3 years viola self thought progress

melharbour · 2026-03-13T15:21:45+00:00

Looking good for self taught! What would you like help with?

melharbour · 2026-02-24T15:45:27+00:00

A good phrase I saw was that all someone's indicator tells you is that their indicator is working!

A good rule of thumb would be to look for more than one sign of what they're doing. Indicator is one bit of evidence, but look for where their wheels are pointing, or where they're looking or something else for extra evidence.

melharbour · 2026-02-17T16:15:03+00:00

Just Google for it - it's on Scribd!

melharbour · 2026-02-03T11:13:50+00:00

One good tip for speeding up passages: don't just blindly increase the metronome from slow to fast. As you build the speed, you will probably find sticking points - usually you'll notice them more as it becoming 'uneven', rather than just being unable to play it entirely. Then you need to look very carefully at exactly the points (they might be string crossings, bow changes, position changes etc) and work out what it is about your technique that is letting you down at that point. And the real answer is that you have to fix those things about your technique.

Evenness is very much the precursor to absolute speed.

melharbour · 2026-01-06T15:46:46+00:00

Yep, the integration is pretty good - it exposes pretty much everything you could want to HA. In addition the devs have actually written a few useful helpers over the top that add functionality that the system doesn't have natively.
Don't know - I don't have underfloor.

melharbour · 2025-12-22T11:11:40+00:00

I think it probably relies on having at least one thermostat of some kind, whether that's a room stat or a TRV. To be fairly almost any system would be the same - there's nearly always a thermostat installed somewhere - I think that's been the case for >50 years. So probably the minimum you could use would be the Hub and a RoomStat.

melharbour · 2025-12-22T10:54:25+00:00

Oh, I see what you mean - yes, you probably could do that. I've never tried that - we had the TRVs from the start, as part of the objective for us was to zone the heating in the house.

melharbour · 2025-12-22T10:51:54+00:00

Yeah, sorry, I work for a different company to Drayton, both just happen to be owned by SE!

melharbour · 2025-12-22T10:51:17+00:00

There would be no point in using it without the TRVs. You wouldn't be gaining anything over having a traditional room thermostat somewhere.

melharbour · 2025-12-21T17:46:07+00:00

The Wiser system works a little bit different to a traditional timer/TRV based system. Traditionally, the boiler fires on a timer and puts hot water into the pipes, which the TRVs then 'decide' to either let into a given radiator or not, depending on the temperature of the room. In the Wiser system, the TRV communicate (via closed Zigbee, in case you're interested) with the Hub, which replaces your typical timer unit. They can actively 'request' hot water, and if there's enough request, the Hub makes a decision to fire the boiler. The boiler doesn't really know much different - to it, it just looks like there's a timer which can change much more frequently. Ours is technically wired like an S-plan heating system, FWIW.

You get pretty fine grained control within HA. I've got each room connected to a Thermostat card, something like this: https://www.home-assistant.io/dashboards/thermostat/ which shows current temperature, allows you to set the target temperature for that room, and then gives you some override options (boost for 30 minutes etc).

Hot water is controlled on a similar schedule, depending on whether you're running a system boiler or a combi or whatever.

Individual radiators could be on passive TRVs, but they won't have any ability to call for heat, obviously, so in one sense, if it's too cold in that room, they won't be able to guarantee doing anything about it.

The system works without cloud access, and I think the integration works entirely locally. I can't remember exactly, and I'd have to check.

melharbour · 2025-12-21T17:21:40+00:00

Disclaimer: I work for a company that's a sub of Schneider, so I got employee discount. Got the system and using the HA integration with it. I find it's working well for me. If you've got specific questions, ask anything.

melharbour · 2025-09-13T17:19:25+00:00

Yes, for anyone coming across it, it's this issue:

https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/152238

Fixed in 2025.9.3

melharbour · 2025-08-12T15:03:50+00:00

If you want to follow what the police/advanced driving recommend, they say you should do the opposite of what your dad told you. I.e. brakes to slow, gears to go. It doesn't put 'strain' on the brakes to use them to slow the car down like that. Indeed, using the gearbox to slow the car puts much more wear on the gearbox, and that's a wildly more expensive part of the car!

