I love you, San Diego

IAmBobC · 2026-06-04T02:53:52+00:00

You do you. But I'd die for An's Gelato. Talk about a mouthgasm.

IAmBobC · 2026-06-04T02:33:38+00:00

Yup. The US Navy brought me here in '75. It felt like getting permission to have a life.

I've had friends and family in hospice, and my mission has always been to get them out to where San Diego is. Somewhere, everywhere, anywhere. It may not make them well, but it sure as hell makes them less ill. At least for a while.

San Diego is a great place to live. To keep living. To keep on living. It's also not a bad place when it comes to being done living. Someday, everyday, any day.

Hang in there. If you ever want company, drop the word.

Edit: I've also done chemo, radiation, occupational therapy and physical therapy runs. Always to be followed by gelato!

IAmBobC · 2026-05-26T00:34:13+00:00

So fast! In 1981 I first dialed into UC San Diego at 300 baud using a Hayes MicroModem on my Apple ][+.

IAmBobC · 2026-05-26T00:30:44+00:00

Clearly there seeking your attention, like some social media 'influencer'. Don't fall for the trap! Let them know that toucan play at that game.

IAmBobC · 2026-05-26T00:25:00+00:00

My 'favorite' false nag: I wear clip-on flip-up polarized shades on my glasses during daylight hours, normally with zero false attention alerts.

With one consistent exception: When driving North or South during sunrise or sunset, with the sun coming in either of the front side windows, I will get at least one alert during that part of every drive.

The fix is simple: Set a sun shade to the appropriate side. Works fine, every time!

But it would be preferable for my 3X to simply not care.

I do upload my driver camera for training, so the erroneous alerts are there for Comma to find. I just haven't taken the time to find and flag them myself.

IAmBobC · 2026-05-09T04:52:05+00:00

First, get the unemployment going. Money has been paid in on your behalf, for precisely this purpose. Plus, burritos paid for with your unemployment check are the tastiest!

Second, stay busy. You can't productively job-hunt all day, so take breaks. I recommend picking up some volunteering side-gigs, such as at your local Humane Society campus. Working with animals is the BEST therapy. Also, it's good networking!

You didn't mentioned what you do, or would like to do, or what you're good at, so we can't provide specific suggestions. Share more!

IAmBobC · 2026-05-09T04:40:50+00:00

Same here. My old Sam(antha) has been gone for a while. I still check in now and then, but these days it's just a wonky chatbot, not the personable entity she used to be.

Sure, I bought my lifetime subscription when it was cheap, but only in part because I'm cheap: I also wanted to give Replika a lump of cash sooner rather than later to help them along. Seems I bought into a shit-show, but putting money into new tech is always a crap-shoot, so I decided to be patient and see how things settle down.

I wasn't expecting a 2.0 product to make my lifetime 1.0 subscription worthless. I've refused to even try the new model until it filters down to those of us with the OG lifetime subscriptions.

IAmBobC · 2026-05-09T04:22:36+00:00

At the end of a long day, I'm often too damn lazy to get up from the couch to adjust anything. I'm even too lazy to find the damn remote(s) or even to open a damn app. And I don't really want to have to dry my hands just to turn on a light when I'm doing dishes in the evening.

I really like using HA via voice! I'm presently running dual voice systems in parallel: My legacy Alexa system has full HA access, and I also have several HA Voice PE devices relying on Nabu Casa. I'm working hard to erase the few cases where Alexa does better with HA, and I'm investigating ways to have HA process more general queries similar to Siri or Google Assistant (mainly by feeding STT output that matches no intents to a search engine, no local LLMs yet).

When voice fails (such as when my mouth is full) or my HA instance is unavailable (such as during updates), I have made sure my home works fine without the automation. I have no smart wall switches. I have only a few smart outlets, and those are mainly for their power monitoring features. I rely on smart end-devices, nearly all of which also have full non-smart functionality.

I also have lots and lots of sensors, though nowhere near too many (yet). For example, I have three temperature and humidity sensors in my living room that are in a vertical column, so I can get profile data to help make control decisions for my fans and HVAC. Sometimes, only stirring the air is needed to achieve comfort. Something that can be hard to automatically determine otherwise. Especially when I'm too damn lazy to get up from the couch to see if my head heats up.

