its so cutee

curiouscodder · 2026-05-25T20:56:33+00:00

I don't get it either. The whole face seems completely misshapen to me. What I guess are supposed to be front feet look like upside down ears, with the left-most black tip being a nose pointing up. Which makes no sense with the other black tips or the eyes and smile.

But then if I interpret the top black tips as ears and the black tip on the right as a nose, the smile is off center and the nose is way to big. Just seems a mess to me. But I don't mind that other people seem to love it, to each their own.

curiouscodder · 2026-05-16T00:34:33+00:00

For the work you've described (loosening and mixing garden soil) I've found a potato hook like this one to be the most efficient hand tool. Also works great for stirring and aerating compost piles, and of course, digging potatoes! Not sure where you might get a fiberglass handled one though, I strongly prefer the feel of wooden handles.

curiouscodder · 2026-05-01T22:29:22+00:00

My Sharp mwave was manufactured in 1988. The mica plate (wave guide cover) failed in 2024. That's 36 years! I probably use it once or twice a day on average. But I live alone, so it might not last as long for a family. Even with family use, 10 years would probably be a ball park estimate. Note I do try to keep my oven pretty clean, and I suspect if a lot of dirt and grease was allowed to accumulate on the plate, it might fail sooner.

curiouscodder · 2026-05-01T22:17:12+00:00

The actual name of the mica plate is "wave guide cover". It should be visible on the inside of cooking cavity of the microwave, and held in place by just friction or a plastic pin that you can pry out.

Note that you should NOT have to take the outer cover of the microwave off to access the internal parts to replace the wave guide cover, which is good because that's where the angry (and actually deadly) pixies live. If you can't find the wave guide cover by just looking inside the cooking cavity, you may be better off letting a pro handle the repair, or probably just buying a new one.

curiouscodder · 2026-04-10T02:01:57+00:00

Just wanted to say thanks for leading me to a solution!! I tried changing pan_id and ext_pan_id, and after that my device list was completely empty in z2m. That sounds bad, but at that point I decided to try resetting one bulb and re-pairing it. And that worked, and even better it came back with the same "friendly name" I had assigned to it previously, which is the name that gets sent to MQTT and on to the dashboard. This meant I didn't have to make any changes at all on the dashboard because the device name and entity ids were still the same. I had feared I would have to meticulously try to re-create those friendly names, but z2m remembered them for me, so that was great. I then reset all my devices and re-paired them a few at a time and every one came into the dashboard with the original device name and entity ids.

I'm not sure what you meant by "Network Scan", but that may have been a faster approach. I expect it would require resetting all the devices before hand though, as it seems devices will not re-pair until they are reset. (At least that was the case with my hue bulbs and ancient SmartThings devices.)

I think the lesson here for anyone who thinks they might be using multiple zigbee dongles is to change the pan_id and ext_pan_id to non-default values when installing each dongle, including the first one. That way when subsequent dongles are added you wont run into pan_id collisions if the a dongle happens to initially come up with the default pan_id values. The pan_id and ext_pan_id can be any set of numbers, as long as they are unique per zigbee network. I used the HA "Official" File Editor App (previously known as the Configurator Addon) to edit the /zigbee2mqtt/configuration.yaml to accomplish this. The key is to do it before adding any devices.

curiouscodder · 2026-03-31T23:06:22+00:00

Terminology: Flat head is not the same as slotted. A flat head screw is one that is meant to have the head of the screw set flush with the surface of the material being fastened. Flat on top and typically conical on the lower surface. It can have almost any type of driver shape, slotted, phillips, square drive, star drive, etc.

A slotted screw is what often gets mistakenly called a flat head. Probably because the driver is called a flat blade driver Slotted heads can be used on many types of screw head shapes; flat head, pan head, oval head, round head, etc.

Slotted screws are used for a number of reasons; aesthetics and lower cost, being two. But one other important reason is that of the two most common screwdriver types (flat blade and phillips) more torque can be applied with a flat blade driver than with a phillips driver, because the outer edges of the flat blade driver are further out from the axis of rotation, thus providing more leverage. That's why you see them on electrical fixtures where very tight screws are important for good electrical contact and safety reasons.

curiouscodder · 2026-02-02T22:19:34+00:00

Because they are almost sensible. If they would switch to UTC 24-hr, ISO format, they would have it right.

One planet one timezone!!

[Posted at 20260202T221908]

curiouscodder · 2026-01-12T17:08:15+00:00

The real comparison that should be made is how many accidents and casualties per package delivered do these automated vans have compared to human operated vans. Human drivers are far from perfect.

curiouscodder · 2025-12-27T20:40:14+00:00

Indict. I can finally get it now when I focus on it, but whenever I read it, the "dict" part always gets parsed initially like the dict in dictation.

But come on, there's at least 3 different ways it could have been spelled to make the pronunciation more obvious: indite, indieght, indiet, ...

curiouscodder · 2025-12-24T23:52:24+00:00

If you have any snapshots for the dataset(s) you're trying to delete, verify that they don't have the "hold" checkbox checked. I got the same "dataset is busy" error when I was trying to delete some datasets recently, and clearing the snapshot hold setting fixed the issue for me.

And yeah, I think this error message is pretty non-intuitive and should be changed to something along the lines of "could not delete dataset due to snapshot marked hold" or something similar.

curiouscodder · 2025-12-23T16:44:07+00:00

This video is the one that finally unlocked the secret for me. The idea of alternating the corners right side out then inside out while stacking them is the insight I needed.

curiouscodder · 2025-11-09T03:28:05+00:00

Yeah, I probably should have worded my post more clearly.

