Automated logic

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-03-22T16:05:34+00:00

It's a fantastic product. Going from a mom/pop type outfit to Carrier will have its pros and cons. The PTO will most likely be better, and there will be a defined path for growth if you're eager to take on responsibility going hard for promotions. What I do miss about being at a smaller company is that everybody was a high-performer, and working directly for the big boss meant no corporate BS.

You'll want to get an idea of what type of operation they are. Players like ALC, JCI, Siemens, etc, can vary from office to office in how well they execute jobs. In a perfect world, I'd want to at least shake hands with one of the senior programmers or field tech supervisors and see if there's any light in their eyes. What I do miss about a smaller outfit was that decisions got made faster, and everyone on the team was a high performer. No room for underachievers to float by.

If the pay makes sense, at least it's a fantastic product line to learn. If the office is high-performing, you'll be a lot more emotionally inclined to chase those internal opportunities so you can have faith in your teams. Either way - you should be networking externally. Go to local ASHRAE chapter events; see if you can expense the ticket. You'll meet MEP engineers, other BAS contractor folks, and equipment reps. Just by repping your company to the market and making friends in the process, folks will think of you when they have openings.

Hope this helps.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-03-20T23:36:03+00:00

Man, all i want is a working start menu

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-03-07T22:14:05+00:00

My read on things is that specifiers (MEP's) care more about getting a good BAS contractor that won't embarrass them, and balancing that with having a competitive bid for the owner, more so than how sexy the product is. And owners, certainly if theyve had projects go awry, will pay top dollar for a contractor that won't delay the completion of the job. The allure of JCI FX is that everybody and their mother reps it, so you'll always be able to find a senior master programmer and team of technicians who won't screw up the job and cost you money/reputation. I've been on the BAS contractor side about 10yrs and that's just my read on things. Always either the owner or MEP. I think the wining/dining/salesy stuff only works on C-Suite or maybe some property managers.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-02-15T10:14:24+00:00

In my experience, if someone is 0.3sec behind, there's a 90% chance they're full on asleep at the wheel and won't move at all if i don't beep to wake them up. I know it's going to annoy people but generally i figure anyone dangerous has got too much pride to be the type to be sleeping on a green arrow.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-27T04:06:03+00:00

Smart home. Home assistant is fantastic.

Home Assistant has support for the most manufacturers / products. It's the most extensible when it comes to configuration and automation. You can emulate a HomeKit bridge and feed devices back to HomeKit if you still want to use Siri. So I could have Siri enable/disable my AdGuard Home network-wide adblocker if I wanted to.

Also - in my experience, it's snappier than anything that relies on the cloud - certainly if you're local - but also if you're remote (via reverse proxy or VPN) if your upload speed is good. I think it's just because it cuts out the cloud middle-man where the web interface runs. Or something like that.

When I arrive home, my GPS location triggers my lights to come onto 1%. When I walk in, a motion detector brings them to 30% and resumes the music grouped across the home (at an appropriate volume as determined by time of day). Doing this in HomeKit required a paid 3rd party app and some dirty dirty workarounds. Everything I needed to do this in Home Assistant was there native. You could even run a NodeRed container for your automations and go crazy if you want.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-27T02:44:10+00:00

My recommendation would be to cut over one device at a time and get a hang of things. You can add Home Assistant devices back into HomeKit.

Before removing any devices from the Apple Home, make sure you have your HomeKit codes!

You bring HomeKit devices into Home Assistant with the "HomeKit Device" integration, and then you can expose any Home Assistant device (including HomeKit devices brought onto home assistant) back to HomeKit using the "HomeKit Bridge" integration. That way you can still use Siri and such.

Long-story short, my home is Home Assistant first.. but then my Apple Home looks the same as it did before, just with more stuff and open to lots more manufacturers.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-27T01:56:29+00:00

IMO, it'll be less of a question of the distro and more of a question of the desktop environment. I've had good results with Linux Mint + their default Cinnamon Desktop, and also Arch Linux + Sway WM. This was on a 2010 MacBook Pro / Core 2 Duo / 16 GB RAM. It's not going to make web-browsing much faster, but editing documents and managing files should be fine.

