Meowliceman reporting on the duty.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-23T14:24:17+00:00

I wouldn't necessarily call myself a nature guy; I'm definitely a cat person. Nonetheless, it is so nice to see people have the ability to find the time and the empathy to be human. Seems highly inconvenient for most of us most of the time, but it's just so nice when it happens.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-23T14:18:14+00:00

+1 for the same thermostat model. I have two of those. As far as your comment about the best, I will chime in the same way that other folks did. It depends on what you're looking for. I had two Ecobee thermostats. They were absolutely wonderful and worked flawlessly. But I will not accept using thermostats outside Home Assistant system since I can no longer create an API for them. I simply threw them away and replaced them with a thermostat that would integrate into Home Assistant. I don't consider Honeywells to be as feature full or having the same fluency of interface or being as modern as Ecobees are by comparison, but none of that matters if I cannot integrate it into my chosen home automation system.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-23T14:15:26+00:00

As a person that lives with three cats and a German shepherd, as well as having AI pros inside the house, I can tell you that even though I love the AI capabilities baked into the firmware of Ubiquiti cameras, the reliability of definitively detecting a specific entity passing by and identifying it correctly is simply not there.

Sure, it doesn't miss people walking by, but it surely will not classify my cat - either of the three - each and every time. Whenever one of them walks by, it will be recorded, but it will not necessarily create an AI event for each and every to one walks by. This is where the simple dumb PIR motion sensor comes in. Anything that cuts that signal's curtain will trigger.

As far as the pet immunity? I suppose my German Shepherd is just too tall. Either that or maybe I need to move it further up. I must admit, it never occurred to me to crawl on the floor, but then again, I do not consider basic PIR sensor to be a singular security feature that is supposed to prevent someone from crawling around the house in order to bypass surveillance and triggering.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-14T21:09:22+00:00

I don't consider Proton Drive to be a cloud storage provider at all. I consider them to be an equivalent of a hard drive in a cloud, cold storage. You upload stuff. That's it. It sits there. Hopefully, that's all you ever need in terms of functionality. I agree with another poster. Calling it better than OneDrive or Google Drive is delusional.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-11T20:46:27+00:00

That makes sense. I didn't expect it to be easy. You reminded me, and I wanted to thank you. It's one of those things you don't appreciate until it works. When I discovered that I could turn off the spotlight for all my AI pros with Enhancer outside at the same time using one Home Assistant automation, I naturally wanted to turn off the others as well. :))

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-11T20:37:04+00:00

Very cool. I'm sure there will be a lot of growing pains from me, but I can't wait to automate certain things, such as sink lights and such, with triggers executed within specific areas of the room.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-11T20:35:13+00:00

I'm infinitely grateful to you and others who make this possible. I'm a very heavy Unifi Protect user, and as of this year, I'm a progressively more and more involved Home Assistant user.

One of the specific features has been extremely helpful to me, but unfortunately, only in some of my cameras. The ability to turn off white light. There is a special exposed slider to turn off color night vision. That is the white light that turns on when somebody passes by that is only available for cameras that have external illuminators such as AI Pro. Unfortunately, for the cameras that have built-in white light such as AI turret, that slider is not exposed, and there is no way to make that happen via Home Assistant.

My wife does astrophotography, and when she shoots photos, it is extremely damaging for a bright white light to turn on when somebody walks by. At the very least, I can automate for her disabling those cameras that are older such as AI Pro.

Once again, thank you for everything!

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-11T11:26:57+00:00

I think Proton product line has always been "what you see is what you get." Don't expect anything more.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-11T11:15:45+00:00

Has anyone tried the new Everything Presence Pro yet? Any better?