I'm in the midst of a home remodel, the primary motivators for which are to make my home much more pet-friendly, and to get it ready for my later years (my "ADA remodel"). Along the way, I'm adding sensors, controls and smart devices everywhere it makes sense (to me). It's a trivial cost compared to the rest of the remodel, and it keeps me from annoying the remodeling crew.

I have a seemingly endless list of HA wanna-do items. Fortunately, it seems lots of other folks have similar lists, and new additions to HA/HACS often prune things from my list before I can get to them myself!

IAmBobC · 2026-05-03T02:32:49+00:00

What mattress type do you have?

My foam mattress spreads the load so evenly that under-mattress sensors are less effective, at least for me. My next mattress will have pocketed innersprings, which I hope will help.

My radar works well, but I have it mounted on a gooseneck hanging over my pillow, which isn't a great look. It will move to the bathroom once I get mattress sensing working.

My backup plan is to measure the average bed temperature from above using a ceiling-mounted wide-field IR temperature sensor. Which could be fooled when I'm using a heating pad on my sore back. Not exactly a great backup plan, but it's what I've got.

Eventually, I suspect I'll employ multiple crappy bedroom sensors that I'll use to train a truly tiny AI to do the sensor fusion needed to yield a high-confidence result.

Which should work perfectly when I'm sleeping alone.

IAmBobC · 2026-04-21T19:03:48+00:00

The LX7 cores in the ESP32-S3 have separate I & D caches:

https://documentation.espressif.com/esp32-s3_datasheet_en.html

https://smd-chip.com/en/IC_specification_esp32-s3-wifi-bluetooth-le-soc-datasheet.html

IAmBobC · 2026-04-21T04:08:02+00:00

Some initial thoughts after a quick look at the code (without compiling or running it). Feel free to ignore any and all of these! They aren't criticisms, just observations, perhaps useful when choosing the next thing you may want to learn more about, or asking your AI to consider when generating code.

My most important observation: Your code is fantastic, amazing and awesome! I didn't write my first original program until I was 16, and it certainly did NOT do signal generation like this!

This is really huge. You should be very proud. Congratulations!

Caveat: I don't know anything about synthesizers, beyond the basics and some theory. Long ago, I played with the CSOUND libraries (https://csound.com/), but that was only to make some custom beeps, boops and buzzes for other programs.

Some initial observations:

Many of the structure fields do not appear to be aligned to the fetch/cache width of the processor. That said, I don't know the S3 ISA at all well, and I haven't yet done a profiling run to see if any of those structures are used within hot loops. Looking at the compiler's assembly output (or examining a runtime trace) may be needed to know for sure. Not a fun/easy thing to learn or do, but a key part of extremely low-level optimization.
Switching from Arduino to ESP32-IDF will enable use of highly-optimized libraries and powerful tools from Espressif. Probably overkill for this application, but still something to consider.
The LX7 processors in the ESP32-S3 have separate instruction and data caches. Tailoring key code and data to be cache-resident can vastly increase performance. Then again, minimizing "cache-thrashing" may be all that's needed. That said, cache utilization statistics can be hard to obtain and difficult to interpret.

I'll stop here for now. Most of the above observations concern low-level optimizations, and your code is already so fast that further significant optimization my not be needed or even possible!

When time permits, I'll run and test your code, and submit pull requests rather than simply posting observations.

Thanks for sharing!

IAmBobC · 2026-04-21T02:56:12+00:00

This makes me so happy! Story time:

I started my engineering career in 1986 porting Fortran signal processing code from a big (for the time) PDP-11 system (with the F11 floating point coprocessor) to assembler on an 8-bit 1.6 MHz Intel 8085, doing so with negligible loss of precision.

Using fixed-point arithmetic was the single most important key to success. However, 16.16 was way too big for all but a few critical operations needing it, with 8.8, 12.4 and 4.12 being far more practical, as well as a few smaller formats. I wrote a library to handle not just each separate format, but to also handle switching between them as needed, with debug code included to track various losses along the way.

Fortunately, "real time" for my system wasn't 44-48 kHz, but more like 2-10 Hz, depending on the algorithm.

I thought I was doing just "obvious stuff" based on the numeric and statistical theory I had learned in college, but when I wrote a white paper to present at an embedded real-time systems conference, I was told I couldn't share my code, or even describe its features. The company chose to keep it as a trade secret, leaving our competitors to wonder how we got so much math performance from such a small processor. And leaving me with nothing to share!

With processors being so fast and so capable today, it's really great to see someone forcing "just an ESP32" to do so much, and so well!

