schizo

joined 6 months ago
[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

What platform would you perhaps be interested in?

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 15 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Still missing the only two numbers that matter: gigabytes of vram, and price.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 2 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

There's other use cases for that.

The immediate one, and applies to my own living room, is that there's one switch for the lights and it's in the far back corner by the front door, and like 15 feet and around behind the couch from where you'd enter the living room from the rest of the house.

The smart switch lets me turn the light on and off from the inside of the house without having to navigate the room and cats in the dark either via a voice command, mobile app, and ESP32 button.

Though, and this is the next use case, I really don't have to do any of those. The smart switch facilitates lots of fun things, and in this case that room has a mmWave occupancy detector that'll turn the light on and off based on the time of the day and if there's a human in the room or not. (mmWave stuff is super accurate compared to the older motion detection crap you'll find in use in that you don't have to actually be moving, because it's good enough to determine if a human is in the room motion or not.)

And, of course, since this is the living room and the TV is in there, it's also tied into the media playback status of the TV to dim the lights when you turn the TV on, turn them off when you start playing a movie, and then turn them back on dimly after you pause, and then slowly increase the brightness over the next 5 minutes if you don't resume playing the movie (unless everyone leaves the room, at which point it'll turn the TV and lights off based on the occupancy sensor.)

Also it's useful for setting a timer: the backyard and front porch lights go on at sunset and off at sunrise, and the controller is smart enough to grab when this is on the internet so it stays accurate and timely year-round.

So yeah, it's maybe not life-changing by itself, but it's seriously the backbone of a lot of automation I've got in place that simplifies having to even think about or do anything to adjust light levels based on where I am in the house and what I'm doing in the room.

Disclaimer: this was not trivial to setup, the components required to make it are not off-the-shelf and require electronics and soldering knowledge and you have to understand the ESP32 ecosystem and how to modify code and deploy them to do what you want. It also then requires you to configure all of this in HomeAssistant, and in my case, requires yet another piece of software (NodeRed) and a ton of webhooks to make everything cooperate and work. It's not trivial, it's not for everyone, and it's not a product most people could build on their own, so I don't entirely disagree that a switch by itself is life-changing, but if there was a proper ecosystem around them where you could do this shit I think more than a few people would hop in.

I kinda have two responses here, so uh, here's both of them:

  1. Well, by the time this is an issue, odds are you've been a career politician anyway and don't need another job. This is just old people who refuse to retire because they like the power and trappings more than they care about doing their job.

  2. By the time they MUST retire, these ghouls have stolen sufficient money that it doesn't matter, and sticking around is just them refusing to give up the power and feed their greed even more.

Both seem equally reasonable and applicable to the problem.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 8 points 1 day ago (7 children)

If only they made smart switches you could use, perhaps?

100% agree that smart bulbs are incredibly stupid and you should go with a switch if you want to smartify shit.

Well no, it's not enormous, but Amazon is selling a couple million ring doorbells a year, and a couple million more of their cameras.

It's a sufficiently large market to hop into, especially if you can make a product that's easier to deal with from an ecosystem perspective than the incumbents, which isn't something I'd ever bet against Apple managing to pull off.

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply he did nothing at all.

He did a good job of pushing node shrinks, and did an awful lot of them awfully fast.

Though, my vibe is he was probably fired because he had the unfortunate issue of being an engineer and didn't really have the ability to stay in proper CEO-speak and was talking and causing a LOT of damage to Intel with what he said, when, and to whom.

A good example is shitting on TSMC while being entirely reliant on them for client chips. The CEO thing would have been to just shut up and say how much you like working with them and how great the partnership is but uh, that's not what he did.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 77 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Hopefully the Mastodon devs are paying attention to the features that bsky has that they don't, and actually copy them rather than sit there and tell everyone that no, they're wrong they don't want that feature.

I want to like Mastodon (or any platforms that are federated with them and trying very hard to be them) but they're utter and total lack of interest in and development of features the community keeps asking for is going to keep it a niche option for weirdos while people keep hopping into corpo social platform after corpo social platform.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 22 points 1 day ago (20 children)

The biggest problem for smart homes for people who aren't enormous nerds is that nothing works together with each other in a simple, coordinated way.

And, of course, one of Apple's biggest strengths is that they've built a cohesive ecosystem that, usually, works just fine with limited fiddling.

Right now you've either got 14 apps for different shit, or you've built something like Home Assistant to try to glue together all this garbage into a coherent solution. I've gone that route, and it works mostly, usually, typically, fine-ish.

It's a shit experience, still, because it's a pile of random plugins and code from random people glued into something that can't stop fucking with existing and working features and thus is perpetually in need of updates and maintenance and fiddling.

I wouldn't bet against Apple being able to make a doorbell, security cameras, light switches, and a thermostat and then turning that into something that actually works properly in homekit, is kept updated, and is easy to configure and use and secure.

That's really the missing piece that nobody seems to have been interested or willing to go after.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 15 points 1 day ago (3 children)

You can share your wisdom and be of great value to the public without being in public office.

