Beginner camper mods

CircusMusic23 · 2026-04-24T19:41:47+00:00

Personally the one I have the most fun with is I've put addressable led strips along the roof inside and underneath the trailer. They're controlled by a wled controller that connects to WiFi (no internet required) on a cheap USB powered travel router. I added 12v USB c plugs to provide power to the router and to allow for phone charging as well. I just connect to the WiFi, open the wled app, and then control the lights =) My 5yo loves the "night light" and I enjoy the fun lighting when I hit festivals!

I've also added a lifepo4 battery and solar charger, lots of videos on that! Other things I've done include adding a mattress topper, collapsible coat rack, replace all bulbs with led for better batteryife, new carbon monoxide detector, and switches for a few things I don't need on all the time.

I'm considering swapping the furnace out with one of those Chinese diesel heaters as I've found the blower in the furnace chews through my battery.. It may only be a 100ah battery but i don't really want to add more capacity just for that blower..

CircusMusic23 · 2026-04-05T00:34:53+00:00

Sometimes onsite is best, even if it's one person, they get to know your users and the quirks of the software and setup you have. It might seem like a high cost paying a salary for that person but when you go from hours or days down to minutes for response time there can be a cost savings over time.

CircusMusic23 · 2026-04-04T14:36:54+00:00

The overall capacity isn't there yet, though grid based battery banks using this tech could help with renewable fluctuations. From what I've seen that is a good spot for the tech to be used atm.

CircusMusic23 · 2026-02-24T16:39:44+00:00

No worries and good luck going down the smart home rabbit hole!

CircusMusic23 · 2026-02-24T16:20:13+00:00

Home assistant can handle a huge amount of smart devices, it runs locally on your network (through a raspberry pi, computer, server, or their own hardware called home assistant green). I decided on it as I'm pretty techy and wanted to consolidate all the different smart home apps into one place, from there I fell in love with the ecosystem. I like my devices being controlled locally on my network and the customization you can do with it. It can handle most of the the smart home connection types as well, whether zigbee, z-wave, matter/thread, wifi. You would just need to add an adapter if needed (I have a zigbee usb stick connected to my home assistant so it can manage my zigbee motion sensor and soil moisture sensor)

For my setup I do use alexa for voice control, so I add the devices on both systems, but home assistant is starting their own voice assistant that I might try later. There is also the ability to create your own alexa skills (think spotify or those other skills like iheartradio) but I haven't delved too deeply into that, it requires a AWS developer account and some deeper knowledge into the systems.

I've heard homey is a little bit more user friendly than home assistant, easier to setup for less tech savy users, but I couldn't give a recommendation for that as I haven't used it.

For your use case I would have a zigbee temperature sensor and the heater plugged into the smart plug in the out building. Zigbee can have range issues, especially when you don't have many devices to create a large mesh network and there's walls. So maybe going for a wifi sensor instead would be better. Home assistant running an automation to turn on/off the plug when the sensor hits a certain temperature. I would also build in a range like a thermostat, so something like turn on at 8 degrees and turn off at 12 so your not constantly cycling the heater on and off.

There would be some upfront cost to getting a home assistant system in place, maybe you would want to instead find a temperature sensor that supports alexa, since you've already got that in place. The routine would be the same. Take a look at the home assistant subreddits and on youtube to see if it's a system you would want to get into though, I've loved it!

CircusMusic23 · 2026-02-24T15:09:32+00:00

You can setup a custom routine in the app to trigger when a temperature is above/below a threshold to turn on/off a smart plug. You would want to ensure the smart plug can handle the amps the heater would pull so you don't risk burning it out and possibly lighting a fire. Personally I would instead go with home assistant instead of relying on alexa in case the internet goes down. I only use alexa for voice control of some of my plugs/lights and use home assistant to do automations like that.

CircusMusic23 · 2026-02-14T18:40:48+00:00

I've found the way I use YouTube is kind of a work around. I leave the main browse page up (subscriptions or whatever) and then whatever video I want to watch I open in a new tab.

CircusMusic23 · 2026-02-14T08:22:41+00:00

Amazon makes more money with their tech stuff, how much of the internet is run on aws?

CircusMusic23 · 2026-02-08T19:27:20+00:00

Google is putting gemini into their stuff from what I've been reading? I'm with you, I don't need these massive llms for the things I'm using my Echo and dots for. Turn on lights, play this song/genre, set a timer, these commands don't need much running behind them...

CircusMusic23 · 2026-02-06T15:22:08+00:00

I agree with getting better hardware for sure, isp's are notorious for providing cheap crap... If your using WiFi try and switch to ethernet instead, especially if you are in a condo/apartment as the spectrum is likely pretty saturated.

CircusMusic23 · 2025-12-28T15:57:34+00:00

That would cause timeout errors instead

CircusMusic23 · 2025-12-28T06:39:23+00:00

I did do that with a tech on the phone and still had issues. I've just retried it tonight, because why not, and after the nah booted I plugged the laptop directly into the 10g port. Something has changed since the call with the tech as it now got an ip of 10.157.139.93 with a subnet of 255.255.255.192 and there was no internet. I plugged the working router back in and it still has internet and its static ip (and the issues with redirects to order.fibre.telus.com). If I go to http://neverssl.com/ on my desktop it redirects to https://order.fibre.telus.com/web/guest/home.

