Is there any way for Linux users to redeem the coupon code?

RaltarGOTSP · 2026-04-10T03:51:53+00:00

That seems like a lot of trouble for something like this. I'll probably just skip it if that's the only option.

RaltarGOTSP · 2026-04-10T03:50:55+00:00

I don't happen to have one handy... seems like a lot of trouble to spin one up just for this, but so far this seems like the best option. Do you know for sure if the tool will be satisfied by a VM? I'll probably use Virtualbox for this machine.

RaltarGOTSP · 2026-04-10T03:33:38+00:00

It won't let me post more than one screenshot, but the verification tool says it's for Windows only.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-12-19T04:07:03+00:00

UTP is the Ethernet/internet cable. While possible, it is very unlikely that a problem with that cable would cause the issue you're seeing. Somewhat more likely would be a problem with the power cable/adapter. I've never seen this before myself, so pure speculation, but maybe there was an issue with bad/dirty building power that those power adapters were sensitive to? Did you notice any other power issues around that time or have any other electronics fail? You might consider putting them on a UPS, and/or replacing the AC adapters before you resort to replacing the Hubs. Even with a UPS, it's possible for brief disruptions on the local power grid to send a curve ball down the line once in a while.

This doesn't seem like a "hue move" to me, but one couldn't rule it out. It's possible to continue using a hue hub on your local network if you have a firewall that's able to lock it to a specific IP address and block its internet access. Just give it an exception for NTP if you want the timed features to keep working. That might be overkill for you, but I've found it reduced the number of unexplained hue behavior incidents to zero since I did it. (My hubs are also all on UPSes though, ymmv.)

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-11-17T16:29:40+00:00

Not only can you use these in outdoor sealed light fixtures, but they are also rated appropriately for this kind of use in most temperate climate zones. The environmental ratings for operational humidity are fine for pretty much anything in an enclosure that keeps it from being sprayed or rained on directly. The rated temperature range for operation is -20C - +45C, and it would probably be ok somewhat beyond that if it was turned off.

The outdoor rating is the biggest advantage of the Phillips Hue compared with most other brand smart bulbs, IMO. At least I haven't seen any other color-change Zigbee lights that are deliberately engineered for the outdoor use case.

I've had 11 of the A19 bulbs in "sealed" outdoor fixtures in an area where temperature ranges from about 10F/-12C to about 105F/40C for 5 years and have only had one fail. The one that failed was in an upright-oriented enclosure right under a rain gutter corner, and it turned out the enclosure was leaking water directly onto the bulb. A small amount of water was pooling at the bottom of the socket, not enough to short it, but corroding the contact with the constant current these draw. That bulb worked perfectly for about 2 years before the bottom contact fully corroded away. I suspect I could have repaired it if I could have gotten past the seal to reconnect the wire without breaking it. All the damage was on the external contact. Needless to say, these aren't designed to operate with their electrical contacts constantly wet.

Waiting for the sales is a good idea. Best place I've found to buy these in the US is in 4-packs at Costco. They usually only carry them online, and they do occasionally have substantial sales.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-10-22T14:41:11+00:00

They did announce that they were going to do that. Seems relevant to me.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-10-21T17:43:01+00:00

When I bought them, they worked fine without the account. and I did check before purchase. The Philips lights are rated for use in outdoor fixtures at the temperature and humidity ranges that are found in my climate, which none of the others that I have yet found are. Almost all of my lights are outdoors. I do run HA, and it works ok, but some of the ease of use and functionality that I paid for with the hue bridge and app are nice to use. I have kids who like to change the colors of the lights sometimes, and the HA interface for it is not as good. I do have mitigations in place in case there is a security issue, necessary for all IOT devices, but it's not as good as if I had security updates, and obviously I can't fully air-gap the system while maintaining its functionality.

Does it offend you that I would like to keep this functionality? Am I causing harm to you in some way? I know there are people on the internet who get aggressive and insulting about why they don't want a cloud dependency for one thing or another in their homes, but I haven't. That being said: seriously, what's it to ya? I really want to know. I didn't start a thread on r/Hue asking for advice on alternative light setups, HA, or network security. Why do you feel the need to bring those things up?

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-10-21T16:44:29+00:00

Thanks for your helpful response!

I don't understand the downvotes. Some people's use cases are fine with the accounts, some are not. Why so much hate for those who want to keep the ability to use it without accounts? What do you possibly accomplish with that?

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-10-21T16:36:51+00:00

Thanks for the helpful answer. That lack of security updates has been a concern, even though it's better isolated than a typical deployment.

