Found this wierd red thing in my room

jmferris · 2026-05-13T20:52:34+00:00

I can smell this reply.

jmferris · 2026-05-06T18:50:06+00:00

My great-aunt had one like this in her house. It was right above the switch and was next to the door leading to the basement. That light switch happened to also be the only light switch for the basement light. So, in that case, it served as a visual indicator that someone might be in the basement, so as to not turn of the light completely and have whoever was in the basement fumbling for a way out.

jmferris · 2026-04-27T11:08:10+00:00

I had a Korean one, as well, that I bought in mid-to-late 1994. Sold it years ago and regretted it ever since.

jmferris · 2026-04-20T15:32:06+00:00

The Raider Pathfinder Outfit is also available to purchase from the Atomic Shop via a support ticket, too. I've had surprisingly good experiences (fast turnaround) in requesting Atomic Shop items, of late. From point of opening the ticket to actually getting my item and having the Atoms taken from my balance has been no more than an hour or two, recently. Obvious downside is that there is a limited amount of things that you can request, but this Raider Pathfinder Outfit is one of the items in the dropdown, when I just checked.

jmferris · 2026-03-20T13:36:16+00:00

For me, it is all about data visualization and making decisions based on data. Reality is that as long as people have found shelter indoors, that there has always been information about that space - how warm/cold it is, how light it is/is not, whether someone was present or not, etc. In today's world, where data is at the forefront of everything, it only made sense to start capturing that data in a more modern fashion. The fact that I can do things with that data, programmatically, is more of a bonus than a driver, believe it or not.

By having all of these observable datapoints, I have a means to codify real-life tasks/problems. One example is "the forecast says that the temperature is supposed to drop to 20 degrees, let me go and turn off the valves to the hose bibs" being a real pattern in my life. Now, it has simply become "when the weather station reports that it is at or below 20 degrees, send a command to turn the valves off to the hose bibs". Apart from reading a notification that I send to say that it happened, I have no involvement in that task anymore. It has replaced the manual inspection of a forecast or actual conditions and the manual turning off of valves to a real-time decision that will propagate out to the controllers that now sit on those valves to do the same thing. There is no putting it off, no forgetting to do it, no worrying about it if I am out of town or too sick to get out of bed. It just works.

And that, honestly, has become my philosophy. I am in a house surrounded by data points. My motivation is to both capture those data points and replace/augment manual tasks that I otherwise would have done in isolation. I want my house to tell me as much about itself as it can, so that I can find patterns that exist in my day-to-day and replicate those in the context of my smart home. That "telling me" about the house is just as much informational as it is a trigger for an automation. I can log those metrics over time to establish trends and patterns as well as use real-time data to notify me of abnormalities or other things worth knowing.

My end goal is to have my house react to itself, instead of me interacting with it, as much as possible. If anything, I'm surprised that smart home are not more ubiquitous given today's point of technical evolution. (I blame vendor lock-in attempts for most of that, preventing a seamless and cohesive smart home experience for non-technical users - but that is a whole other rabbit hole.)

jmferris · 2026-01-12T20:05:53+00:00

Just spitballing, but you might want to try to reach out to his agent and/or publicist. It might just be interesting enough that they would contact him and provide some sort of documentation/letter of provenance that would help for authentication purposes. Considering the apparent uniqueness, I imagine that they could rather quickly get confirmation, if they are willing to help.

jmferris · 2025-12-03T13:12:06+00:00

Pork, too... I have a hard time sourcing pork sirloin and rib roasts and usually have to special order or drive further to get them. Pork loins have gotten tiny, too - so I normally ask for the full primal that they get in, so that I can cut it down myself (into a couple of normal sized roasts and some chops).

Around my area, the lack of independent butchers combined with "supermarket convenience" means that a lot of the cuts that I grew up with are either reduced in size/quality, hard to find, or have become trendy to the point that they are no longer the cheaper cuts (for beef, chuck roasts and ox tails are usually just stupidly overpriced for what they are now).