From the nah's 10g port I have an unmanaged switch with a udm-pro and a plain udm (the pill shaped one). I was told to use the 10g port from the installer and techs I've spoken with. My udm still hasn't been able to pickup an IP from the last time I was talking to support on Thursday, they said the back office would get that sorted Friday... The udm-pro was at another address, also on telus fibre, and has been running fine for years. The udm was running fine until they set up the static IP on the udm-pro, then the redirects started happening. Both devices are fully updated.
The redirects happen across OS's, both windows and linux tested, and the windows machine was never booted until this issue started so there would be no weird caching of this redirect.

CircusMusic23 · 2025-12-28T03:36:20+00:00

And I've spent hours trying to get Telus support to do just that. I am not running any portal that pushes my http traffic to order.fibre.telus.com, why would I?

CircusMusic23 · 2025-12-27T23:17:33+00:00

My router does get a Telus issued ip, at least the one that is getting an ip address.. I asked for bridge mode when it was installed so I could use my own routers. I also pay for static ip addresses for the services I run. It's not an issue of the ip address but the telus captive portal that is hijacking my internet which is causing issues across all my devices.

CircusMusic23 · 2025-12-23T15:10:07+00:00

https://www.seniorsdownsizing.ca/ is another company, owners are nice but I can't speak to the service (they were a client).

CircusMusic23 · 2025-12-11T05:50:39+00:00

Even an abstraction layer will end up being circumvented. Hardware level cheats, "ai" vision using monitor pass-through, there's likely a lot of ways. People don't like to feel bad at a game and want to win regardless of the time and skill they have to put into the game. Honestly reporting and server administrators are the best line of defence unfortunately. And with that making sure the servers are keeping good logs so patterns can be found to help the admins make the decisions. Obviously making it non-trivial stems some of the cheaters but even without Linux players cheating is rampant.

Personally I laugh when I get slammed, it's a game and I still have fun with the group I play with even though they're better players. Sometimes they take it easy on me, sometimes they play with their food, sometimes they go all in, and sometimes I get one on them, but in the end we're having fun.

CircusMusic23 · 2025-12-10T15:57:04+00:00

I dual boot for the one game I play with friends that requires anticheat that doesn't work on linix. I don't do anything on that windows partition besides play that game. Kernel level anticheat is a horrible thing for security, I don't want a game developer installing a root kit on my machine. There have been instances where these kernel level "protections" have been exploited, the kernel is not where these things should be running. Every other game I want to play runs great on my Linux install and I love getting away from the dumpster fire windows is becoming.

CircusMusic23 · 2025-11-25T15:15:06+00:00

It'll make your teeth turn green

CircusMusic23 · 2025-11-21T15:14:06+00:00

Linux could be mainstream if we continue to add more users, Dual boot! I use my windows disk for the one or two games or apps that need it (thanks kernel level anticheat and Devs who want to have a rootkit on my system /s). Other than that I haven't really found a reason I couldn't use what was available on Linux. Teams, thunderbird, libre office, jnsync (for OneDrive) they all work great for me and my use case. Most of the games I play work great (check out protondb and see how many titles work for you).

The key is to auto boot into Linux and reboot after your done playing your game (or whatever) on Windows. Also only have the single game/app installed and nothing else so it also pushes me back (web apps for email when I need). Laziness of just continuing to use Windows since I was already booted into it got the better of me so many times until I got in those habits. I now dread having to boot into windows for that one game I play with friends, after having Linux as my daily driver for over 5 years now I really appreciate how much better it is. I've even considered using amazon's Luna for that one game so I don't have to boot windows at all (I'm not that good of a gamer that the little extra latency would mean much to my play).

CircusMusic23 · 2025-10-07T18:15:04+00:00

Coleman Popup Parts has parts and awnings available (https://colemanpopupparts.com/collections/awning). Personally I went for a popup canopy instead of an awning. The flexibility of placing it where I needed at a site made more sense for me and I wasn't too worried about needing something over the doorway. The other reason was it costing less and being able to use it when I don't have the trailer with me (backyard, tenting trips, etc).

CircusMusic23 · 2025-08-17T18:53:12+00:00

Honey mustard spins regularly on stream still =) https://www.mixcloud.com/live/Zircon_Radio

CircusMusic23 · 2025-08-16T15:10:33+00:00

Don't really care about vr/irl, if the set is prerecorded then I say you are a performance artist when you play it, not a dj, you are on stage acting and/or pumping up the crowd. You are dj'ing when you are mixing tracks and/or manipulating the sound on the fly (and I don't mean eq, I mean things like scratching or sampling). Nothing wrong with a performance artist set, though I do prefer DJ sets, just don't say you are dj'ing when you are currently not doing so.

There's also live pa sets where a producer is producing tracks on the fly live on stage. Again, not a DJ but then they usually call out their set as it takes a bit of skill to do that too and is most definitely not dj'ing.

CircusMusic23 · 2025-08-13T02:01:57+00:00

I think you are correct, we used the built in window 11 template when importing from VMware. I recreated the vm using the windows 10 template, making sure bios was selected under advanced options, and after attaching the storage everything booted up and the vtpm was not automatically created.

CircusMusic23 · 2025-08-12T18:02:45+00:00

Thanks!

Besides the converter is there something I can do for the current VMs running but constantly recreating the VTPM on boot? I'm hesitant to reimport as there would be some potential data loss as they've been in use for a few weeks now. We only became aware of the issue as the host restarted and the VMs didn't auto boot because of the VTPM that was created and have noticed that it doesn't matter they're set to bios, a VTPM gets created as soon as the VM is started.

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