cassidy

cassidy, 4 days ago to GNOME

An update to Tally, my desktop app for Plausible Analytics, is incoming! Tally 3.2.1 refreshes the visuals a bit, and I really like the more subtle look with the header bar. This addresses some feedback that the old look was too bold.

https://flathub.org/apps/com.cassidyjames.plausible

If you’re on Linux and use Plausible, grab the update from Flathub soon!

#GNOME #Linux #Flatpak #Flathub #PlausibleAnalytics #OpenSource

Screenshot of Tally showing a Plausible dashboard, but in a dark style

cassidy, 5 days ago to homeassistant

I’ve been playing with air quality sensors and purifiers in Home Assistant. Here’s my current layout on my dashboard; I want to improve it a bit more, but I am loving the glancable styling powered by the sensor values. :)

#HomeAssistant #SmartHome #AirQuality #Zigbee

Dark style screenshot of an air quality dashboard with tiles for outdoor, indoor, office, bedroom, and kids room. Each tile has a measure of PM2.5 particles along with a graph of the last 12 hours. The card background is color-coded to match the level of particles, e.g. orange for unhealthy for sensitive groups, green for good, yellow for moderate, etc.

cassidy, 5 days ago to homeassistant

Alright #HomeAssistant nerds, I have a question. I would like to set up a standard way to get a derived value back from a number of sensors; for example, given a sensor’s PM2.5, PM10, Ozone, CO, SO2, and/or NO2 reading, I would like to return an estimated air quality index (AQI). Ideally I could also have a standard way to map any given AQI value to a category string, e.g. 10 = Good, 75 = Moderate, 175 = Unhealthy, etc.

#SmartHome

cassidy, 8 days ago to Starwars

I wish Justin of starwarsfonts was here on the fediverse, because I have a question!!

Any idea what the font used in the text graphics is here? It’s driving my wife crazy; she thinks it might be Albertus Nova, but we aren’t sure—and something just looks… wrong with the text.

https://youtu.be/J3kyYFHdRsM?si=WbYEP_k7q1iCDwHp

Like… it almost looks like someone vectorized a screenshot or something if that makes sense??

Any ideas, @louie? 😅

#StarWars #StarWarsFonts #fonts

cassidy, 8 days ago to random

Can (and should) I provide a door code for our front door for deliveries to our house when we’re not home? I’m sick of deliveries being put smack in the middle of the front step on a perfect pedestal for porch pirates…

I can set up a specific code for each delivery company and make it only work during certain hours/days when a delivery is expected, so the security implications aren’t too bad imho. My bigger question is: will delivery companies even bother with it?

cassidy, 8 days ago to ChatGPT

I was curious if a niche blog post of mine had been slurped up by #ChatGPT so I asked a leading question—what I discovered is much worse. So far, it has told me:

• use apt-get on Endless OS
• preview a Jekyll site locally by opening files w/a web browser (w/o building)
• install several non-existent #Flatpak “packages” & extensions

It feels exactly like chatting w/someone talking out of their ass but trying to sound authoritative. #LLMs need to learn to say, “I don’t know.”

#AI #ML

cassidy, 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago) to random

I got an air quality sensor and air purifier, and have learned:

• opening the windows is the most effective way to decrease particulate matter

• our humidifier pumps out hazardous levels of particles when using tap water (oops)

• waking up w/an irritated throat and sinuses goes away with clean air!

• high particulate matter is correlated with nosebleeds in kids—and our kid gets chronic nosebleeds

I am happy to have learned all of this but also feel like an idiot for learning it so late. 😭

cassidy, 10 days ago to random

Honestly, I kind of miss this. The software feels much more human and organic, not just because of the depth and shadow, but thanks to the earthy color tones.

I would love to be able to ship accent colors in GNOME to give people more control over the look and feel over their computers in a well-defined way that doesn’t leave them or app developers with broken promises.

@windowsonwindows https://mas.to/@windowsonwindows/112463918670890861

cassidy, 12 days ago to SmartHome

Very work-in-progress, but I have started to document my smart home stuff on my website! This might end up turning into a whole subsection once I figure out how I actually want to organize it, but for now, it’s a dumping ground all on one page. 😅

https://cassidyjames.com/home

#SmartHome #HomeAssistant #Zigbee

cassidy, 13 days ago to android

Ugh. Pocket Git, another long time favorite Android app of mine, has disappeared from the Play Store—without an obvious replacement.

I don’t want to start developing Android apps, but dang, I could really use replacements for these:

• Straightforward git client (explicitly not an IDE)
• Package tracker that supports multiple carriers

I’ll design them if someone else can develop them? 😝

#Android #GooglePlay #OpenSource

cassidy, 13 days ago to SmartHome

I love how you can see when it started raining based on our humidity sensors around the house.