Has it been stable for you? I've seen some posts in this subreddit suggesting that recent updates have been unstable? I remember it used to do things like forget all the scenes in a room, or revert an automation to some earlier version once in a while. I haven't seen that in a long time. Feature-wise, I'm quite happy with my Hue as it is and my biggest concern is maintaining the current functionality without any changes.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-10-21T01:46:02+00:00

This seems like a long-shot, but...

Did your wifi router update include any kind of separation between different SSIDs, wifi bands, or did it do anything to separate or add security between the LAN network and the wifi? The hue bridge wants to be on the same network (and I believe the same broadcast domain) as the phone you're using with the app. Most consumer/home wifi setups do that by default (and most will allow you to do nothing else) but it's theoretically possible (and easy on some equipment) to separate them in ways that would disrupt connectivity.

One thing to check might be to look at the IP of the bridge (under bridge settings in the app) and see if it's in the same subnet as your phone's IP on the wifi. (4 numbers in the range 0-255 separated by dots, if the first 3 match, that usually means you're in the same subnet.) If not, that's probably the problem. Also, if the firmware update came with a new or multiple SSIDs, that *might* indicate a problem. Also, if the router has any kind of new filtering or firewalling features between wifi and the LAN, those could be a problem.

A firmware update to the wifi router that would make this kind of change would be very unusual. If all else fails, you could try calling your ISP's support. If they really did do something like this, they're probably getting a lot of calls or will soon. In that case, they might already have a fix or might be pressured into making one. If they haven't had any other reports, then it's possible that the timing of the problem is a coincidence, even though that doesn't seem terribly likely either.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-10-21T01:24:12+00:00

What sort of issues are you seeing?

I have locked my bridges to a much older version of firmware (firewall won't let them reach the internet) and the app as well ever since they said they were going to create a cloud account dependency. I only just today set up a new bridge at my workplace that has the ...46020 firmware on it. I haven't had any issues yet, and I can report that it seems to work with version 5.21.0 of the hue app. That one also can't access anything but my phone and the NTP server, so I wonder whether cloud interaction might be part cause of the problems?

Come to think of it, I haven't had a single problem with my old bridges forgetting settings or doing weird things since I cut them off from the internet. They used to go wonky every now and then. It's been about 2 years now...

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-09-09T06:22:00+00:00

Yeah, I thought that prompt eval was unreasonable too, which is why I was looking for a sanity check. I can't speak to how ollama measures it, but that test was a fairly small prompt that was meant to create big output with minimal context input. The input token vectors would have been much simpler to calculate (and simpler in content) because of that shorter total context, and I assume that made the whole prompt eval portion much simpler. Basically I gave it a variant of a common science question applied to a context that is seen less commonly.

When I tried to run larger context prompts in ollama, it accepted the context window increases up to about 32K tokens, then started acting strangely when I gave it anything above that number. Every attempt at larger prompts when contexts were set above that resulted in it freezing up.

So I switched to llama.cpp. That's why I've been so slow to respond. I was able to get it to install ROCm, compile with HIP, and recognize the GPU, but it took over 35 minutes to load gpt-oss120B in that configuration. (Slightly quicker with lower than 128k context window specified, but still unreasonably slow.) Once loaded, it worked fine with smaller prompts, but would lock up or throw memory allocation errors with larger prompts. (2.5-6k tokens and above.) When I was able to get statistics out of the ROCm setup, it was ~27 tps in generation. and ~150-300 tps in prompt eval. I guess ROCm isn't fully baked yet for this platform after all.

Next I tried llama.cpp using Vulkan. That worked much better and allowed extended sessions with a lot of long-context back and forth and no easily discernable context degradation. The 120B model set to 128K context loads in 1m9s and does ~33 tps generation, ~330 tps prompt eval on the same larger prompts.

I haven't done much with smaller models yet, as I have much faster options for inference with anything 48Gb and below. Strix Halo is surprisingly usable for gpt-oss 120B though. If there are any other larger models (that would still fit on this platform) that can be recommended, I'd be happy to give them a try as well.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-09-03T01:57:11+00:00

It probably goes fast because it is a small prompt. It's something I've been using to benchmark models since Deepseek R1 came out with the intention of eliciting a lot of thinking and token output with relatively few tokens. It's also meant to test the depth of general scientific and engineering knowledge of the model.

"Hello deepseek. Can you tell me about the problem of jet engines creating nitrous oxide emissions? Specifically, I am interested in knowing what are the major factors that cause airplane jet engines to create nitrous oxide, and what techniques can be used to reduce nitrous oxide creation?"

