TedZanzibar

Yup, that's one of the other things I wish I'd had the foresight to do.

My entire card details got stolen recently, including my name, address and phone number. The first I knew of it was when an email came in with a verification code for a multi-thousand £ purchase for a hotel reservation. I was just thinking it's an odd looking phish when my phone rang. I ignored it as I always do and then it immediately rang again, so I answered it:

Them: Hello, is this Mr Zanzibar?

Me: Yes

Them: This is Amex fraud dept. We've noticed some odd activity on your card, did you make a purchase at x for y in the last few minutes?

Me: No.

Them: OK, great. It's been flagged and declined on our end so your money's safe. Just so that I can get this closed off, can you confirm the code that was sent to you?

Me: ......Nnnnnooooooooo?

Them: immediately hangs up

Obviously then had to then call the real fraud dept and cancel my card, but I was annoyed by how little of a shit they seemed to give. No curiosity of where they could've got every detail of my card, no advice of what to do next, just cancelled the card and issued a new one. Thank you, next caller please.

Spent the rest of the day both relieved that I didn't fall for it but also furious at myself because the best response I could come up with in the moment was "no". I could've at least told them to get fucked!

Just to confirm: I tried this, it works.

Same. It's incredibly bare bones and you have to supply your own domain, but the pricing structure makes a lot of sense and they offer some cool stuff that no other provider does, like wildcard subdomain support.

I tried Jellyfin once about a year ago and it was... OK I guess? Certainly nowhere near as polished as the rabid fan base would have me believe, and there was something in my library that it flat out refused to play.

If I didn't already have a lifetime Plex Pass, and it was just me hosting my own media for a user count of one, then sure, I'd use it. But none of those things are true. I need something that "just works" and Plex fits that bill.

Like most people here, I bought a lifetime pass when it was $75 and it's paid for itself over and over again in the time since. I honestly think I've had more than $750 worth of value from my purchase. Sure they've made some odd decisions recently, but until they start actively taking away functionality or rescind existing lifetime subs then I will continue to use it.

Meanwhile, not to belittle you personally, but the fact that every thread that mentions Plex in any way, good or bad, is guaranteed to be dominated by people circle-jerking over their beloved Jellyfin has put me completely off the project, to the point that I've had to add the word to my blocklist. Obviously that's not working too well or I wouldn't have seen this post!

Not a boss per se, but the first Marauder fight in Doom Eternal made me rage quit for a good 6 months.

Let me get my daily fail headline translator out real quick:

"Came under fire" == "somebody tweeted"

"Fury" == "a bot tweeted"

"Outrage" == "one of our staff tweeted"

"Slammed" == "somebody liked our tweet"

August 1999. The last total solar eclipse visible from the UK was 72 years ago, and the next one would be 91 years later. Young Ted woke up to a gloriously sunny day. This would be it!

An hour before the event we drove out to a nice remote viewing spot with minimal obstructions for miles around. 30 minutes to go, the clouds rolled in. Thick, blanket cloud from horizon to horizon. The eclipse happened. From under the cloud it got a bit darker and the birds had a bit of a freak out but it was otherwise a non-event. We drove back home, disappointed.

30 minutes later the clouds cleared and the rest of the day was as glorious as the morning had been. 27 years later I'm still bitter about it. Seattle's got nothing on us!

Yeah this. I think the classic tikka masala was invented in Glasgow.

That first line is what CGPT helped me with. I wanted something that I don't need to modify when I add or remove lights, so this just gets everything. Ideally I'd just get the lights that don't have the power restore feature but most of my lights go via Hue and that doesn't expose the feature to HA at all.

The input_boolean is a thing I already had setup. The UPS fires a webhook event when it goes in and out of battery mode and there's a separate automation that switches the helper based on those.

Got a little help from CGPT so it might not be perfect, but this seems to work from my limited testing:

triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - input_boolean.ups_power
conditions: []
actions:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: state
            entity_id: input_boolean.ups_power
            state:
              - "on"
        sequence:
          - action: scene.create
            data:
              scene_id: light_states_backup
              snapshot_entities: |
                {{ states.light | map(attribute='entity_id') | list }}
      - conditions:
          - condition: state
            entity_id: input_boolean.ups_power
            state:
              - "off"
        sequence:
          - action: scene.turn_on
            target:
              entity_id: scene.light_states_backup
            data: {}
          - delay:
              hours: 0
              minutes: 0
              seconds: 10
              milliseconds: 0
          - action: scene.delete
            data:
              entity_id: scene.light_states_backup
mode: single

I've only tested it by toggling the UPS boolean manually and not actually cutting the power, so I'm probably going to need to add a delay, or a retry loop or something to make sure the scene applies consistently but so far so good! Thanks for the inspiration.

Thank you. I've also never used scenes beyond what comes built-in with Hue! This is all good stuff.