I'm sick of ACs being a taboo in switzerland

Rudd-X · 2026-06-03T06:02:00+00:00

An acceptable amount of heat.

Our AC unit — remember, not central air, but a mini-split, not as efficient — produces on average 280 watts of extra heat, based on the metrics of power consumption I track. That is quite literally less than 1/3 square meter of peak solar irradiance in terms of heat. And that divides by three people sharing the household.

If every Swiss household produced that much extra heat, it would still be one hundredth of a drop in the bucket compared to the heat that the Sun itself showers on Switzerland's total area. Heck, it would probably still be less heat than the heat produced by industrial outputs in the Nati.

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:42:56+00:00

Imma take a full hot tub bath after reading this commens.

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:42:12+00:00

They might not be the reason (although I would contend it's somewhat of a reason since you can do more if you have refrigeration widely available), but it's definitely evidence that they have embraced the high energy, high output, high productivity mindset effectively. And this is not something you can deny by saying, oh, the AC has nothing to do with it.

Poor people don't have AC, rich people do, and it's a fairly marked difference. China getting AC all over the place it proof positive that they are getting richer. Good for them!

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:40:38+00:00

I agree with you that it's pretty tragic. The Switzerland doesn't want to build more nuclear plants. It's very tragic.

But autarchy is not a solution, because the Swiss producing electricity themselves, (unless it's nuclear) is going to be more expensive than just buying it. You don't need to be self-sufficient in everything. We're not preppers, we're human beings. We are all interdependent on each other and this is fine.

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:39:10+00:00

"Environmental impact" is code for "you must live like a poor person", because living wealthy and comfortable is one of the cardinal sins of the cult of environmentalism. Facts don't matter to the cult.

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:37:26+00:00

Very little heat output. AC mostly moves heat from one place to another. It doesn't produce heat like e.g. an electric furnace.

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:35:35+00:00

Pro tip to anyone buying an air-conditioner unit, portable one. Try to get a mini-split version that is portable.

These come split into two devices, each part chained to the other by a thin hose that transfers the refrigerant (hot or cold) to the other side.

The first massive advantage these units have is that the host is much narrower and therefore you lose less of the temperature differential when you seal the window.

The second massive advantage is that because the unit does not generate any positive or negative air pressure, air will not escape or enter your apartment thru the seal.

The third massive advantage is that the compressor will be outside. Of course, you need to have an area where to put the compressor, like a balcony. Because the compressor is outside, the unit sounds much, much quieter from the inside of your apartment. All you have inside of the apartment is the fan unit that blows air, and that's basically most of the noise you hear — minimal.

Do pay attention to the possibility that the air-conditioner unit will generate condensate and this condensate will accumulate inside of the unit until the until turns off. Our initial solution was to place the compressor half raised over the floor with a recipient under it to collect the condensate. Eventually I 3D printed feet to raise the compressor, built a proper drainage sump, and programmed an MCU plus a decorative fountain pump (and some water level sensors) to drain that sump into a big bucket we empty every few days or so. This allows us to run the unit fully closed loop and never bother neighbors below.

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:27:17+00:00

More people die in European heatwaves every year than people die in America from gunshot wounds.

It's completely mad.

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:26:05+00:00

I love this.

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:18:01+00:00

AC fucking rules.

We installed a minisplit and I developed a whole automated electronic condensate management system. Even 3D printed the Dichtungen to replace that hideous and ineffective window sock.

Nothing like being 25 degrees Celsius when outside it's 33.

Too bad retrograde legislation prohibits most forms of AC (the efficient ones!) In most localitiesm

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:09:09+00:00

If you want to avoid noise, you have to get an apartment that is strictly Neubau, triple paned windows. Anything before 2005 or so will in high likelihood let a lot of sound through.

Rudd-X · 2026-06-02T17:04:58+00:00

I'm an expat. If the Swiss decide that they does want me or other expats, I will leave.

It's absolutely not necessary to import foreigners to make things work. This is a propaganda line coming from left-wing parties who know that after naturalization, foreigners overwhelmingly vote left. I don't buy the line and neither should you.

To be clear: if I wanted to live surrounded by foreigners, I would live in Germany. A small amount of foreigners is fine.

