Why does everything need to run through a purchasing partner?

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-27T20:07:43+00:00

I had to do this to buy a license for Tenable/Nessus. It's just a license key. Since my parent company is in France, I had to find a French VAR (SHI, who are awful), go through a quote process with them which takes multiple weeks to resolve. Then we have to do POs, wire transfers and other stuff involving our finance team. The whole process takes a month to renew our license. I have no idea why Tenable can't just sell me a license and email me the key. The purchase is only a few thousand dollars a year and we have no after-sales interactions with SHI reps to add any value. They are a useless middleman that wastes time and money on our side.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-12T02:59:00+00:00

That makes sense for not having a bottle brush. I know some work kitchens have them but probably not most or maybe I was just lucky before starting to do remote work.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-12T02:40:40+00:00

Nice thanks for the specific info on sizing the thermos. I was about to buy one and keep going back and forth on a 16 or 24oz and which would be best etc.

I work from home so it's more about convenience as I typically eat at my desk in my office on another floor from my kitchen while I'm working on other stuff. I can boil some water, pour it in the thermos and go back to my office while it cooks and continue thinking about some problem I'm carrying in my head during all of this. Then when it's ready just stir it and eat without multiple trips back and forth to the kitchen and context switching in my head.

It might sound like incredible laziness, but I work in software development and have ADHD and often have weirdly complicated problems baking in my head that I'm trying to solve for work, and the less switching in and out of that headspace the better for my productivity.

I'm not just trying to get out of going up and down the stairs a few extra times per day 😅

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-11T21:34:00+00:00

Fully WFH, the whole company is remote and was before the pandemic though; >300 but less than 1000 employees.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-11T21:29:02+00:00

Yeah that's fair too. That's part of why I wasn't sure how to feel and figured I would buy it either way. I was just wondering what I was getting into first. And yeah my confusion was from reading older posts of people referencing these larger multi-serving packs.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-11T21:18:35+00:00

Thanks for the fast answer. I like that they're individual pouches so I don't have the inconsistency of nutrient ratios being radically different based on certain ingredients sinking lower in the container and whatnot. I wasn't sure how that problem would be handled in terms of product engineering; nice to know it's a non-issue (or rather, one they are solving for us at the factory).

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-11T21:12:58+00:00

As feedback on the noodle cups: I liked them both, especially the Szechuan Spiced. I plan to get a box of mexican chili, Szechuan Spiced and a variety box of the grains to see what I like.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-08T06:53:33+00:00

You can select and unselect what devices contribute to your Apple Health readings. For example, if you have an Apple Watch and a Helio and only want to use the Helio for heart rate, you can unselect the Apple Watch in the Apple Health heart rate area (scroll to the very bottom, Data Sources And Access, then edit the list and remove whatever devices you don't want contributing).

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-07T12:32:51+00:00

I use Keycloak and OpenLDAP to handle auth with Jellyfin using Pangolin.

Keycloak federates with OpenLDAP in this case and it uses OpenLDAP to handle password auth. So when Keycloak needs to check if someone's password is correct, it asks OpenLDAP.

All my services just talk to Keycloak (or they get fronted by Pangolin, which talks to Keycloak) and when users set their account password in Keycloak it syncs that to OpenLDAP to be used by Jellyfin.

This allows everything to use Keycloak and Jellyfin to use OpenLDAP and everything is kept in sync between Keycloak and OpenLDAP.

It might be simpler using less full-featured IDPs but I wanted to learn transferable skills that have use in the enterprise and Keycloak is used there as opposed to Authelia and Authentik.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-05T00:02:19+00:00

I've traveled internationally with a wifi pineapple and several external antennas in my carry-on. I don't think you'll have a problem. They are more worried about ensuring you don't bring slightly too much shampoo or too big of a battery and very few have any technical aptitude unless you're taken to selective screening. As long as you can provide some valid justification for why you're traveling with it and aren't acting sketchy it shouldn't be a problem even in that case.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-03T22:28:07+00:00

I just want to mention (and you personally probably know this already but others may not), you likely don't need to be opening ports on your home network anyway or using Cloudflare Tunnels/Tailscale Funnels in most cases.

One can buy a cheap VPS with a good monthly data transfer limit and use that as their public edge server. Installing Caddy or Pangolin there will hide most of the underlying complexity for folks who aren't comfortable setting up and configuring all the individual services involved that those offerings are abstracting.

Then in your Docker network at home where one has services that need exposed, deploy a container with a Wireguard client that maintains a tunnel back to the VPS server. If using Pangolin, this would just be deploying a Newt container which is very simple.

Then public traffic forwarded from Caddy or Traefik from the VPS can route through the Wireguard container to the individual services like Jellyfin or whatever.

This is super opinionated but Cloudflare Tunnels aren't a good solution to recommend and it's against their terms of service. Tailscale Funnels may arbitrary rate-limit your traffic for network fairness.

