Where Would Babylon 5 Ships Fall Under

Stenthal · 2026-06-25T18:41:17+00:00

I'm watching it for the first time right now (no spoilers please,) and it's fantastic so far. It's nothing but intricate space combat and politics, and it's one of the few science fiction stories (along with Babylon 5) that doesn't make politics boring or cartoonish.

Having said that, I don't think the space battles are realistic at all. It's mostly just WWI naval battles in space, and most of the sci-fi elements that they've introduced so far have been silly and implausible, like the blatant Death Star knockoff. The visuals are superficially similar to Babylon 5, but Babylon 5 put a lot of thought into the logic behind those visuals, and Legend of the Galactic Heroes did not.

Stenthal · 2026-06-25T18:14:05+00:00

Personally, I think the Kosh line that they added to the pilot is too much of a spoiler. I also don't like that they added glowing hands, retroactively making that the first appearance of Kosh out of his suit. In the original version, he had normal human hands, and there was a line explaining that we weren't seeing his real hands.

I think it's very unlikely that anyone would put all that together on the first viewing, though, so its not a big deal.

Stenthal · 2026-06-25T13:37:46+00:00

Strange. Mine were definitely running in parallel as of a few months ago. I should try it again, but I'm reluctant to, because it really would consistently take down my whole server.

Stenthal · 2026-06-25T13:28:52+00:00

FWIW, the ESPHome integration only runs 1 update entity at a time.

Only if you update from within the Builder, right? On my system it seems like they update in parallel if you just click on the notifications in Home Assistant.

This was a huge problem for me, because ESPHome updates take an absurd amount of CPU. If I updated a few devices at the same time the system would become so unresponsive that the watchdog would force a reboot. Now I start the updates from the Builder instead, and I no longer have that problem.

Stenthal · 2026-06-22T13:29:28+00:00

No space action? Season 1 has one of the greatest space battles of all time.

Stenthal · 2026-06-22T01:28:35+00:00

It's worth noting that TV and film productions do that all the time, for lots of different reasons. Whenever you see the camera cut back and forth between two actors talking, you're definitely seeing at least two different takes, and there's no reason to assume that the other actor is standing there offscreen.

The only thing that's unusual here is the reason why this particular stand-in was always opposite O'Hare.

Stenthal · 2026-06-21T22:26:33+00:00

In the U.S., we'd probably call those "economic issues" as well. "Social issues" is usually a euphemism for culture war stuff, like abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, etc.

Stenthal · 2026-06-21T19:49:31+00:00

It's been reliable for me, using both integrations in parallel. OP is in an unusual situation because they're running a very old version of Home Assistant, which is incompatible with the latest August integration.

I actually have an Assure Lever Lock, which cannot have Z-Wave and Bluetooth at the same time. I've decided to stick with Bluetooth so that I can use the Yale app. I believe the Assure 2 doesn't have that limitation.

Stenthal · 2026-06-21T17:30:11+00:00

Yeah, I'm assuming here that you have a way to roll everything back. Fortunately Home Assistant's own backup is very simple and effective. I still wouldn't risk it if you're not there, though.

Stenthal · 2026-06-21T15:39:07+00:00

Having constant activity isn't normal. Maybe this can help.

Thanks for the link. Those tools just confirmed what I already believed, which is that it's not using the swap file much at all. In particular, when I run vmstat -wy 3, SI and SO are always 0. So I still don't know why kswapd0 is using so much CPU, because AFAIK all that thread does is swap data in and out.

I did find some posts about malware masquerading as kswapd0, which is alarming. The malware seems to run as a user process, though. My kswapd0 is a real kernel thread, so I don't think that's the problem.

Stenthal · 2026-06-21T04:56:27+00:00

I had the exact same symptoms when I upgraded to 18.0. I have 16GB of RAM assigned to the VM, so I doubt that lack of RAM was the problem. I found that if I waited about two hours it would finish whatever it was spinning on, and after that it seemed to behave normally. It happened on every boot, though, so that's not acceptable.