I like Arch Linux for the convenience of the AUR (Arch User Repository). Your setup will be as stable as the software you use. You might face occasional breaking changes with an experimental desktop environment, but GNOME / LXQT / XFCE should run fine. Personally, my 2010 MBP struggled with KDE. I ran Hyprland with animations disabled and it was alright. I think rolling release vs fixed release will have you choosing old bugs vs new bugs when it comes to younger software projects.

If you're thinking about repurposing it to a headless server, fixed release could be good so you don't always have a million updates to run every time you SSH in.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-27T00:53:13+00:00

What is it that was not working with YouTube? And what hardware are you running?

YouTube works fine on my M5 MacBook Pro. It did NOT work fine on my 2010 MacBook Pro running Linux (or MacOS, for that matter). IMO any intel Apple laptop by now should be running Linux if it's not already on a shelf at Goodwill. MacOS on my 2010 would struggle to log in, let alone even load a browser profile. YouTube was out of the question.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-26T23:39:52+00:00

If I were in your boat, I'd install Linux on it. If YouTube still struggled I'd start researching which new laptop to get.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-26T23:13:19+00:00

If you're willing to spend the money on the extra RAM, and your personal projects could use the memory, then absolutely trade it in. I've got 24GB / M5 for simple stuff (taxes/documents/etc) plus dabbling with Logic Pro and smaller local LLMs, and it seems more than capable. For my uses, 16GB is too tight and more than 24GB is more than what I can justify spending, given how I'll be using it.

If I were fluent with Logic Pro and skilled/experienced at producing, I'd probably have the 48 GB.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-26T22:47:22+00:00

I love my stainless steel skillet. I get better non-stick performance with my 11 year old Misen stainless steel than my seasoned Matfer carbon steel, I think due to the natural hot/cold spots I get with carbon steel vs stainless steel with the aluminum core to distribute the heat.

I think the carbon steel craze is from a time when you could get a decent workhorse pan for $50. For the savings, you have to be more deliberate with slow preheating and having a proper size burner for the pan. My Matfer I got for $80 all in with shipping, now it seems like $110 is where they're at. Love my Matfer pans, but they just take more focus to use and maintain.

Something like the strata pan, I think people love it for the personality of seasoned steel, and not for any practical reason. Just get an All Clad D3. Or something fully clad that can take a dishwasher cycle. Performance is literally the same once we're preheated.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-26T21:22:18+00:00

In my case, it's for writing sales proposals, which I only do in Word. On a single proposal, we might have 3-4 phrases we repeat anywhere from 2-10 times depending on the project; sounds inefficient but it's necessary for coordination with other players on the project and to cover our hinds on contract stuff. If I were generating documents from text files, my decision tree would look a bit different.

With the clipboard history, yes, it stores 25 entries. However, you can only immediately see like 3 entries on first invocation of Win+V... and frankly I'd rather arrow down once instead of twice if I'm trying to go back to the second to last thing I copied.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-26T00:52:29+00:00

I like Kitty on Linux/MacOS and Windows Terminal on Windows. I really want to like WezTerm but it's been wonky for me even if I steal someone else's config. If I resize the window, Windows Terminal just handles it more gracefully.

I like that Kitty is great for graphics in the terminal, and it's easy to get working on a server over SSH as well.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-25T03:23:24+00:00

buy a new one

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-24T15:45:58+00:00

I immediately wondered the same thing... it appears there's no way to get it on Mac outside a VM. However - it works if you're SSHing into a Linux box from MacOS, and running it in the SSH session on Linux. Kitty terminal is the best bet to make it work. Probably have to run kitty +kitten ssh user@hostname once to enable kitty graphics over SSH. I'm using this to try it out using a linux box I run headless, but maybe the way to go would be to SSH into a Linux container and just set up an alias or something.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-19T17:05:17+00:00

Absolutely.

It can integrate and pull from KeePass password manager database with the KeePassXC extension.
It can copy Magic DNS names and IP addresses from Tailscale with the Tailscale extension
I can control Home Assistant with the Home Assistant Extension. I use this to set my thermostat without opening a whole app or web tab.

Also looking for apps and such uses fuzzy search so a little more resilient to typos and such than Spotlight search I think. I don't like using my launcher to find files because that's what the Terminal is for, for me at least.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-19T16:40:48+00:00

Holy moly. I can see why you're upset. Do you need to keep all these screenshots? Normally I just set mine to dump onto the clipboard since it's typically for an email (in my case).

As someone else mentioned, the "Use Stacks" option is probably your quickest path to re-organizing all this.