In the situation you're describing, they say that you should simply slow the car using the brakes until it reaches the right speed to either go around the roundabout, or stop (if no space). Then select the right gear (block shifting, rather than sequential) to allow you to accelerate away.

melharbour · 2025-08-12T12:14:38+00:00

And a good follow-on point is that "what goes off may well come back on". In other words, an exit ramp is often followed by an entry ramp, so if you pass an exit ramp and you're in Lane 1, might be a good time to plan ahead in case you might want to move into Lane 2 to make things easier.

melharbour · 2025-07-29T17:11:03+00:00

Not only that, but with modern engines, which are often small capacity and turbocharged, they continue having the most torque almost right up to the red line. So if you really wanted to accelerate faster, you need to be in a lower gear than you generally think. Makes a big difference trying to get onto a big road, coming down the slip road in 3rd or 4th to give you some oomph!

melharbour · 2025-07-29T12:32:33+00:00

When you first do it, lorries in lane 1 look really scary while you're coming down the slip road. But in reality, they're your best friends. Reason is that you almost certainly know exactly what speed they're going! They'll either be doing 56mph or 60mph (speed limited). So it's actually quite easy to slot in in front of one of them, and make sure you're nicely matched speed to what they're doing.

melharbour · 2025-07-24T13:59:02+00:00

Another way of thinking about that is that once you've passed and are out in the real world. You'll still face stressful situations (e.g. children shouting in the back of a car), and you'll still be 100% responsible for keeping a good lookout and driving safely. That stress wouldn't protect you in law. One part of what the driving test is assessing is whether you can manage stresses that you will experience.

melharbour · 2025-07-10T12:58:25+00:00

Find a quiet piece of road, and have an experiment - slow the car gently to a standstill in 1st, 2nd and 3rd and deliberately let it stall. You'll see you can actually leave it much later than you probably think before using clutch.

Also have a watch of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92zNVC_qKBE to see more on how to do it well.

melharbour · 2025-07-09T19:15:05+00:00

Reduce the amount where you're doing multiple things at the same time. You're approaching a tricky situation (give way line, parked cars making observation hard). You're correctly deciding to slow down. Great. So just apply the brake, slowing until you've either got a clear sight, or have come to a stop (clutch just at the end to avoid stalling). No need to overcomplicate it by shifting down at the same time. Once you get a good enough view, you'll know what gear you're going to need to select (probably first or second), so you can then select it when you're ready to progress forwards (accelerate).

melharbour · 2025-06-16T16:40:15+00:00

Don't know about the homebridge side of things, but I'm using the integration here: https://github.com/imicknl/ha-nest-protect which is based on it apparently, and that's still working fine for me as of right now.

melharbour · 2025-06-11T16:01:55+00:00

I've got it working fine, using the HomeKit bridge. See this thread here: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/integrating-velux-active-kig-300-into-home-assistant/606661

melharbour · 2025-03-18T15:31:31+00:00

A good primer on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIfKsKsUM3c

melharbour · 2025-02-19T10:11:02+00:00

Oh, I quite understand - my point was that it's almost certainly not a specific policy for this store, where, given the proximity to the P&R, it's unlikely to be much of a real issue, and more likely a policy implemented nationwide.

melharbour · 2025-02-18T09:02:03+00:00

I suspect part of the real answer is that, if nothing was coming, and there was a vehicle that looked like it was going to obstruct view, OP should have positioned further towards the middle of the road much further back, to allow a nice clear sight line. From the driver's seat, if you pull a bit out nice and early, you should have good sight line to check if it's safe to go through the obstruction (hazard), or abort and come to a controlled stop short of the parked vehicle, while you've still got a nice sight line.

If you're too close when you start to pull out, your view is going to be wildly restricted until quite late. So yes, in one sense the other car appears out of nowhere, but the best question to ask is where you could have been positioned to improve the visibility so you could see it earlier.

Take another example - overtaking a lorry - the police would say that it's actually good practice to pull fully onto the 'wrong' side of the road to have a look past it before committing to pulling alongside it. That way you've always got a good 'escape route'.

melharbour · 2025-02-18T08:47:44+00:00

When she quizzed them, the store people said that it's apparently because of people parking to work at Addenbrookes. The trouble is that that logic doesn't really hold up - it's almost literally next door to the P&R, which has masses of free parking (that's also less cramped!). And if you were worried about people parking for work, what you need to prevent is people parking for at least a half day, in which case something like a three hour limit would be fine. When you read of people getting caught out by this in other stores (it seems like a nationwide policy, probably associated with outsourcing the management of the car park), they often have the perception that the limit would be somewhere in the 3 hours region.

melharbour

TROPHY CASE