At some point, though, you've gone from useful adult into honored elder, and while I'm not suggesting we put them all on ice floes, they shouldn't be running the country, especially since more than a few of them clearly don't even know which country they're in, let alone how to run it.

If you can't walk, are having strokes, have developed dementia, and generally just sit around staring at the wall like my cat, perhaps it's time to gracefully retire and go spend the rest of your life doing conferences and speaking engagements and whatever the hell else you want, not trying to legislate.

ArchiveBox is great.

I'm big into retro computing and general old electronics shit, and I archive everything I come across that's useful.

I just assume anything and everything on some old dude's blog about a 30 year old whatever is subject to vanishing at any moment, and if it was useful once, it'll be useful again later probably so fuck it, make a copy of everything.

Not like storage is expensive, anyway.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 10 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Honestly, I think we're 3 years out from Windows being replacable for a gaming platform.

Anti-cheat is a big one (sure, there's "support", but if none of the games people play are supported, is that support?), but VRR and HDR are also huge.

That trifecta is the only reason I'm still sitting in Windows, and I find myself hopeful we land there sooner rather than later so I can dump Windows and never have to think about whatever dumb crap Microsoft is going to do next.

 

Made this mostly because I've found putting RSS feeds into Lemmy useful since my doom-scrolling has reduced to just Lemmy and figured I'm probably not the only person that'd find this useful.

It's pulling 6 RSS feeds that provide free games for Steam, Gog, Epic, and Humble.

Nothing shockingly world-changing, but hey, free games.

!freegames@forum.uncomfortable.business

71
Laptop for Linux use (forum.uncomfortable.business)
 

So I'm looking for a laptop, but before you downvote and move on, I've got a twist: I'm looking for a laptop with Linux support that's going to intentionally be console-only and rely on TUIs to make a lower-distraction device.

I was looking at older Thinkpads with 4:3 screens and the good keyboard before Lenovo went all chicklet with them, but I'm kinda concluding they're both way too expensive AND way too old to be a reasonable choice at this point.

A X220 or T40-whatever would be great and be the perfect aesthetic, but they're expensive, hard to find parts for, and using enough crusty old shit that this becomes yet another delve into retro computing and not one into practical, useful computing which is the goal here.

So, anyone have any recommendations of any devices in the last decade that have a reasonable keyboard, screen, use modern enough components that you can source new drives and RAM and batteries and such, and preferably aren't coated in a coating that's going to turn to sticky goo?

Thin(ner) and light(er) would be nice, but probably not a dealbreaker if the rest of the pieces align. This will be almost entirely used at a table for writing and such.

 

Basically, the court said that algorithmically selected content doesn't qualify for Section 230 protections, which could be a massive impact to every social media platform out there that has any sort of algorithm selecting content, which, well, is all of them.

Definitely something that's going to be interesting watching play out.

 

I have a question for the hive mind: what is the point of this, exactly?

I mean, I understand the attempt to gain access, and I understand why 2fa codes can be valuable to attempt to phish but that's like, not the thing here.

They just spam dozens to hundreds of these (I'm showing over 400 in my inbox right now) but like, even if I WANTED to give these codes to the attacker, I have no damn clue who the dude in China that's doing this is.

I'm confused as to what they hope to gain by trying over and over and over every couple of hours because it feels like there's no upside to whomever is running this bot, but I probably have missed a memo on some TTP around this, heh.

 

So I've got a home server that's having issues with services flapping and I'm trying to figure out what toolchain would be actually useful for telling me why it's happening, and not just when it happened.

Using UptimeKuma, and it's happy enough to tell me that it couldn't connect or a 503 happened or whatever, but that's kinda useless because the service is essentially immediately working by the time I get the notice.

What tooling would be a little more detailed in to the why, so I can determine the fault and fix it?

I'm not sure if it's the ISP, something in my networking configuration, something on the home server, a bad cable, or whatever because I see nothing in logs related to the application or the underlying host that would indicate anything even happened.

It's also not EVERY service on the server at once, but rather just one or two while the other pile doesn't alert.

In sort: it's annoying and I'm not really making headway for something that can do a better job at root-cause-ing what's going on.

 

Just got an email thanking me for being a 5-node/free user, but Portainer isn't free and I need to stop being a cheap-ass and pay them because blah blah economic times enshittification blah blah blah.

I've moved off them a while ago, but figured I'd see if they emailed EVERYONE about this?

A good time to ditch them if you haven't, I suppose.

 

I'm wanting to add a bunch of energy monitoring stuff so I can both track costs, and maybe implement automation to turn stuff on and off based on power costs and timing.

I'm using some TPlink based plugs right now which are like, fine, but I'm wanting to add something like 6 to 10 more monitoring devices/relays.

Anyone have experience with a bunch of shelly devices and if there's any weird behavior I should be aware of?

Assume I have good enough wifi to handle adding another 10 devices to it, but beyond that any gotchas?

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