a country-based whitelist for where my Immich instance can be accessed from but I find the Zero Trust admin backend to be massive overkill for my needs, and it doesn’t help that they’ve recently moved everything around so none of the guides out there point to the right places anymore!

TedZanzibar,

Hmm I must be doing something wrong then because it doesn’t work for me.

TedZanzibar,

The whole point of home automation is that it’s automated. Setting a timer on your phone is for chumps.

I have a similar thing to notify us when the washing machine is done, only without the cool presence stuff - I’ll have to look into your setup for that!

I also use a smart plug to monitor our toaster. Not for notifications but because it uses a mechanical timer that if it fails, will also fail to turn the element off, so it comes with dire warnings about always unplugging it after use. Instead I just have HA setup to turn off the plug if it ever draws power for more than 4 minutes.

TedZanzibar,

Thanks for the re-upvote. My guess is it was someone who sets timers on their phone. 😂

Dammit, now you’ve got my head swimming with ways to improve the washing machine stuff. I bet a vibration sensor on top could be combined with the smart plug power monitoring to detect when it’s being emptied.

How did you do the Google-turning-on-the-smartplug thing? I feel like I’m missing a lot of tricks by not having HA integrated into those. I just use them for audible notifications currently.

TedZanzibar,

Nothing on the PS2 was compelling enough for me to buy one at the time, and I found the dualshock’s stick layout uncomfortable. Then Xbox came along with Halo and that was that, really.

The PS3 was overpriced and underwhelming while the 360 knocked it out of the park. Still my favourite console ever.

Then the Xbox One and PS4 happened… Yeah, MS ballsed up the messaging and then floundered even more every time they tried to re-explain their ideas, but I honestly think the whole put-the-disc-in-once licensing thing was ahead of its time. The people claiming that they couldn’t possibly connect their console to the internet for 2 minutes every month to refresh their licences were being disingenuous, and Sony’s “this is how you share games on PS4” bit, while understandable from the free marketing perspective, just came across to me as both short sighted and incredibly mean spirited.

Since then I’ve been team Xbox by default, but they’ve never really recovered from the shit show that was the Xbox One launch and it’s a shame.

TedZanzibar,

it will either be underpowered or power hungry.

Or both!

New Xbox Feature Could Save Players Loads Of Time (kotaku.com)

Modern games get patched all the time, and there are few things more low-key annoying than sitting down to dig into a meaty RPG or hop into a quick deathmatch only to see you’ve got to download an 8GB update. You start scrolling TikTok or dropping memes in the group chat and by the time you realize the game’s finally ready,...

TedZanzibar,

Yeah this is it. Updates are submitted and presumably ready on the backend days in advance of their scheduled release. This will allow consoles to download the update ahead of time and have it queued for install.

It’s the same as pre-loading an unreleased game, but for patches.

TedZanzibar,

My inner monologue is an asshole that literally never shuts up unless I’m asleep. If I’m not actively thinking about something and conversing with him or keeping him otherwise distracted, he’s singing a snippet of the last catchy song he heard, over and over, until a new one takes its place. Sometimes it’s the same song for days on end.

TedZanzibar,

Z2M. I had a ZHA setup and I’ll give it to them, it was super easy to setup (barely an inconvenience). Then I bought a set of sockets with power monitoring but found that they used a non-standard way of reporting those stats.

They were seemingly quite new and both ZHA and Z2M had ‘quirks’ submitted very quickly to make them work, but while the Z2M quirk was approved and added almost straight away, 2 or 3 months later I was still waiting for the ZHA one to be approved.

Then, like you, I wanted to change the Zigbee channel and took the opportunity to switch to Z2M where the sockets and their power monitoring have been working perfectly ever since. It’s definitely more complicated to setup initially but you get more control overall and, at least from my experience, the overall device support is much better.

Note: I did initially have loads of stability issues when making the switch, but it was due to me flashing the combined Zigbee+Thread firmware to my Sonoff stick. The fix was to turn off the OpenThread Border Router in the Silabs addon and then everything was stable again. I don’t have any Thread devices yet, of course.

TedZanzibar,

I read that as “Voldemort” and was both confused and impressed.

How do you store your grounded coffee? (slrpnk.net)

Hiya, just quickly wondering how people store their coffee? Mine is in a tin box I got second hand, cos I thought it looked nice. Any rules regarding storing grounded coffee? I don’t store much at the time, it’s just if I grind a little too much and what not. I’m assuming the general thumb rule for this is to store it in a...

TedZanzibar,

ITT a surprising number of people who remember having these tins as kids, including me. I’ll have to see if my parents still have theirs.

TedZanzibar,

This looks neat, will definitely give it a go, cheers!

TedZanzibar,

I just recently put in an N100 mini PC to run as a Plex server. Cost me about £160, pulls all of 6W when idle, and it doesn’t break a sweat when transcoding no matter what I throw at it. As a media server I can’t recommend them highly enough.

TedZanzibar,

I was hoping to see “Oh Jesus Christ!” as the top comment but this is close enough.

TedZanzibar,

This is the correct answer. Due to wear levelling, a traditional drive wipe program isn’t going to work reliably, whereas most (all?) SSDs have some sort of secure erase function.

It’s been a while since I read up on it but I think it works due to the drive encrypting everything that’s written to it, though you wouldn’t know it’s happening. When you call the secure erase function it just forgets the key and cycles in a new one, rendering everything previously written to it irrecoverable. The bonus is that it’s an incredibly quick operation.

Failing that, smash it to bits.

TedZanzibar,

Very little. I have enough redundancy through regular snapshots and offsite backups that I’m confident enough to let Watchtower auto-update most of my containers once a week - the exceptions being pihole and Home Assistant. Pihole gets very few updates anyway, and I tend to skip the mid-month Home Assistant updates so that’s just a once a month thing to check for breaking changes before pushing the button.

Meanwhile my servers’ host OSes are stable LTS distros that require very little maintenance in and of themselves.

Ultimately I like to tinker, but once I’m done tinkering I want things to just work with very little input from me.

TedZanzibar, (edited )

I like Niagara but it’s insanely expensive, especially as a subscription. I don’t know how people justify it.

Edit: The above was based on me getting duped by a Play Store sponsored search result and installing some crap that charges £70 for a lifetime licence. In comparison Niagara feels like much better value, but it’s still expensive compared to most apps and I still don’t like subscribing to software in general.

TedZanzibar,

Reading the article and justification given I do actually get the idea of it. They want to levarage the parent company’s clout and connections in order to convince other app makers into implementing a way for Sesame, the universal search app/plugin, to pull results directly from those apps. For the parent company it would give them a USP in the analytics market.

In short: Think of searching for a product from the launcher and rather than it opening Google, it returns results directly from the Amazon app, or eBay, or any other app that supports the functionality. Obviously there’ll be an affiliate kickback for any click-through and you’ve got a decent revenue source.

It’s a good idea, I get it. Would I feel comfortable using it? I don’t know. On the one hand it just cuts out the middle-man of searching for and clicking through to products via Google etc. On the other hand, all of the concerns already raised in this thread!

TedZanzibar,

Gotta hold my hands up and admit that in my initial haste to confirm the price I fell victim to the Play Store putting sponsored results ahead of what you actually searched for and I installed some crap called minimalist launcher, which charges £70 for a lifetime license. That’s what my “insane” comment was based on.

In comparison it’s nowhere near that bad for Niagara, but it is still pricey compared to most apps, and I balk at paying a subscription for software in general so that still stands.

Might give it another go after all…

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