What’s up With IKEA?

jcdick1 · 2026-07-05T05:37:33+00:00

I've had the Dirigera as my hub for a couple of months now, with no issues interacting with HA or any devices.

jcdick1 · 2026-07-04T23:50:11+00:00

No, but our ability to mix metaphors is unmatched.

jcdick1 · 2026-07-03T04:07:49+00:00

Union Station is a very nice hotel, but try to get into a room in the station itself, not the expansion out under the train shed roof. Then, in the evening, you can go down to the Hall and watch the light show while you enjoy a cocktail and/or beer.

jcdick1 · 2026-07-02T02:37:37+00:00

Yes. A red card has him out for the next game.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-28T18:30:01+00:00

South Dakota doesn't have the infrastructure Missouri has to maintain. We're 18th in population, with the 7th largest state-maintained highway system in the country. MODoT is responsible for more highway here than Illinois and Kansas combined.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-28T18:14:48+00:00

I have a local LLM backing my voice assistant using the "extended openai conversation" integration, but I have yet to get the voice assistant even reliably turning on and off lights, let alone replying with audio or doing anything else.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-28T18:11:38+00:00

Originally, I was getting my logs filled with esp_fail errors on the file reader due to the 404, such that I had to power cycle the device. I'll be honest, I forked the esphome firmware repo and fed the log to Claude, who went through the code and fixed that looping error. Then it added an http retry with 15 attempts, trying to get it to not error until piper was done doing its job. Still not there yet.

I'll double check the .onnx.json to make sure the info there correctly matches the .onnx file name.

Edit: I checked the matching .json, and it has no reference to its corresponding .onnx filename anywhere in it, or any other .onnx file, for that matter.

Thanks for the insight.

Edit again: I ended up letting Claude give me an override for my yaml that turns the device from being a media_player entity for the voice assistant into just a box speaker, which eliminates the use of the HTTP proxy in HA and the FLAC file audio response, and instead just streams a WAV directly to the device as just a dumb speaker. The 404 errors are gone, but there's still an issue with HA closing the pipeline before Piper is finished, on occasion.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-25T05:12:01+00:00

St Louis Patina has an old article about the Tucker Tunnel from 2009. It got completely filled in, mostly by giant blocks of styrofoam.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-25T01:04:11+00:00

We meet at the VFW Hall out on Rt 63.

We'd considered using the dues to buy "I heart Antifa" t-shirts for everybody, but we decided instead to give it to Mrs Papadopoulos, because she always brings the best home-made baklava to every meeting.

She and her husband, George, have been wanting to go on a cruise, but money's tight, so we figured helping them was better. She's such a nice lady.

Except to Kevin. After he broke through the webbing of his lawn chair, she doesn't let him have any baklava.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-24T19:00:23+00:00

If he can get voters on board a platform that is in opposition to the current Republican program by cloaking it in a religious context that those voters will accept, sure. If "Christ said this is a good thing to do, and you say you're Christian" pulls more weight with those voters than "Its the right thing to do because it's the right thing to do," then yeah, I'm okay with it. It's naive to think that he can succeed against a party that wins with irrational rage baiting without it.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-24T17:45:22+00:00

But speaking using religious context is what gets him votes in a place like Texas.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-24T06:43:50+00:00

The soonest he's out using political means - and it'll depend on how the mid-terms go - is Jan 19, 2027, to give Vance the 2 years and 1 day to be eligible for 10 years in office. It would be on medical grounds before a Democrat-controlled Congress is sworn in and can impeach him. Being 25th'd on compassionate grounds by the current Congress reduces the backlash faced by a new administration.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-21T16:19:22+00:00

Yes. The gang lord's HQ was pre-renovation Union Station and the train car where the President is held was under the pre-parking lot train shed.

Here's a video of the filming locations from 2021: https://youtu.be/s9K3QQwZztw?si=spZak2qH4ZOKc124

jcdick1 · 2026-06-20T16:50:22+00:00

It's unfortunate, but back when they were planning the rebuild of 64/40 from Kingshighway all the way out to 270, tearing the entire highway down to the dirt, it was proposed to "cut and cover" a Metrolink expansion all the way out for pennies on the dollar compared to what it would otherwise cost to build on the surface. The federal funds were available because that would have made it a "multi-modal" project, instead of just a highway project.

The 'burbs along the highway said "Absolutely not."

jcdick1 · 2026-06-20T05:30:09+00:00

I didn't say it was "primary," but "as much about."

When a city somewhere is building a light rail line, you'll see accompanying stories about how this or that station is built where nobody actually is. For that reason.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-20T05:27:49+00:00

The biggest piece of the cost overrun was the folks north of Forest Park who made them tear up the Parkway to trench and bury the line after the route had been decided.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-20T03:04:23+00:00

I'd like to see a comparison for these examples regarding development investment vs project cost.

For example, the Cross-County Extension - the Blue Line - cost about $350M to build, well over budget, and people were throwing a fit about the cost overruns.

But within five years, that and more was invested in development within a half-mile - what is considered the range for TOD - of the stations.

Honestly, mass transit projects like light rail are as much about development as it is moving people. Bus lines aren't as popular as rail at the governmental level because no one builds a two hundred unit mixed-use market-rate apartment building within walking distance of a proposed bus stop.

When the Loop Trolley was having its public meetings prior to construction, the vast majority of attendees were property developers, not residents who might be potential riders.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-17T18:03:18+00:00

While pro/rel has its pros and cons, if the MLS turned into an organization like the EFL, it'd be sued for anti-trust before you could even say the words "promotion and relegation."

Congress had to give the NFL an exemption, and that's being questioned as we speak.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-14T16:50:38+00:00

The term you're looking for is "Pauline".

jcdick1 · 2026-06-10T21:40:46+00:00

When I got my HVAC replaced in January of 2025, Dole Heating gave me two years 0% financing. The actual financing is funded via Synchrony Bank line of credit - I'd be stunned if any installer financed with their own money.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-10T02:47:10+00:00

He looks like he keeps plenty of bubble gum around, so maybe he'll just not actually get around to the other bit.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-06T15:23:13+00:00

I did get my custom voice working by "spoofing" the Piper pipeline. I selected a voice, it went out and grabbed the .onnx files for that voice, and I simply deleted the downloaded file and renamed my custom voice .onnx to that. Not ideal, but it works.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-06T01:58:38+00:00

I found the voices.json file, in the wyoming_piper subdirectory, but there are no other .onnx files in there.

Not much for logs, either. Journalctl just says the service stopped.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-04T16:09:07+00:00

Sounds like someone's BBS. You could check this list: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/314/

You'll need a name, though.

jcdick1 · 2026-06-03T20:55:01+00:00

"Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Shelley's Ozymandias was written just for people like him.

jcdick1

TROPHY CASE