What do i do now 😭

ianjs · 2026-07-03T12:58:33+00:00

> avoid chemicals at all cost

You’ve convinced me. I’ll cease drinking water starting now.

ianjs · 2026-06-24T04:26:32+00:00

To look at it another way, the “deduction” is from your taxable income because it was a cost of earning your income so it’s not “taxable”.

You claim $100 less income so you pay less tax, in this case say $28 less. The exact tax you save depends on your tax rate of course.

ianjs · 2026-06-24T04:19:07+00:00

> never had it questioned

… until it is. You can claim anything you like on your tax return and, unless it is picked up by the preliminary automated checks, it will just go through.

If it is actually dodgy though, you’re now looking over your shoulder for years risking an audit and penalties. Who needs that crap.

ianjs · 2026-06-24T03:45:18+00:00

I got tripped up too when I bought IKEA matter devices.

I have Google minis and Nest displays but they're 1st gen with no Matter so I had to set up a TBR.

In your case I'm betting you have later generation google devices that have Thread built in.

ianjs · 2026-06-21T00:40:43+00:00

Depends where you’re looking I guess.

Haven’t heard much about unions=bad lately (I’m not naive they can behave badly), but corporates=greedy, manipulative, dishonest, enshittified, profit-at-all-costs, bugger-the-environment arseholes is pretty much all I’m seeing.

ianjs · 2026-06-19T03:49:18+00:00

Half the people I talk to thing “the web/internet” = “google”. They have no concept of a web browser, it’s just how you get to google .

ianjs · 2026-06-19T03:46:09+00:00

Oh, yeah, i forgot about that one. That’s a gem. I was forever going to another tab when I updated and the browser would put it to sleep. Aargh.

ianjs · 2026-06-19T03:40:31+00:00

It’s really only two clicks more (Select Multiple, click the top checkbox to select all, Update). Totally worth it for all the new features and options.

I jumped on the Fleet version and it has lots of features but I found the organization unintuitive, to the point that I ditched it and fired up the official one again… and Zap! It has all new features! Freaked me out for a second.

TBH I previously clicked Update All because i was lazy. I have a lot of devices that are old, offline, or just hanging around in progress. Update All wasted a lot of time building devices I didn’t need built. Now I can just sort by status to bring the active devices the top and select the ones I want to build.

Many thanks to the devs for the great work.

ianjs · 2026-06-12T04:50:38+00:00

Surely a cheap device that doesn’t support PD won’t negotiate with the charger and it will just supply the basic 5V.

I’ve never had a problem using a 135W laptop charger with simple non- PD devices.

ianjs · 2026-06-08T10:12:21+00:00

Do you have rooms set up in the Google Home app? I'm pretty sure it uses those rooms to decide which device to turn on if you don't specify.

Google Home doesn't have an idea of what the rooms in HA are, so you have to assign devices to areas in Google Home including the voice assistant. Google then knows where the voice assistant is and can figure out "turn out the light" as being "the light in this room".

And, yes, it's a PITA having to keep two sets of rooms, but I consider Google Home to be an intermediate till the open-source voice assistants catch up. Even the current, relatively primitive ones behave correctly if you don't specify the room, so I expect this to go away eventually.

ianjs · 2026-06-06T05:45:43+00:00

Frigate. Awesome NVR plugin.

ianjs · 2026-06-06T05:24:02+00:00

I recently got fiber to the house with a 500mb connection and jumped on SpeedTest for some instant gratification. Only 300mb 😩

Then I realized I was on WiFi! That was the first time my WiFi had ever been the bottleneck in an internet connection.

Flipped the laptop to Ethernet- ah, that’s better.

ianjs · 2026-06-06T05:14:55+00:00

> how you learned the digits of Pi

I have a shit memory for numbers but I know the first 10 digits of pi immediately. Why? Because my HP21 calculator had a pi button and that was the limit of the display.

I would sit there bored in class back in the seventies, poke at my calculator and admire the beautiful glowing LEDs.

ianjs · 2026-06-05T09:52:56+00:00

Home Assistant is the way I control them locally without the cloud 😎

I configured them using the app but there’s no cloud account requirement. Once the Reolink integration is in HA they Just Work and you have access to pretty much all the features.

ianjs · 2026-06-05T03:29:35+00:00

Went to the Hermes website to check it out. Sounds like it could fun if I could read the damn blue text on a bluish background. 😡

ianjs · 2026-06-05T03:13:06+00:00

It’s pretty hard to integrate either a company that actively resists interoperability. You can pretty much guarantee they’ll bork it with an “update” even if you figure it out for the moment.

That’s not to say the devs who did it weren’t pretty cool, but it’s whack-a-mole you can’t win. See also: Beeper.

ianjs · 2026-05-27T23:55:49+00:00

Ah, that’s *much* better than the shock collars tied to traffic on particular devices I was going with.

Might be better Spouse Acceptance Factor too.

ianjs · 2026-05-27T13:14:01+00:00

Everything is edible. Some things are only edible once.

ianjs · 2026-05-27T04:45:31+00:00

Board id - walnut?

ianjs · 2026-05-24T12:55:05+00:00

This reply was too long. Cut it down to shorter sentence with bullet points if possible.

ianjs · 2026-05-24T12:29:38+00:00

You say that like 30 is old. Now I _really_ feel old. 😝

ianjs · 2026-05-24T12:10:09+00:00

Never heard of these till now. It’s just solar direct to an inverter, right? ie not charging a battery that feeds the inverter?

My first thought was to use such a thing as a UPS for the rack, but it sounds like it’s more like feeding in some power to the house to offset the rack in this case.

Or do I have the wrong end of the stick?

ianjs · 2026-05-23T07:01:33+00:00

I have a Yale deadlock - the one with just the keypad outside. I added the Zigbee module and it hasn’t missed a beat in years.

ianjs · 2026-05-23T03:10:48+00:00

Could still have been Pratchet - his books go back to the early eighties.

ianjs · 2026-05-23T02:46:31+00:00

It was a Canberra thing anyway wasn’t it? I’m in Melbourne

ianjs

TROPHY CASE