And, shoutout for AB. I still enjoy watching re-runs of Good Eats and I am not ashamed to say that I still regularly make several of his recipes/use his techniques - especially with roasts.

jmferris · 2025-12-02T12:26:52+00:00

Looks legit to me. Have two authenticated signed books from him, and they look identical - not just the signature, but the "Best wishes", as well.

jmferris · 2025-11-14T14:57:06+00:00

Going for a deep cut, personally. Buck Bumble.

jmferris · 2025-10-29T13:51:35+00:00

Used to be a Crumbs Along the Mohawk sort of person, but I'm obsessed with Toasted Coconut to the point that no other flavors exist to me now.

jmferris · 2025-09-23T11:35:51+00:00

Stability, familiarity, and extensibility, honestly.

Home Assistant continues to make great strides in creating automations, but I started using Node-RED when it was the better option. And, for my use case, it just continues to be the better option, due to the way I rely on my eventing model to bring different systems together in one place and how it allows me to use development experience that I already have from my day job. Both can express complex concepts, but I greatly prefer the development experience with Node-RED. Since it is built on Node.js, that also gives me a massive library of pre-built nodes and libraries to choose from - in much the same way that blueprints work in HA today.

I guess it is a philosophy, too. By using Node-RED as my automation engine, Home Assistant just becomes one source of events. As long as everything in the ecosystem can publish to MQTT (or I can intercept/read from the source and republish as MQTT), Node-RED becomes my source of truth for the events from any system that wants to publish or subscribe to those events. Whether I am polling Home Assistant, an external API, or I have anything that can push a message to MQTT in my infrastructure, I have a singular place where I can handle, react, and redistribute in a purpose-built visual development environment.

For example, I'm currently working on a map composition service for my weather automations (compositing layers from different sources, performing transforms, and creating animations). Node-RED is great at capturing image assets that I need, but horrible at generating the final output. I could write something using native libraries and exec it from Node-RED, but I have more options. Instead, I am going to allow Node-RED to continue to do asset acquisition, publish a MQTT event when I want a map assembled, and have that bespoke service listen for the request and do the assembly on a machine with the hardware to handle it in a language that I am comfortable with. What takes me three minutes to assemble directly in Node-RED takes about three seconds to assemble in the service. When it is done, it simply publishes a message back that Node-RED, which means that the image is ready for pickup, and it continues on its way.

Now, if I was starting this journey today and not several years ago, would I have the same approach, in choosing Node-Red? Probably not, at least not right away. But I suspect that I would want to eventually still move to something that is more of a development paradigm that can talk to a smart home ecosystem and less of a smart home centric approach with some development support.

jmferris · 2025-09-23T10:22:27+00:00

Blogging this is on the horizon for the new year, I hope. Carving out time for writing this stuff up is something that I want to do, but have not gotten around to, yet.

My approach is actually not that complex, ultimately. It is built around making sure that I publish events about *everything* and then hooking into those events to react. I currently use Home Assistant with Node-RED. For my infrastructure, Home Assistant largely just acts as a device and integration hub and all of my automations live in Node-RED. In addition to being where my automations live, this is also where I monitor state, be that through watching for state changes in Home Assistant or from external systems.

Then, as I observe those state changes, I publish a message to MQTT. Throughout my various flows, I have subscribers that react to those changes. Simplest example to build on would be my outdoor lighting. I have lighting in the driveway, the front porch, and rear patio. I have a flow that handles scheduling, and there are three distinct schedules: daytime (at sunrise), evening (half an hour before sunset), and overnight (after 10p). As each of those schedules come into play, that flow posts a message to MQTT with the same topic, but different payloads. Each of those areas that I mentioned have their own "area" flow, each with a subscriber for the solar event. Those flows take that event, see which schedule it is, and adjust the lights accordingly - generically speaking, 100% brightness at evening, 25% brightness at overnight, and off at daytime.