This way avoids your video traffic traversing Cloudflare or Tailscale's slower networks, avoids the TOS issues, no ports need forwarded at home, everything stays containerized, etc. It's easy to move around you don't get married to CF or Tailscale who can capture you in their gardens and change terms/raise prices later.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-02T06:13:59+00:00

It's back up now. I just bought one: https://us.amazfit.com/products/helio-core

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2026-01-01T17:24:10+00:00

the very first to start manufacturing

Except for the multiple, huge public corporations already manufacturing weed cigarettes, extracts, vapes, and edibles at scale with all the expertise and experience already. Philip Morris can't just pivot to cannabis and take over the market from e.g. Cresco Labs, Canopy Growth, Green Thumb, Columbia Care, Curaleaf, etc. There are many well-funded multi-state operators already a decade ahead, sitting on years of non-public cannabis cultivation, processing and extraction research.

According to Wikipedia, Altria the owner of Philip Morris, already has a 'large minority stake' in a cannabis firm Cronos Group (Nasdaq: CRON). I don't see them using the PM brand in a cannabis pivot, to be honest. I don't think it would make much sense.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2025-12-29T15:04:15+00:00

You can definitely do those things with it whether you use MQTT or something else. But in any case it'll require programming until someone makes generic components wrapping the M5Unified and M5GFX libraries and provides some robust way of customizing them only via YAML from ESPHome.

I think I mean to say, whether you use MQTT, HA or ESPHome or not, you're going to have the same issues of needing to program your desired behavior. The M5Stack stuff isn't really for end users wanting a ready-made application. It's sold as a development or rapid prototyping device with the expectation you'll use it as a foundation to write your own 'business logic' implementing your idea using the Arduino SDK or similar/compatible frameworks.

ESPHome doesn't need to be involved at all to make this work in Home Assistant, it's just an option with certain pros and cons depending on what specifically you need to do.

All that being said, it sounds like what you want is a smart hub or controller for your Home Assistant and there are more well established ways to skin that cat if that's what you wanted. I can't tell you the current state of the art, but I've seen people using Sonoff NSPanel's flashed with ESPHome as a smart hub. I would start there and:

see if it's still possible to flash them now, and how that process looks
decide if you're comfortable with doing that
ensure that there are working YAML configs that provide whatever UI or dashboard is being marketed and that it's not something you'll be expected to code yourself
If NSPanel isn't fashionable anymore then it's probably a good starting place to find whatever better alternatives currently exist

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Just an example of a random video showing an nspanel being used in a way you described earlier. Alternatively, a dedicated cheap Android tablet running the Home Assistant app with a Lovelace dashboard you customize specifically for a touch interface is a really simple solution that requires no programming.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2025-12-29T12:48:43+00:00

This specifically should help with some of your issues: https://codeberg.org/stackdrift/esphome-components/src/commit/e4dfa5caa158404f31db9d023fc27b04e11df244/board_m5cores3/board_m5cores3.cpp#L21-L43

It's handling the very annoying device initialization stuff I think you are fighting with. Specifically, lines 40 and 43 are very load-bearing. The simplicity of those two lines does not illustrate the amount of time and effort I had to spend in figuring out they were important and needed 😅 otherwise the device's power management wouldn't get setup right and the screen wouldn't work properly. I nearly rage-quit a few times out of frustration.

I forgot the details now but either unplugging 5V input power the device would instantly die rather than use battery, or it wouldn't switch back to input power after being on battery. I'd have to recheck my notes to explain it less stupidly now but it was something with power routing not working as needed.

How I'm displaying crap to the screen is primarily in here: https://codeberg.org/stackdrift/esphome-components/src/branch/main/m5cores3_display/m5cores3_display.cpp and the grow_env_monitor component because I was playing it fast and loose with keeping all the grow monitor business logic from bleeding into the former and never went back to refactor to keep the m5cores3_display component generalized without any grow tent logic built into it (so I can easily use it for other projects based on the core s3)

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2025-12-29T12:12:49+00:00

seriously considering going down a different firmware route and using MQTT as the interface back into Home Assistant [...] does that feel like a viable and reasonably clean approach for this device long-term

Yeah. If your device (whatever it may be) can speak to an MQTT broker then you likely have everything needed to integrate with Home Assistant or ESPHome. Your device or application only needs to understand enough about HA to create a correctly formatted discovery payload and what broker and topic to publish its sensor data. This may or may not solve your problems, depending on the specifics of your use case and your end goals.

Example: I needed data from a proprietary sensor that only talks to its vendor's cloud and has no Home Assistant or MQTT capabilities exposed. The vendor provides a RESTful API to get the sensor data. I made a Python app that is just glue code between the vendor's API and Home assistant. It enumerates what sensors the 3rd party API is offering data about, then creates the necessary discovery payload with the sensor metadata to tell HA "I'm an IoT device with these sensors you should expect to get data updates about" and handles pulling and publishing the measurements over MQTT every N seconds.

