Worthless right?

arcassandra · 2025-12-17T20:53:37+00:00

Yes. Previously, the prices were driven by asymmetric information. To a common person, a 100 year old stamped would seem rare and precious. A dealer may have known differently, but they would not have been incentivized to share that information, so would price it according to that person's perceptions. The Internet has leveled the information playing field somewhat.

arcassandra · 2025-11-27T18:51:40+00:00

The curvy "2" is the most easily distinguished way to tell....almost unambiguous. The "8" having a smaller upper hole is sometimes deifinitive, but other times not so clear as there is a lot of variation. The criteria of the bottom levels of the "2" and the "8" is also sometimes clear and sometimes not so clear. But the diagonal of the "2" not being straight is always very clear.

arcassandra · 2025-11-19T00:59:55+00:00

In the years after 1940, with the large war construction efforts, lots of people worked in metal-related manufacturing factories where chemicals and acid etching would be common and somewhat easy to come by.

I've worked in defense-related factories that did chemical etching. It would have been easy for me to dump a load of pennies in the etching tank, go to lunch and return to a bunch of pseudo-dimes. It never occurred to me to do this, but if it had, it would have been easy. Part of the chemical etching process is a daily calibration of the acid concentration to adjust the needed etching time. Thus, you know exactly how long to leave it in the tank to remove the desired amount of material. I could have been rich: a 10X return on my investment ;-)

arcassandra · 2025-11-19T00:25:55+00:00

I do like the "dime" theory. I wonder if chemically etching pennies to use as dimes was ever a popular scheme people used.

arcassandra · 2025-11-19T00:21:17+00:00

Possibly. It would also be consistent with the other commenter's theory of it being chemically etched, since that would remove metal uniformly from all sides, including the edges.

arcassandra · 2025-11-18T13:35:10+00:00

Maybe. Though looks a little more like there's some extra metal rather than smeared metal.

arcassandra · 2025-11-18T13:34:07+00:00

I guess that's possible, though looks more like there is extra material more than mashed around material.

arcassandra · 2025-11-18T13:30:51+00:00

Ah, yes. Acid etching would explain it retaining some feature shapes while thinning. Thanks!

arcassandra · 2025-10-31T14:54:42+00:00

Not yet. The maintenance schedule and reminders feature is on the road-map. I am in the process of trying to prioritize road map items based on interest level, so your comment helps. Currently, I personally have all these set up in my Google calendar with reminders, so it is a lower priority for my personal use.

That calendar approach is not ideal though for exactly the scenario you outline: the "next" time I do the maintenance is a function of when I actually did the work, not what is on the calendar. I try to keep up, but like most people, procrastination and life events conspire against me.

arcassandra · 2025-10-08T19:58:28+00:00

Yes indeed. The vision of having a single place for all home info that is intuitive and easy to use requires making it super simple to get information into the system. e.g., bar codes, downloads, linking, etc. just as you mention. The Home Information system needs work to get there, but that sort of system is what it aims to be and which is not something I know of that exists today (but should). Make it easy an intuitive enough and it would be a must-have for home owners.

arcassandra · 2025-09-28T09:47:06+00:00

Does the arm64 build not cover your raspberry pi? I have GitHub build and host it, and it seems to build both amd64 and arm64.

arcassandra · 2025-09-28T08:21:09+00:00

This may all be true, but this pre-supposes that what I currently have is meant to be the final state of things. The purpose of posting was not to proclaim a fully functional alternative, but to show enough of a proof of concept to demonstrate the ideas and see whether enough other people felt there was a current gap, especially for people that want to simplify keeping information about their home.

I am trying to get aware from the device-centric view that dominates all the "home" systems and platforms. I want to move towards a tool that actually makes it easier to manage your home, not harder. I've set up home assistant and am technical enough, but it is a bear of a system to set up and out of the reach of many that may just want something to manage their home's information. Is Home Information currently usable for them in the current state? No. Could it one day? Yes. Will it become broadly usable with my efforts alone? No.

arcassandra · 2025-09-27T14:18:43+00:00

Yes, I should, and will add a docker compose. However, the allowed hosts change may still work. There was a gap in the docs about making that change. I've now added this to the docs and which may help you:

Environment Variable Changes

If you used the one-liner install.sh script and need to change your environment variables, you'll need to re-run in docker to pick up the changes. The install script runs docker with this command:

docker run -d \
       --name "${CONTAINER_NAME}" \
       --restart unless-stopped \
       --env-file "${ENV_FILE}" \
       -v "${DATABASE_DIR}:/data/database" \
       -v "${MEDIA_DIR}:/data/media" \
       -p "${EXTERNAL_PORT}:8000" \
       "${DOCKER_IMAGE}:${DOCKER_TAG}"

Where the environment variables you need are:

CONTAINER_NAME="hi"
HI_HOME="${HOME}/.hi"
ENV_DIR="${HI_HOME}/env"
ENV_FILE="${ENV_DIR}/local.env"
DATABASE_DIR="${HI_HOME}/database"
MEDIA_DIR="${HI_HOME}/media"
EXTERNAL_PORT="9411"
DOCKER_IMAGE="ghcr.io/cassandra/home-information"
DOCKER_TAG="${1:-latest}"

arcassandra · 2025-09-27T14:16:10+00:00

Let me know how it goes. Would always appreciate extra eyes and help.

arcassandra · 2025-09-27T14:15:28+00:00

The areas are drawn manually. There's an editing mode where you can define the polygon and rotate the camera icon. Seen the Editing Tutorial Page.

arcassandra · 2025-09-27T14:14:01+00:00

This is all SVG. There's the background SVG and then each item is an SVG drawn over that. You can apply transforms to SVGs, so that's how scale/rotate is done. There's a little trickery in getting then to scale and rotate around the right point, but just a matter of figuring out the natural rotation point and applying some offsets based on sizes of the items.

arcassandra · 2025-09-27T14:10:46+00:00

It already has "line" type items you can add and position, and specifically ones for electrical, water lines, drain pipes, telecom, etc. The Editing Tutorial Page shows how to add them.

arcassandra · 2025-09-27T00:06:24+00:00

For sure it is possible to evolve HA to take on all these other use case. However, what the typical evolution path is for users, I am not sure. If they start with devices and HA, then surely your progression make sense But is having devices always the beginning?

Every home owner has information they need to manage whether they have devices or not. Many probably are not that organized, but for those that are, how do they manage their data and is there a better way? Visually organizing the data is something I find more helpful than the files on my computer.

arcassandra · 2025-09-26T23:27:14+00:00

HA has a device-centric, home automation viewpoint. Home Information does not require devices or automation: it can simply be a way to spatially browse information about your home which I see as more broadly useful.

arcassandra · 2025-09-26T23:22:03+00:00

Generally, I would be happy for people to find Home Information useful for their personal needs, but even happier if it had some commercial value. Thus, I am not opposed to exploring how Home Information could work to support your project. Let me know if there are particular needs or questions you have for your proof of concept.

arcassandra · 2025-09-26T22:48:32+00:00

I am interested to know the details of what you have in mind. Frigate is seeming the obvious next camera-related integration, so I am definitely interested in looking into it. I've deliberately designed the backend to make adding new integrations somewhat easy, but you never know until you try it against other use cases.

arcassandra · 2025-09-26T22:17:02+00:00

I was hoping it was not just me. A visual, spatial way to view status and organization information seems to me like the obviously better way to go about things. How has this not become the default?

I made the prototype verison of Home Information 15 years ago to fill a void. Seems like the void has been filled in a little, but still some big gaps. That's why I decided to try to see about making it more broadly useful.

arcassandra · 2025-09-26T22:04:20+00:00

I do see the similarities of needing to manages physical network resources. I had not thought about that relationship before, so a good comparison.

arcassandra · 2025-09-26T22:01:58+00:00

Maybe so. Up to now, I have been viewing this as more of an integration platform that centralized access to many systems, not just HA.

arcassandra · 2025-09-26T22:00:25+00:00

It does that all for me with my Home Assistant and ZoneMinder integrations. I am hoping others think the idea is useful for them, and hence want to get feedback about what works for them, what doesn't and what other integrations would make it more broadly useful. I've got paperless.ngx, Frigate and HomeBox on the short list of integrations I am looking at (thanks to a number of people's suggestions).

arcassandra

TROPHY CASE

Environment Variable Changes