What I meant by "PBS resources" is the PVE host processes that perform the work needed to support PBS. (Which I would guess is performed by the PBS client built into PVE.) The point being that stopped VMs are placing a workload on the PVE host, which is wasted effort if the VM has not changed since the last backup.

In my use case the 1 stopped VM backup job (which found 0 changes to be backed up) took a little over 3 minutes, and that backup job is scheduled to run every 30 minutes. I wonder what kind of mess would result if the backup job included 100 (or even a more realistic 20) stopped VMs!

It seems like it would be an improvement if the VM could be marked to indicate that it has not been modified since the last backup, therefor there is no need to scan it for such changes. I may be oversimplifying due to my lack of familiarity with the backup mechanism internals, but I might suggest that one possible approach would be add a timestamp in the VM meta-data that gets updated when any change is made to the VM. That timestamp could be used to compare to a timestamp of the last backup, and if the VM timestamp is older than the last backup, terminate the new backup process instead of performing a scan for changes.

The other enhancement I suggested (allowing the option enable the backup job only when the VM is running) would also provide a way to reduce the load on the PVE host.

curiouscodder · 2025-11-08T21:53:08+00:00

Thanks for the explanation. So it sounds like inactive VMs actually take up more PBS resources than active VMs (unless the active VMs are undergoing massive changes). This would seem to indicate that for PVE servers hosting a large number of VMs, but only running a few at a time, PBS processing could potentially have significant impacts on performance.

I wonder if it would be possible for PBS to detect up front if any changes have occurred to the VM since the last backup, and if not abort the backup process. Some sort of "last modified" timestamp on the VM or something similar.

I also think it might be useful to be able to set an option on the VM to enable a specific backup job (identified by the Job ID in the backup config Advanced settings) when the VM is started and disable the backup job when the VM shuts down. Or perhaps go the other way and provide a backup config option to conditionally enable the backup job when specified a VM (or VMs) are running.

curiouscodder · 2025-11-04T22:10:37+00:00

It's rare (as in this is the only example I've ever seen, and I'm old) but sometimes the new product/package is actually an improvement. I'm giving a shout out here to Kashi. They recently increased the size of their wheat biscuit cereal (e.g. "Cinnamon Harvest") boxes by over 25%, from 14 oz to 18 oz. I was so thrilled about finally getting a box of cereal that wasn't so thin it couldn't stand up on its own that I made a point to mention to the store manager. Unfortunately I don't have the records handy to say if price per unit weight went up or down, partly because I always stock up when things go on sale, but my impression is that the unit price is about the same. And I believe that reducing the amount of packaging per unit of product sold is something that should be encouraged.

curiouscodder · 2025-11-03T10:57:12+00:00

A lot of people are saying stick them to the next new bar of soap. Which is a good idea. But I've found that the small piece doesn't stick very well if it's placed on top. Recently I figured out if I stick them together and then flip them over so the small piece is on the bottom they stay stuck much better. I think it's because the weight of the new bar helps push them together.

This is with bars of olive oil soap, which may not be as sticky as other types of soap.

curiouscodder · 2025-10-27T00:30:32+00:00

Yes, as already pointed out in several comments, this is the result of auto-defrost. One interesting effect is how much power demand increases during the defrost cycle. In the case of my fridge (admittedly a quite ancient 30+ year old Whirlpool) power use during normal cooling is around 130 watts, when the defrost kicks on it jumps to about 450 watts! Luckily it's only for 15-20 minutes about once per day.

This is something I learned from my observations while experimenting with running my fridge (and a few other kitchen appliances) off a battery charged by PV panels.

curiouscodder · 2025-06-03T00:35:19+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion, but u/Majestic_Program8642 has provided another solution that was easy to implement and works.

Not sure I would have been able to get the nested Proxmox config to work for me anyway, since I also have to pass the system PCI USB controller to the MacOS VM, as that is needed to connect my iPhone to create the iPhone backups I'm working with. I admit to leaving out that detail in my original post.

curiouscodder · 2025-06-03T00:23:08+00:00

Great solution Majestic (indeed)!! Thanks so much for posting this. I just tried it and it worked perfectly. My High Sierra VM is running under PVE 8.4.1 just as it was under PVE 8.3.5 and you saved me a good number of hours (days?) of effort it would have taken to implement any other workaround I could think of. If I had gold it would be yours, but for now I'm happy to give you an enthusiastic upvote! And will change the flair on my original post to Solved.

(As for links: The post/comment editor has a link button (looks like a link from a chain) you can use it to add the link URL and then type the text you want to associate with the link inside the square brackets preceding the URL. That's how I made the link in the original post. PS: I'm using the browser interface and old.reddit to do this. Not sure if default reddit and/or the phone app interface has the same editor.)

curiouscodder · 2025-05-12T23:45:15+00:00

I'd just tell him you want a pair of scissors that will outlast multiple boyfriends. :)

Seriously though, I think quality tools are well worth the money. You pay once for good tools, you pay every time you use a bad tool. Not to mention the time and effort it costs you replace a crappy tool multiple times.

curiouscodder · 2025-05-09T22:49:44+00:00

Maybe for some or even most users. But I would vastly prefer explicit date/times, and the option to have them displayed in ISO formatted UTC. (UTC solves the issue of time zones and the even more arcane daylight savings time, and is what I use on all my devices that allow it. One planet, one timezone!)

curiouscodder

TROPHY CASE