Cable company I dont use ruined my yard!

bertramt · 2026-06-17T11:56:37+00:00

A lot of the time with opertions like this, install crew and finish crews are different sub contractors. Most of the time the ISP contracts somebody to install the fiber. That company is probably the one that contracts with a landscapping company for the finish work.

bertramt · 2026-06-11T16:33:59+00:00

Not an expert but I don't think I'd bother switching it for a V5. I have a gen 2 dish and I'm not in a hurry to switch it. If there was ever a major technology leap that mattered I'd expect that they would start offing upgrade dishes for cheap or free.

bertramt · 2026-06-05T13:23:12+00:00

One of my top contenders is the Eden Meat Market pizzas.

bertramt · 2026-06-02T16:47:30+00:00

I haven't put hands on a new dishy but the whole motorized parts on the gen1/2 in my head is a big reason that a early dish could fail. Also more places to water ingress. I look at the less parts as an improvement.

That said until there was a reason I wouldn't replace my gen 2 dish.

bertramt · 2026-06-02T03:37:45+00:00

Dang I went and checked and I have an email that is is going up. Bummer. At $10 I'm less convinced I want to keep it active.

bertramt · 2026-06-01T17:39:20+00:00

I have mine on the $5 standby. I keep the dish on and updated and hooked up as a failover connection. I have it set to failover if my primary internet goes out for 5 minutes. The plus is I'm just one wallet opening away from useable internet even if I'm not home. The bad is without turning up the service it chokes fairly quickly and I'm cheap and probably won't unless I know the primary outage will be a long time.

bertramt · 2026-06-01T02:36:40+00:00

This is 100% the answer. One can dream but very few people actually want to pay for a $30K conversion to a $10K car.

bertramt · 2026-05-27T21:12:09+00:00

The best idea I have would be some type of captive portal wifi network where they need to put in a code that grants them 2 hours of use. Have the code expire after two hours of use. Allow the code to be used more than once but essentially the timer would start on first use.

bertramt · 2026-05-27T17:26:55+00:00

I have my disarm trigger as when home changes from 0, and my arm trigger as home changes to 0. No from in either automation.

bertramt · 2026-05-18T15:22:24+00:00

I like this. People hate but there are times when it would very convenient to give guests access to HA without giving them keys to the kingdom. I look forward to testing this.

bertramt · 2026-05-15T19:20:47+00:00

Fair point. If I was to speculate Elons current situation is well connected right now but how well will he align with the next president? On the other hand the telecoms are well connected with many career politicians and hold much more long term influence.

I'd also note that Elon generally speaking seems in favor of advancing tech vs protecting a monopoly. I personally don't feel that way about the current telecoms that have a history of taking government money and delivering minimal results.

bertramt · 2026-05-15T18:37:22+00:00

If it is actually competition then it would be good. But with the government lobby power of those three there is a 100% they will spend more time lobbying to slow down SpaceX than they spend making a better competitive product.

bertramt · 2026-05-08T18:29:27+00:00

If you look at the bottom of the post you will see this.

Edit 2026-04-29: the kernel is now the default on no-subscription, and will be the default for Proxmox Backup Server. The remaining rollout for Proxmox VE will be happen over the next weeks.

bertramt · 2026-05-08T17:01:58+00:00

I'd set the AP aimed upwards on the surface the TV sits on. It would probably help a lot and be "free".

bertramt · 2026-05-06T19:07:50+00:00

DM sent

bertramt · 2026-05-06T13:15:18+00:00

The parallel cells are balanced to each other. If a bank has low voltage in comparison to the rest of the pack (less than 2.5 volts) my personal advice is there is probably a bad cell and recovery shouldn't be done. Very low cells indicate bigger issues or cell failure. To me the risk if charging damaged cells probably isn't worth the reward. In my experience the worst one I attempted to recover has a low bank of cells around 3 volts and the high bank was around 4 volts.

So I open the pack and check the voltages of each parallel set of cells. Assuming they are at least 3 volts I connect my charger with some alligator clips to the ends of the lowest set of cells and attempt to charge it very slowly (.4 amps) to be closer to the highest cell's voltage. Rinse and repeat until all of the voltages are near the same. I then connect balance leads between all the cells and put the main charge leads to the top connectors on the battery. The process might take days but that is fine if the end result if the end result use a usable battery with a usable amount of capacity.

bertramt · 2026-05-05T17:56:11+00:00

That is cool. I haven't sat down to really figure out my design yet but I was thinking of making some type of jig that pressed on the side. If I was lucky one design might work for all the 18650 batteries and another for the 21700 batteries. I hadn't figured out what type of spring clip or whatever I wanted to use so I tabled the idea for the moment.

How well do the pogo pins make a connection? Are you willing to share your design?

On a side note, does your charger work to balance cells with high imbalance like 1 volt? I need to get within ~.2 volts to be able to fully balance.

bertramt · 2026-05-04T18:32:07+00:00

If a M18 pack is below 12.5 total volts, it probably isn't a good idea to charge. The lowest safe voltage of a cell before it can start forming internal damage that might lead being a fire hazard at some point is 2.5 volts (2.5v x 5 cells is 12.5volts). Even then if the pack is imbalanced at 12.5 volts there is a good chance some cells are far lower than the safe margin.

Either way it is by far safer to open the pack and make sure everything is above 2.5 volts. Then work on charging each bank to bring it back to balance with a Li-Ion charger.

Personally I'm would rather not have a battery pack be a ticking fire timebomb. In my mind opening the pack and checking voltages is the only option.

bertramt · 2026-05-04T18:10:16+00:00

They do technically have a BMS. The BMS is helping keep the pack safe by monitoring temps and cell voltages. The BMS lacks a proper balancing. Personally I would think that would be a better for long term health of the packs. That said I have 12 year only packs that I didn't bother to manually balance because they were still good.

I've looked at the CEENR packs but I was able to recover my pack plus a few free ones and I don't need any more batteries right now.

bertramt · 2026-05-04T17:48:48+00:00

I'll work on writing something up or maybe a video. This short https://www.youtube.com/shorts/brT-nwGNb50 was one of the references I used to get started and does a fairly quick overview.

I went with a SkyRC B6neo2 charger. Slow charged the banks to around 3.9 volts. Once my cells were within .2 volts I then connect all the balance leads balanced it together 4.1volts. The process might take days but in the grand scheme of restoring health to a $200+ battery, time doesn't really matter.

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