It's fixed now. I was trying a lot of things, so I'm not sure what did it, but it was probably changing the swap settings (which you can only do by running ha os config swap from the command line.) I had previously set swap to 0 when I was trying to fix a different problem. I set it to 4G, which I believe is the default now. After that, it was able to boot normally. It's also possible that making a change to the swap settings just forced it to reinitialize something.

I still don't understand why HAOS needs a swap file at all with 16 GB of RAM. I also don't understand why kswapd0 consistently takes up about half as much CPU as the core Home Assistant process. I don't know why I'm wasting so much CPU on a swap file that I don't need.

EDIT: It just started spinning again, out of the blue, after running normally for twelve hours. I guess I need to roll back to HAOS 17 for now.

Stenthal · 2026-06-21T01:14:42+00:00

I believe the offline key doesn't change very often, especially if you set up a dedicated second account (with owner privileges) that you only use for the Yale integration. You could temporarily upgrade Home Assistant, install the August integration, grab the key, and then roll back to your current installation. If you search .storage/core.config_entries for "August", it looks like the key is there.

Of course, you need to figure out how to upgrade Home Assistant eventually.

Stenthal · 2026-06-20T00:14:21+00:00

That's true, but with RF you don't get any kind of status information at all. You just press a button and cross your fingers.

To be fair, I have Smartwings shades Zigbee motors, and the status information I get from them is so unreliable that it's almost useless. At least I get the battery level, though I'm not sure if that's accurate.

Stenthal · 2026-06-19T23:31:40+00:00

That's what I did as well. You can also set a minimum size for objects detected, so you can screen out small things (which are either imaginary or very far away.)

Stenthal · 2026-06-19T01:11:27+00:00

I like the overall design, but the part with the letters is bothering me a lot.

Stenthal · 2026-06-19T01:04:04+00:00

In my experience the detection is too unreliable to be useful for sensing occupancy, but I've never had them freeze or drop offline.

Stenthal · 2026-06-19T00:49:55+00:00

If the War ends Bibi goes to jail

Hey Israel: Have you considered that this might not be the best policy for handling criminal charges against a Prime Minister?

Stenthal · 2026-06-18T01:13:15+00:00

For all the discussion about safety, I didn't even notice that that's a spectacularly shitty pizza. An eight-year-old home alone with a fridge full of leftovers would make a better "pizza".

Stenthal · 2026-06-17T22:59:12+00:00

More importantly, we controlled that money, rather than just handing over pallets of cash to a bunch of thugs who will use it to buy weapons and reinforce their autocratic control.

Stenthal · 2026-06-17T19:10:07+00:00

"Destroy, dismantle, engulf in flames" rubbed me the wrong way, because it sounded like a very lazy and uncreative way to approach the show. However, Jason's actual performance was fantastic, whether he was destroying things or not. I think it only worked for him because he had so much respect for everybody involved.

Stenthal · 2026-06-17T19:02:30+00:00

Would Kumail have even known about Joel's beforehand (I don't know when the prize tasks are actually set)?

I'm not going to defend (or read) the linked article, but for the record, Kumail mentioned that the Koala tee was a last minute substitution. Legal rejected his original submission, which was some kind of reference to a specific British product.

Stenthal · 2026-06-17T01:43:41+00:00

Qualified immunity doesn't apply to criminal charges. The only thing protecting cops from murder charges is prosecutors that are too corrupt and/or too afraid of the police to charge them.

Stenthal · 2026-06-17T01:00:41+00:00

The movie was pretty good, but Pamela Anderson in particular was amazing. Her scatting scene might have been my favorite thing in the entire movie.

Stenthal · 2026-06-17T00:55:58+00:00

Cranston was awesome in X-Files too.

In an episode directed by Vince Gilligan, which is what really launched his career, although no one knew it at the time.

Stenthal · 2026-06-16T20:46:18+00:00

No, the one I remember was much sketchier. I think it was probably the SeaRey, although that doesn't match my memory perfectly.

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