#SmartHome #HomeAssistant #Zigbee

cassidy, 14 days ago to random

Imagine if all the resources that have gone into chasing “AI” were spent paying humans to do interesting, creative things, instead.

cassidy, 14 days ago to homeassistant

I continue to believe Zigbee delivers on the important things that Matter and Thread keep promising, but actually:

• mature
• widely available
• affordable

The one thing Matter over Thread devices can claim is that they work without a hub… except they don’t; the hub still has to be built into your Nest display, Apple HomePod, etc.

I have hundreds of low power, local-only smart devices from a dozen or so brands and it all… just works together.

#HomeAssistant #SmartHome #Matter #Thread #Zigbee

cassidy, 15 days ago to random

I wish I had all the money to throw at hardware, specifically for Linux testing/development. 😭 I’m super interested in trying out:

• @starlabs StarFighter and StarLite
• Steam Deck
• Newest Dell XPSes
• Samsung 27" 5K display (HiDPI on an external display, yes please!)
• Modern powerful ARM laptop

I feel like there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in the hardware land that I don’t get to check out!

cassidy, 17 days ago to Colorado

White people in ski town: “Dear Native American, please come paint art about the struggle of native peoples.”

Lakota artist: Paints a piece referencing Palestine, with proceeds supporting the UN Crisis Relief Fund

White people in ski town: “Stay in your lane!” Revokes residency program

https://coloradosun.com/2024/05/10/danielle-seewalker-artist-residency-gaza-vail/

#Colorado #Palestine #Gaza #Israel

cassidy, 18 days ago to SmartHome

I can 1000% recommend the Meross smart garage door opener with HomeKit for anyone looking to open/close/check on their garage door remotely—it’s easy enough to install and works great over the local network with Home Assistant (thanks to HomeKit, even if you don’t have any Apple devices)!

#SmartHome #HomeAssistant #HomeKit

cassidy, 21 days ago to random

The preschooler was sick with a 24-hour stomach bug on Saturday, my wife was sick with it on Sunday (and is still recovering), the toddler was sick with it on Monday, and now I am pretty sure I am getting hit by it. 🙃

Parenting is fun!

cassidy, 21 days ago to android

The OneTracker app for Android is just… gone??

https://onetracker.app/

Luckily the web based version still works, but I can’t install the app on my phone so I can’t get push notifications anymore. 😞

I really liked how simple and straightforward the app was, and how it wasn’t trying to up-sell anything besides its core competency of tracking and notifying about packages.

#Android

cassidy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to ai

I really like the convention of using ✨ sparkle iconography as an “automagic” motif, e.g. to smart-adjust a photo or to automatically handle some setting. I hate that it has become the defacto iconography for generative AI. 🙁

#AI #LLM #LLMs #GenerativeAI #design #ML

cassidy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to fedora

TIL Fedora is packaging a web browser app I developed for elementary OS, stopped updating over three years ago, and marked as end-of-life two years ago—yet it happily shows up in Fedora 40 if you search my name. It crashes on launch, so it doesn’t even work…

WHY??

Edit: I guess the package is being EOL'd in Fedora due to it no longer building and this thread, huzzah! My recommendation to distros: don’t package random apps and then not maintain them/communicate with upstream.

#Fedora #Linux

cassidy, 1 month ago to random

Pro tip: if your Bluetooth isn't working with a certain wireless card, check the BIOS settings before installing a new wireless card… apparently my Intel NUC had Bluetooth disabled in the BIOS; the card works just fine!

The upside is that I installed an extra RAM stick as long as I was in there. TWICE the RAM at a whopping 16 GB.

Palpatine shooting lightning, saying "Unlimited power!"

cassidy, 1 month ago to gamedev

The future of game development is open source.

https://youtu.be/EYt6uDr-PHQ?si=uJ4evnp1-f4Z4XgA

#GameDev #OpenSource #Godot #Blender #Linux

cassidy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

I really need to automate this somehow, but my latest estimate is 3.13 million active users of Flathub!

This is a number of updates delivered to a popular dependency, org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default//23.08, between the 23.08.14 and 23.08.15 releases. This was less than a month window (March 18 through April 9).

Pretty impressive stuff!

Edit: updated, more realistic stats based on @alatiera; thanks!

#Flatpak #Flathub

cassidy, 1 month ago to GNOME

Image encoding × FOSS desktop nerds, I have a question…

The current format for dynamic/dark-style wallpapers in GNOME is not great. I don’t think anyone—including distros, designers, & maintainers—likes how it works: it’s a legacy system of GSettings keys and an XML format that sets those keys but is not biderectional; choosing that XML file in Settings sets the individual GSettings manually, making it hard to show the pair of wallpapers as selected.

So let’s do better?

#GNOME #Linux #FOSS

cassidy, 1 month ago to random

I’m seeing a strange issue in several GNOME 46 apps: it seems like if the first interaction within the app is touch, then a bunch of things like menus/popovers just don’t respond to either touch or mouse input until you close and re-open the app.

Am I going crazy, here? I’m testing this on Endless OS but I have a bug report against one of my apps stating this as well.

I need to do some more testing, but I’ve seen this in apps like GNOME Music and GNOME Builder as well.