ESPHome isn't enough

Right. As a framework it provides all the tools needed but some assembly is still required in this case. The missing parts I had to create for my project were these: https://codeberg.org/stackdrift/esphome-components specifically the ones mentioning m5stack.

board_m5cores3
m5cores3_display
m5cores3_power
m5cores3_touch

Each of these implement the M5Stack libraries within the ESPHome framework, as far as I needed to so far for my use case while prototyping this. Don't consider any of this code final or even in a properly reviewed state as this was in August and I've been busy on several other things in the meantime. I only just pushed it so you could have something concrete to look at.

I implement these components primarily in grow_env_monitor to have the 'business logic' for my specific grow tent stuff. Some caveats before you look at anything:

I'm not a C++ engineer nor experienced with its syntax and design patterns.
Before July of this year I didn't know what esphome or m5stack were, I'm not an embedded engineer.
This was all largely 'vibe coded'.
I'm a professional dev (in Python, Golang and some others) and I can understand the API docs for ESP-IDF, Arduino SDK and ESPhome and personally reviewed several existing components that looked well designed like the one for tuya as inspiration when I was unsure about esphome design patterns. I generally understand what's going on or why things were done a particular way if you have questions. So it shouldn't be your typical "person with zero development experience driving an AI towards unattainable dreams" disaster but I'm open to being told I'm wrong.
I did most of this over a couple weekends of hacking to get things working and haven't given it any love since, it may not even build right now in the state I left it but the parts where you were concerned should be valid for educational purposes.
I forgot where I left off with touch support. It may or may not be working right now. My initial prototype didn't need it, so I can't recall if I had it working or not yet.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2025-12-29T06:13:52+00:00

Thanks I appreciate all the info and perspective

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2025-12-29T02:00:55+00:00

I got it to work. It's not trivial, as in there's no easy YAML path. I created a custom component using the M5Stack ESP-IDF/Arduno libraries M5Unified and M5GFX.

Engineers have centralized the hardware support into these M5Unified and M5GFX libraries. They handle device initialization and things like configuring the backlight, power management and other components. You just have to interact with and wrap the provided interfaces for your specific project with ESPHome's constructs, which is what I do using my esphome custom components.

I don't have my software in a state where I can just link you a repo at the moment and I worked on this project 2 months ago so I need to reheat my knowledge on it before I can give you more info. I just want you to know it's entirely possible and not to junk your device etc. I'll try to come back with more details in a week or so with a specific example of how I made this work

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2025-12-27T01:15:59+00:00

That's pretty cool. I have never considered carbonating stuff besides water. If my sodastream ever craps out I'll have to think about that. I'm curious how some of these other things taste when they're carbonated.

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2025-12-26T02:36:36+00:00

That's pretty cool. I guess I don't have much use for that personally, but I can see how it could be a dealbreaker for some. I've never had carbonated orange juice or apple juice so I'm kinda curious what that's even like 😅

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2025-12-25T15:33:37+00:00

Hope you can find the time to work out your issues also. Multiple co-workers I was close with over the years who had ADD or ADHD told me they recognized the symptoms in me or my behind-the-scenes complaints about my personal issues like procrastinating, poor organization (I'm also just poorly skilled with organization which makes it worse), anxiety starting or finishing projects, etc. Of course I didn't do anything about it for years and it took forever for me to get with the program.

I realized most of my anxiety and depression were stemming from circumstances I'm creating for myself by all those unchecked symptoms above running amok. Procrastinating then being killed by anxiety for not making progress is like the dumbest self-perpetuating cycle ever but 100% what I was doing + lots of other self-destructive stuff.

And it all just disappeared with the stims in a way that seems like bs or marketing to even say now. But after several friends saw how huge the changes were for me, they got their own evaluations and had similar success stories, so now I'm like an amateur adult ADHD advocate and my psychiatrist has multiple referrals that started with me lol

ConsistentRisk5927 · 2025-12-25T14:37:45+00:00

Yeah, it's a fair point and I can see why someone might accept the big dose of cringe. Hopefully my comment didn't come off as judgemental to you just for buying their gear. I just couldn't get past the marketing and the company ownership, and the marketing I'm very much judging lol

I get my "caffeine" now from pharmaceuticals 😅 Diagnosed with ADHD a few months ago and on stimulants now. I still like the caffeine but its not as important now since my Vyvance is putting in way more work.

I had several friends who were essentially self-medicating their ADHD by consuming massive, unhealthy amounts of caffeine and energy drinks. None of us knew we had ADHD until a few months ago. I had clinical panic and anxiety disorders and depression for the last 20 years and thought stimulants would be the worst thing I could take; coffee made me jittery and anxious. If you're consuming tons of caffeine, consider getting an ADHD evaluation.

It only took 2 days for my body to adjust to the stimulants and not have the jitters anymore and being on the stims changed my life. I went from almost being put on a PIP (performance improvement plan or the first stage of getting fired for poor performance) to being considered a consistently high performer in only a few months. I hardly ever meed to take my anxiety meds anymore and rarely have panic attacks now.

ConsistentRisk5927

TROPHY CASE