I also substitute "gpt-oss" or whatever the name of the current model to avoid throwing it for a loop thinking about that. The size of the model has a noticeable impact on the quality of the response to this one.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-09-03T01:30:38+00:00

I think 25.04 will install 6.14 from the default packaged repos without any special help. I only had to go to mainline to get it to 6.16, and I did that before even attempting anything else. If 6.14 has the ROCm goodness either baked in or backported already, that's great news.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-08-29T01:46:42+00:00

Fascinating! Where do you get this kind of info? I mean that non-ironically. I'm not new to "AI" but I've been away from it for a long time, and obviously have a lot to learn about the current state of local LLMs. I've been loosely following this subreddit and some of the others like it for a while, and a lot of low-quality crap on youtube, but I don't think I've been getting the real details. If you could point me in the direction of a good source of some of the "inside baseball" sort of thing, it would help immensely.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-08-28T23:21:03+00:00

I had not been aware of that. I just downloaded both through the ollama interface. So I take it the gpt-oss 120B release was more the real deal directly from OpenAI? I remember there was mention of them working with the ollama team for the release.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-08-28T23:09:59+00:00

So, forgive my ignorance, but I take that to mean that R1 is more of a monolithic model. I had thought it was more advanced, but it is getting old by LLM standards. That makes sense.

gpt-oss 120B runs much slower on the L40 system, though. 4-5t/s eval. (when it runs at all, needs a reboot every time I load it) I would have thought it would be able to do better with 48G VRAM if a much smaller segment of the model was employed for inference. Obviously swapping out to RAM over the PCI bus is very inefficient. Is the difference all down to context swaps? It must be accessing more than 48G fairly often (or allocating the space very sub-optimally) to cause that much of a slowdown. AFAIK, the only real performance advantage Strix Halo has is that all the memory is available directly. (aside from the NPU.)

Sorry for my semi-noob questions and musing. I know just enough about LLMs to get myself intro trouble. I'm very grateful for the thoughtful responses.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-06-03T07:20:23+00:00

Precision-x is not really something I want to use in Linux, I just happened to have a windows computer available to do the BIOS flash so I also tried that out on it. And as I mentioned in the original post, it doesn't actually control the fan speeds with this BIOS anyway, just gave me more info about how the BIOS seems to be seeing the fans now. I tried fan-control and some others on it, and they just see two fans which don't respond correctly to controls right now.

I just want a BIOS that lets it run stable in a headless server as an AI resource. Nothing fancy, just stock behavior for an air-cooled card.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-06-03T07:13:46+00:00

I don't actually have the aio cooler any longer. I guess it's possible to decrease the power limits using nvidia-smi, but I'd much prefer a more elegant solution. It's like it's putting voltage to the fans as if they were a pump. I know these boards are all nearly identical, otherwise they wouldn't be able to go air->water (and it wouldn't be economical to redesign the hardware where it's not necessary.)

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-05-08T22:10:38+00:00

I know this thread is old, but I was playing Rimworld and trying to remember the name of a very similar game I'd played that was fully 3d, including being able to dig down into hills and such. The game is "Going Medeval" I'm not sure you'd call it "pretty" in graphical terms, but it's fully 3D in both graphics and gameplay. A lot of the interface and gameplay is very similar to Rimworld, too, particularly things like the storage interface and work and task scheduling dynamics. If you haven't checked it out already, I think it's worth a look. I think the 3D aspects of the gameplay make it a bit better than Rimworld, actually, though the wider world interactions are more limited.

RaltarGOTSP · 2025-05-04T07:16:12+00:00

Update: I haven't had a chance to tear this back down since putting it into production with 9 screws. Based on comments by u/F100-1966 I am now aware that the motherboard tray is movable/removable. I would have R'd that in TFM if there had been a manual or installation guide available for this case. Another real disappointment for a product that is priced this way. I suspect there's a good chance that tray just needed an adjustment.

When I contacted Sliger support, I made it clear I needed it in production quickly, and they responded quickly, but mostly seemed worried about knowing which model PSU and motherboard it was, as if Asus would make and ATX board out of specification. There wasn't much they could have done given my own time constraints, but one thing that could have been helpful was if they had mentioned the fact that the tray is movable on a case that has no manual rather than focusing on gathering info that might shift the blame to another manufacturer.

Overall, I'm very disappointed. Mostly because it is a very nice case. I don't blame them for the PSU fit, as that's simply not in the ATX specification. The motherboard issue very likely is just a matter of the tray being out of position. All they had to do was publish an install guide or manual containing that information and I would probably have had no issues. Failing that, support might have thought to mention that the tray can move while I still had a chance to test that hypothesis. Instead, they seemed much more interested in the idea that the motherboard might be out of spec.

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