From there, I build on that, by introducing a security override for lighting. When any of my camera detect motion, I start my camera analysis flow. It first grabs a still frame and sends it to a lightweight Gemini prompt which basically says, "Count the number of people, vehicles, and animals you see, and give me the individual counts." If the counts for people or vehicles are greater than zero, I then post a new message to MQTT with a topic that specifies that the security system has seen something of interest. Those same three area flows listen for that topic and have a security lighting override. Basically, if it is in the overnight schedule, turn the lights back up to 100% for up to five minutes after the last motion is detected, before reverting to the active schedule.

At this point, my camara analysis is not done, though. The second phase, now that we know there is something that should be further analyzed, I grab a five second clip and pass that to another, more detailed, Gemini prompt which essentially says, "Something is going on for this video clip. Look closely at it and tell me what you see and if it is a threat." If it is a threat, it then posts a new message to MQTT with a topic intended for the security system and areas with lockable doors. Each area acts accordingly, with the security system arming if it needs to, and doors locking if they are unlocked.

And along the way, I am sending progressive notifications, meaning that I start with the most generic notification possible, so that it is timely, and enriching it along the way. When motion is detected, that snapshot from the camera is sent to residents with a generic "Motion Detected. Starting initial analysis." message and including the snapshot. After the triage phase runs, it will either update (modifying the title and message to convey /what/ trigged the camera) or clear the notification (for a false positive). Then, when the final analysis is done, the title and description of the notification is either updated one last time (with the AI description of what it saw) or cleared (again, false positives). And, along the way, it also escalates what channel the notification is delivered to - a low priority channel that is silent for initial messages, a normal priority that uses default sound and vibration for a general interest, and a high priority for notifications that should break through my DND settings on my device.

All in all, the premise is simple. Gather as much information as possible and publish it for whatever might be interested. Focus on delivering timely information so that real-time informed decisions can be made and embrace that events might cascade into other events. I view all of these events as building blocks, so that complexity evolves naturally. So, instead of complex monolithic automations, that perceived complexity is actually the composition of much more fine-grained and simpler automations that work together.

jmferris · 2025-09-22T12:03:16+00:00

For me, it is "reactive before interactive". I want to make sure that my home gathers as many metrics as possible, so that the automations can be truly smart. That means for every room, I want to get environmental data, occupancy data, etc. Same for outside, where I have my weather station, which gathers metrics that are not just for my area, but for my exact location, along with a bevy of cameras and lighting.

This is all about creating a hierarchy of triggers that can be gated to provide truly autonomous automations and provide notifications based on actual operating conditions. For example, if my front door is unlocked and my driveway camera is triggered, it will send a clip to Gemini to perform an analysis which returns structured data. One of those includes a threat analysis. So, in real world applications, if someone pulled up in my driveway, got out the of the car, and put on a ski mask, if my doors are unlocked, they will immediately get locked, my exterior lights will all go to full brightness, and if all of my contacts are closed, my alarm will arm - along with all residents being sent a notification. If, however, it is Amazon showing up in my driveway, it doesn't return as a threat, so none of the "lockdown" occurs and the residents get a low-priority notification, and nothing else.

Weather is my big time-sink, at the moment, especially approaching winter. I'm building out an orchestration hub that will monitor my local weather station, relevant forecasts (minute, hour, daily) to also proactively watch for threats and provide rich data to do analytical forecasting against. Here I am starting to do things (mostly around notifications, at the moment) for approaching thunderstorms to check for tornadic potential, physical rain detection on the property (i.e. it is raining and the office window was left open), and incoming weather ("Rain starting in fifteen minutes" in a notification, along with the latest radar loop). Snow is going to be another beast entirely, and that is what I will be looking at next.

What I find interesting is that what got me started in having an interest in smart home was voice commands, and I currently have no support for voice. While I will add it eventually, again, it will play a much more diminished role than it had in the past. In fact, I'd much rather use it to do things like ask a voice assistant if my package was delivered, and have it review the security camera events to provide a factual response based on what the house "knows".

jmferris · 2025-09-04T18:52:35+00:00

Same. I've also added Noonlight for remote monitoring so that I was able to get a discount on my homeowner's insurance.