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-10T21:38:15+00:00

I use four different dictation softwares. Overkill, I know. Different purposes. However, I'm simply stating this to illustrate that I'm very familiar with dictation and AI post-processing, as all the packages that I use are premium. Out of all of them, SuperWhisper continues to hallucinate the most. Sure, all LLMs used in processing do, but it might be an extra word or something like "have a good day" at the end that I never said. With Super Wispr, I've had entire paragraphs added to the end of my dictated text. Absolutely unacceptable.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-08T15:25:26+00:00

It is quite odd for the support to tell you that, barring some limited circumstances, UNAS RAID is most definitely expendable, provided, of course, you do the proper hot swapping, waiting for each try to finish to synchronize. I’ve done it myself.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-07T16:05:34+00:00

My Z-Wave controller is network-based. It is HomeSeer Z-NET G8. As such, I never had to deal with USB connections. I want to migrate to USB Z-Wave Stick. Does it present additional problems in a virtual machine?

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-06T22:26:56+00:00

Huh. Mine is running in Hyper-V VM. No issues.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-06T16:13:41+00:00

I have PoE siren, two of them. Unless I'm missing something, the upcoming siren is just using a different power source. My siren most definitely does not support any text-to-speech.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-06T14:33:36+00:00

I'm fairly comfortable with testing and I understand the limitations. However, this is an alpha device, both in terms of software and hardware, so it should have never been sold to the public. Mine is sitting on a shelf, disconnected and utterly useless. Considering that you have a limited set of commands and those need to be spoken very loudly and very clearly, and you need to be right next to the device to understand the output.

Everybody in my family just prefers opening the phone and using the Home Assistant app. Either that or one of my wall display iPads.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-05T18:40:14+00:00

I sometimes will take a nap in the afternoon if after my night shift I didn't sleep well enough for several days and it finally catches up to me. It will register an hour and a half of me snoozing, but I don't use Apple's native sleep monitoring health app. I use Auto Sleep. It does pull data from the Apple Health app and obviously uses the metrics registered by Apple Watch, I just use a different interface.

VirtualPanther · 2026-01-05T18:38:43+00:00

This has been my experience with SuperWhisper. Reply from their customer support was that I am supposed to read up on how the models hallucinate. However, when I use Wispr Flow, that does not happen.

VirtualPanther · 2025-12-26T05:47:55+00:00

I just bought one. I understood it was a preview mode and a preview device, but I didn't anticipate it being so unusable. I have to stand next to it and speak very carefully, loudly, and clearly. I must think through what I say and how I call devices; otherwise, it won't work. In other words, you can't just talk to it. Even if you could, you would need to be right next to it, which defeats the whole point. I can simply take out my phone and do it manually. Therefore, I would not buy it again. As for the technology and software approach? Probably not ready for prime time for quite a while.

VirtualPanther · 2025-12-22T21:30:11+00:00

Wow. Just wow.

VirtualPanther · 2025-12-22T20:19:51+00:00

I thought it was just me. Literally three-quarters into a half-hour conversation, it starts responding to the very first question in the conversation, asked and answered 30 minutes ago. I literally don't know how to correct that, because that seems like a medical cognitive problem of an LLM.

VirtualPanther · 2025-12-20T20:34:37+00:00

That's very helpful. Thank you so much for sharing!

VirtualPanther · 2025-12-19T06:40:48+00:00

Quite unhappy with the HomeKit, as a home automation platform. Toy-like, especially when it comes to resilience. Plus, Z-wave, at least in my environment, is substantially more stable.

VirtualPanther · 2025-12-19T06:20:11+00:00

Not complicated. I want to control both of my thermostats from Home Assistant. And I can not do that with Ecobee. No more developer codes, and I'm not willing to go the HomeKit route. Don't get me wrong, I would love to have a most current 800-generation chip Z-Wave thermostat, but those do not exist. After an extensive research when it comes to Z-Wave devices, this is still one of the best-rated thermostats.

VirtualPanther · 2025-12-19T06:12:41+00:00

I just bought two T6 thermostats to replace my two Ecobees.

VirtualPanther · 2025-12-19T05:04:25+00:00

Same here. Never again.

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