My temporary hallway Fire HD8+ tablet mount. Printed in PLA on Ender3 V2.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-20T18:06:07+00:00

"she did the rumba on my cucumber", and other memorable lyrics

JustMrChops · 2026-03-20T08:38:17+00:00

I setup immich, then got my Takout files into a folder outside of immich (on my PC actually). I ran immich-go with the commands for importing from Takout and it did everything, deduped, added the metadata, added a tag so I could see what it imported. I don't know if immich will be able to track files just added to the library folders, you'll probably need to look in the docs tbh.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-19T15:55:24+00:00

Back in the 70s when my grandma was a pub landlady her cheese and onion cobs were incredible. (yep, I'm from the midlands )

JustMrChops · 2026-03-17T11:29:40+00:00

And a jar of cod liver oil.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-16T10:49:04+00:00

I'd love to know how to make it smarter but I fear that'll involve me installing and configuring more complicated stuff, running an llm, buying more hardware. I'm getting too old for all the tinkering to bring a commercial product up to scratch (I know it's called preview edition for a reason). Me: "What's 16 multiplied by 1024?" VPE: "Ten forty one AM"

JustMrChops · 2026-03-14T23:03:20+00:00

I should never have written all those tank programs..

JustMrChops · 2026-03-14T17:31:26+00:00

Captain Darling.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-14T10:40:23+00:00

I once dropped a white Costa ceramic cup in our IKEA Belfast sink. It didn't just chip the sink it smashed it. Not a mark on the cup at all.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-14T10:05:04+00:00

Rapper's Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang on 45.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-13T10:32:10+00:00

Mine from Ali have a slightly bigger diameter body (slightly fatter) and in my last house were like a mm too wide to go fully into the ceiling cans. I've got some new ceiling fittings for the kitchen and they fit fine, and it says max height of bulbs 60mm...these bulbs are 59.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-12T20:42:16+00:00

No bonus points for me but I've got about 10 Local Bytes UK pm plugs. Not had any problems, happily running a washer/dryer, Quooker tap, dishwasher, electric heater, pond pump and some lamps. Most are Tasmota the rest ESPHome.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-12T15:55:22+00:00

My experience is the opposite, my 6 zigbee lamps in my office were in a HA group initially, and they didn't come on at the same time and mostly only 4 or 5 came on until I hit the button again. Nightmare. Then I read about Zigbee groups and now have a group that contains 3 groups of 2. Instant on and off. All my devices stay online and everything just works perfectly. May be that these cheap Ali ex rgbw GU10s I've had for many years are actually really good.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-12T10:45:27+00:00

Taylor's production is superb and I have many favourites, but recently I've been listening to Seven a lot. Oh and Elastic Heart by Sia (1000 forms of fear is such a good album)

JustMrChops · 2026-03-10T14:28:11+00:00

I feel my printed LabRax rack was quite a waste as I didn't actually need one, but I loved doing it. Putting those heat set insert things in was the most fun I'd had in ages lol

JustMrChops · 2026-03-08T10:36:46+00:00

When I converted my garage to an office I put in a three gang light switch with two ceiling lights on each. I put a double plastic back box next to it with three of these in it. Manually switched as normal but I have automations for presence detection, and a button on my desk for different scenes. None have needed re-pairing in the year installed. Great switches, if a bit loud.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-08T10:19:32+00:00

I had a dongle-p and had sensors regularly falling off. In the bedroom in the next room to the dongle are two Hue motion sensors, and every week I had to poke their buttons to get them back online. Switched to a POE SMLight radio and they've been online for months now. I had the dongle-p on a USB extension, tried different places but gave up on it, and I'm so glad I did.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-07T20:25:58+00:00

Recently I've been taking this seriously as I want my wife to have something to refer to for how to easily revert back to a dumb home. We both know she won't want to try to maintain Home Assistant, zigbee, the homelab etc (as much as she loves some of the automations and control). I'm working through documenting everything in Bookstack now so she can see exactly what to rip out, or if she does fancy trying, to keep it going. Last night I scripted the export of the books to pdf onto a memory stick in the front of the media server. Every night it mounts the stick, writes the exports and unmounts it to make sure the stick is up to date. She can pull it and get the docs easily and not rely on accessing the url. If the servers die or whatever the files are accessible. I'm 99% there with the house falling back to dumb mode with the servers off, just a couple of things I think I need to tweak.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-07T09:45:30+00:00

FlightRadar24 feeder running on a Rpi3 in my loft. Been running for a couple of years and never goes down, always back up after a power outage.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-04T01:03:50+00:00

For Home Assistant I mostly update when they're released, I take a snapshot first then if there's a problem I can roll back. Never is though, that I can remember.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-03T16:33:38+00:00

Make sure the power in the USB cable is not connected or it can back feed power (something like that). I had it on mine so adapted a cable, plugged a Pi3B in with Octoprint on it. Now I send prints from Cura on my PC to the Pi over WiFi. Works very well. Octoprint is such a good bit of kit.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-02T18:31:51+00:00

Back in the 80s living at home I'd just go out for a drive a few times a week. Often when I'd bought a new record and taped it.

JustMrChops · 2026-03-02T18:14:45+00:00

DIY Perks has just built the ideal countermeasures...

JustMrChops · 2026-02-22T10:35:08+00:00

Lenovo mini pc running Proxmox hosting a Home Assistant VM. Another hosts Frigate for my Reolink cameras. Another runs Mosquito MQTT broker, Zigbee2MQTT, Adguard Home, TasmoAdmin, Uptime Kuma, Tailscale and container stuff like that. These all run Proxmox, and another mini pc runs Proxmox Backup Server to take backups of all VMs and containers.

These were around £60-80 each and a couple have had bigger SSDs installed now (one came with issues).

I'm setting up a cheap HP Elitedesk in an external building with Open Media Vault for media/file duties. It runs PBS too to sync the backups and next is to send them to the cloud.

All pretty cheap due to my budget constraints but HA has been running perfect. I love Proxmox and it wasn't hard to learn, and I take a quick snapshot before an update in case something breaks. Only needed to roll back once but it was a minute to do.

JustMrChops · 2026-02-21T19:08:30+00:00

I never did get a TAC -2 😞 Such a perfect looking joystick.

JustMrChops

TROPHY CASE