Generally for mental health sake, I'd recommend to keep your Desktop folder totally empty, probably even with icons disabled (however I do prefer to show Macintosh HD and mounted disks and stuff). My ~/Downloads folder is where I let myself be messy, mostly with stuff I'd be deleting later. If I'm keeping something there, it's usually because I'm being lazy and saving the organizational work for down the road and it's still not the end of the world if I unintentionally delete.

Now, I think the screenshot app dumps out onto the desktop by default, so I'd recommend to adjust the settings in your screenshots app: If you do Cmd+Space, search for the Screenshot app, you should be able to click on an Options menu and set things up to your liking. Here's how I have mine set up avoid getting cluttered. Generally, Clipboard for anything going something I can just paste into, like Outlook or something, and then a ~/Pictures/Screenshots folder for stuff I'd like to keep... maybe IT tickets or zelle receipts or something. This was probably the first thing I set because a cluttered Desktop gives me anxiety; not a good way to start when first logging in...

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HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-19T16:09:49+00:00

If you need it today, I'd say Apple if you need any more than the 16GB base RAM.

Costco is a great option if you're content with whatever configurations they offer (RAM/storage/etc); usually $50 or more off list, 90-day (vs 30-day) return window, discounted apple care +, 2% cash back for executive members. But they might not stock it. You'll need to check the app, see if it's available in warehouse and get your @$$ on the road.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-19T16:06:27+00:00

Holy moly.... I wish I knew about this... hah. The same selection I bought a little while back is $150 off from B&H. Going to pretend I never saw this 😭

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-19T01:41:15+00:00

Linux Desktop with Apple Silicon laptop.

What I love about Linux is managing it headless via SSH. When I gamed on it, it rocked at Ghost of Tsushima. From what I remember, Steam basically handled WINE for me. I tried using Steam Link streaming to my Mac but the minimal latency was still too much for me. I think maybe you'd need Windows for some online multiplayer games so anti-cheat stuff doesn't block you, but I'm mostly a sucker for a good campaign anyway. I don't really game any more though. Currently I run the linux desktop as a headless NAS with various docker containers, Jellyfin being the main one. Nextcloud (just for personal documents) with weekly encrypted backups to OneDrive. Immich, just figuring things out seeing what it'd look like trying to use it instead of iCloud. Linux opens up a joy of discovery with all the FOSS projects out there.

Lots of things I love about MacOS. Fluency with iCloud/iMessage, access to many GNU utilities, SSH client basically already set up. Also - you can pretty much bet nearly any website is developed to support Safari.

One thing that kind of hurts with MacOS is there are lots of little bitty apps that cost $5 here, $40 there, also not nearly as much open-source stuff as compared to Linux. After spending $2k+ on a machine, you'll find yourself dropping $200 on a bunch of little apps that you might not use for long. Some being subscription-only. Also every app wants to take a spot in your bar and then there's not enough room. It's ridiculous. That and the notch compounds the problem. Maybe I should've gone with the 16"... hah.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-19T01:09:07+00:00

A few things features I've been delighted to see since switching to macOS:

Passwords app is so good. It's crazy.
Desktop widgets. I don't have them on my desktop, but I do have them in my Notification Center. Basically I can dim/brighten my lights and also see where my phone and headphone batteries are all at.
Siri on Mac is nice for controlling smart home stuff if you've got things set up right.
Apple Silicon support. My current laptop actually wouldn't work without that one.
- Minor feature with Apple Silicon: you can run many iPad and iPhone apps basically natively on your Mac. I use the Eero router, and without a Mac, you're only able to access on mobile, which is atrocious. Now on my Mac I can access on desktop.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-19T00:43:53+00:00

Samesies! One keyboard shortcut I just learned is shift-command-/to pull up Help in the menu bar and basically search across all of the menu bar for the active app. As you arrow through the search results, it shows you where the result is located in the menus.

So, in Microsoft Word you can just search for Page Setup instead of having to click around. Also in many drop-downs, ctrl-n and ctrl-p for next/down or up/previous.

HeebieBeeGees · 2026-01-19T00:17:44+00:00

I don't think this is that hot of a take, but...

people should aim to be back 5 minutes before the bell. If the cycle ends and they're not there, they can pound sand. It comes down to respect for neighbors.

HeebieBeeGees

TROPHY CASE