• 4 Posts
  • 163 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle
  • I’ve tried a few “third party” smart bulbs as it were but, expensive as they are, nothing comes close to Hue for colour accuracy and general responsiveness. As you didn’t specify “cheap”, Hue will always be my recommendation.

    That said, if you do want “cheap” and want to avoid WiFi then the Innr bulbs are fairly decent for the price. I’ve got about 15 of their spotlight style bulbs and they were half the price of the Hue alternatives.





  • I have my dock plugged into a smart plug and the laptop set in the BIOS to turn on when it receives power. I have an NFC tag on my coffee machine that I bloop while I’m making my morning brew, and that turns the dock on so that everything’s ready when I move into the office.

    For turning things off I have HASS.Agent installed and sending state updates (locked, unlocked, etc, which is useful for other automations) and when that sensor goes unavailable for 15 minutes it turns the plug off. I find that’s long enough to allow it to reboot for updates and what not.

    The sensor does report shutdown, reboot, and sleep states but I found that it often happens too quickly to get the change sent, so the unavailable state is more reliable.









  • I think Labour has already pledged not to raise taxes, but let’s play devil’s advocate and pretend that they were going to slap a £2000 on everyone of working age.

    Doing some fuzzy maths based on statistics I can find online from 2 years ago, that’s roughly 45 million people, or £90 billion a year. Or to put in into the Brexit campaign’s favourite terms, £1.7 billion per week going into public coffers.

    I’m not suggesting such a flat structure would actually make sense as a policy, but that maybe tax rises as a concept aren’t always a universally bad thing.



  • Unless you’re hosting VHDs and need maximum throughput (in which case use NFS), SMB is going to be the easiest to setup and maintain across those 4 platforms.

    The Linux SMB implementation is decent and supports the latest version of the protocol (or close to, at least) whereas NFS in Windows ain’t so great and is a bit of a pig to get working in my experience.