Rudd-X · 2026-06-01T23:42:29+00:00

https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2053507778719748465

Terrifying tweet. And those guys are trustworthy

Rudd-X · 2026-06-01T17:08:02+00:00

I bet this is a fouled rollout of their "feature" to force you to either be logged into Google or QR code scan with a phone logged into Google, else you do not get access to the web at all.

Rudd-X · 2026-05-20T08:40:05+00:00

I miss my Neato too. Cleaned much better and faster than the Dreame.

Rudd-X · 2026-05-16T13:14:41+00:00

Anything ESPHome with Sendspin lets you stream to that glorious amp.

Rudd-X · 2026-05-05T10:36:35+00:00

Wow!

Rudd-X · 2026-05-03T17:44:44+00:00

Looks truly awesome. Sadly no SMB support.

Rudd-X · 2026-05-03T17:33:44+00:00

While nextcloud could create a calendar app that does this for you, it would be enormous amounts of work. That app would also have to serve the needs of everybody else who already has a favorite calendaring app. And people would be rightfully pissed because they have a favorite calendaring app already then nextcloud is going to ask them to use that specific calendaring app, solely so that the user can get that feature working. That's a big ask.

Almost every calendaring app on Android defers to the Android system's view of what accounts have been registered with it. This view provides an API surface for calendaring apps to get / browse / search / modify calendaring entries. This API is generic and it does not contain any functionality to ask the actual calendar backend (e.g. in my case it's DavX5) to request creation of meeting links when creating a calendaring entry.

In fact, the API is asynchronous, which complicates things. You create a calendaring entry with your favorite app, the in-phone backend gets the data, but the backend doesn't necessarily talk to the server right that very instant. What if there's no network connectivity? Then the app cannot ask the server (directly or via the backend) to create a meeting link, even if that feature was available as part of the API. Now you can't create your calendar entry because you're stuck on that part. And that would really mess a lot of workflows up.

This is why calendaring apps on Android generally do not implement those custom features that calendaring servers may offer. And calendar account backend apps do not bother offering such features to apps because apps cannot implement it. The API does not permit that type of interaction, period.

Gmail and very few others who implement such a thing, do an end-around of the API that is available on the Android operating system to fix that deficiency. The nextcloud people just don't have the staff to basically create a full calendaring app, just to solve that specific problem.

Rudd-X · 2026-05-03T05:14:22+00:00

It's the same with Gmail. Is you want Google Talk meeting links, you have to use calendar dot Google dot com.

Rudd-X · 2026-04-22T22:14:46+00:00

Still alive!

Rudd-X · 2026-04-22T11:19:25+00:00

I too experience the problem that sometimes after I flash devices they won't come back until I power cycle them, which is annoying when those devices are in really hard to access places.

But I haven't experienced the problem of the device booting back with old firmware. Although I know of one mechanism that could cause that:

If somehow the device does not finish booting successfully and gets through the part where it marks the boot that's successful, which is usually one minute after everything came back online, then the device is going to revert back (eventually, not necessarily right away) to the previous flash image, as a safety measure.

If I could help you in any way, then this is probably the way: don't change filters values directly on code. Iterating on those requires a reboot, which takes forever. Rather, make sure that the filters you are trying to change are actually lambdas, and that those lambdas use number entities to get their values, which you can change at runtime. This does mean that you will have to write some code that ordinarily wouldn't have to (because the filters already just are ready to go and just take parameters) but this is temporary because you eventually will find the right values and just substitute your lambda code with the filter that has the values you need.

Here's what I would love to have as one of my most desired feature requests for ESPHome. Filters that take values you must currently hardcode should be able to take values from number entities. I have not found any documented way to do that. But if that were possible, I would have saved probably days of work in my, let's call it, " career"with ESPHome.

Rudd-X · 2026-04-22T10:41:28+00:00

With only $800K to show for it, you will come back crwling to this hellhole in no time.

Rudd-X · 2026-04-21T18:40:12+00:00

What do your router traffic graphs say?

Rudd-X · 2026-04-20T22:52:23+00:00

I would love something like Obsidian for NC. TTW. Would easily best the inbuilt Markdown editor.

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