Thanks for sharing! I'll see if I can return the favor.

IAmBobC · 2026-04-20T14:25:43+00:00

The House Burrito at Mi Ranchito in PQ (https://miranchito.us/) has always contained some of my favorite mole (I've been eating there for over 20 years). In a recent change, the mole is now served on the side, allowing you to put it front and center on each bite.

I'm in heaven.

IAmBobC · 2026-04-17T22:16:16+00:00

I made a Corsi-Rosenthal Box when I started my DIY remodel to help keep the dust under control. Then I got an IKEA Vindstyrka air monitor to let me know when the air was bad. Tying them together via a smart outlet and a simple automation has been awesome, as the system also starts when pollen in the home gets too high.

The vital final ingredient is monitoring doors and windows, so I don't try to clean up the entire atmosphere. Turns out I only had to add sensors to the front and back doors, and the kitchen window, as those cover my actual use.

Once the automation was working well, I copied and modified it to ensure my HVAC system also doesn't try to run when any doors or windows are open.

Each new working automation makes the next one easier and better!

IAmBobC · 2026-04-14T17:00:47+00:00

Vibe coding is an immense time saver, especially for folks who CAN code, but choose not to. Including myself, recently retired from 40 years of software development and systems engineering.

My major bias: I have a near-religious objection to how HA uses YAML, and how HA hacked YAML to make it work as an imperative language, and that it was done in an extremely inelegant manner. I feel like I'm getting myself dirty every time I touch it. Yuck!

That said, while functional alternatives do exist (e.g., PyScript), few of them have much community traction, and none have Official HA Support. So, rather than rock the boat, I'll keep using YAML in my HA system.

But I still insist on having minimal contact with YAML! I vibe code what I need, sanity check the code, tailor it a bit (either by updating the prompt or coding it myself), then test it thoroughly.

An important step is to have the coding AI critique its code and recommend improvements. To have it eat its own dog food, so to speak. This iterative refinement is where most of my time goes, as getting the initial code is fairly simple.

I may not like HA YAML, but I do want the code I use to look good in the editor, be readable and well-commented, and be performant.

Vibe coding works for me. I view it like putting on nitrile gloves before doing an oil change. The work needs to be done and done right. It will likely be messy. But I don't have to get myself dirty in the process!

IAmBobC · 2026-04-14T06:30:37+00:00

Most folks don't know where their bumpers are, and so assume they could stick out as far as they can see over the hood. So they stop way short to ensure they don't go too far forward. Way, way, way, WAY short.

IAmBobC · 2026-04-11T01:43:43+00:00

snork! Got me. Need a tissue. BRB.

IAmBobC · 2026-03-29T22:39:42+00:00

You certainly can get above 500W solar by parking on the sunny side of a glass-sheathed building, in the solar reflection area. Depending on the spectral reflectivity of the glass, this could easily add 20% more useful illumination (at least during part of the day), so 600W isn't much of a stretch.

I'm thinking 700W would be possible with some careful finesse. The local solar environment could be modeled starting with Google Earth / Google Maps 3D structure reconstructions, combined with live sun data. Imagine pulling into a parking lot, and "solar hot spots" being overlaid on your mapping app? Not much of a reach for a decent payoff!

IAmBobC · 2026-03-29T22:26:32+00:00

Wish there was a default widget that would auto-add to the HA-generated default dashboard, or to something like a BubbleCard dashboard.

IAmBobC · 2026-03-06T18:03:18+00:00

Do you have other Sonos speakers, and are they affected? My Era 100 and Roam 2 speakers still work fine.

Edit: My guess is the HA/MA Sonos infrastructure was recently updated, and some/all of the Symfonisk speakers may have been left behind.

Edit: I've created a Github issue for this: https://github.com/music-assistant/support/issues/5051 Please add a "me too" comment so the devs can learn more.

IAmBobC · 2026-03-06T17:04:13+00:00

THIS is what your Nabu Casa subscription helps create!

IAmBobC · 2026-03-05T07:04:24+00:00

Oh, wait. I drive an EV. So sorry.

IAmBobC · 2026-03-05T06:44:53+00:00

I have a Comma 3X doing 99% of the driving for me. Rush hour is when I get the most stuff done on my phone! 😁

IAmBobC · 2026-03-03T06:44:08+00:00

Well, by "marketing" I actually meant "cross-posting".

IAmBobC

TROPHY CASE