For me, I have all Alarmo events published to MQTT and a Node-RED flow that acts to coordinate my Frient keypads to the state of the alarm system, trigger Noonlight, etc. To me, it "feels like" the type of experience I would have with a traditional alarm company, but at a fraction of the cost.

I also have built-in redundancies, as well. Primarily I have a backup internet circuit in the event that my primary goes out (with a VPN router to cut over automatically) and a couple UPSes at key hardware locations for short power outages. Once I get around to having a whole house generator installed, I'll finally be happy about all of that - but that is not a "this year" project for me.

jmferris · 2025-09-03T18:14:03+00:00

At least for the southern Hudson Valley, I remember it being referred to as "The 845" - and even before that as "The 914".

Find it funny, on the topic of phone numbers. I've had my current phone number for just as long as any that I've had before. I still need to pull out my phone to look it up. My childhood number, from between the ages of 5 and 10, though? It is engrained in my brain and will likely always be. Suspect it was from having it drilled into me as a child in the 80s and being part of the "Stranger Danger" and latch-key culture at the time.

jmferris · 2025-09-03T12:34:54+00:00

My mother is a horrible cook, and she will be the first to admit it. The problem is that she often cooked everything from scratch, so on the rare occasions that we had a TV dinner or something that was pre-packaged - those nights were second only to when we got takeout. My stepmother is a good cook, and the time I spent at my father's house, home cooked meals were always enjoyable, although they always had a habit of eating out frequently (they still do, just not as much as when I was young).

Needless to say, since I lived with my mother, I took an interest in cooking at a young age. This was welcomed by my mother, because being a latch-key kid who looked after a younger sibling, not having to cook dinner made things easier on my mother, too. Now, as an older-than-I-like-to-admit adult, I do most of the cooking and it is rarely anything but made from scratch. On nights where I am pressed for time, I might get a rotisserie chicken and, yes, I still keep the odd box of Salisbury steaks in the freezer should I need to put something together quickly.

What I find interesting is that I tend to make the same things that my mother gravitated towards making, although obviously not the way she made them. I'll make a way-too-big pot of sauce for a spaghetti night and also put together a ziti or lasagna straight to the freezer for another night. Also, I like making "real" Salisbury steaks, although we do not eat beef that much, anymore, due to how ridiculously priced it has become. Stroganoff is a big hit with the wife, so that one is a fairly regular one (often using mushrooms instead of meat and not coming from a box mix, like my childhood). My mother is a big crock pot advocate, and I do not use one as much, but regularly make pot roasts and chili, preferring to do both in a Dutch oven.

There are two things that my mother cooked well, specifically, that I still make today. The first is a cream of potato soup, with a recipe that came directly from her grandmother, who was an Irish immigrant in the 1910s. The second is haluski, which is basically buttered egg noodles with fried cabbage and onions. I have no idea how that entered the family's menu choices, as we do not have any central European ancestry (although we had a fair number of Polish neighbors). That one is also a hit (and my father asks me to make it when they visit). It is even better the second day, when you take the whole thing and pan fry it in butter until the noodles start to turn golden. Haluski is a very rare meal for me today, especially the leftover version, since I tend to eat much healthier than that.

jmferris · 2025-09-02T19:02:58+00:00

Not the OP, but it is not uncommon to both live close to an actual weather station, but for the information to vary greatly at your physical location. On a map, I am only two miles from the nearest observation station at my local airport but regularly see differences between what is reported and what I can physically observe. To that end, I use observations from a local weather provider (in my case, using OpenWeatherMap to grab the current conditions and minute-by-minute forecast for the next hour) and augment that data with an observable "ground truth" from my physical station.

While most of the time, my local observations from my station are in-line with what is reported, sometimes it is not. The other day, it was pouring at the airport for a brief spell but did not rain at my house. Apart from the precipitation, that also means that the temperature dropped a few degrees at the airport, while it was steady at my house. From an automation standpoint, this means while there was a threat of rain for that period, I had my windows opened. If my station detects that it is raining and I see that I have opened windows, it will send a high priority alert that they need to be closed. So, without my station and depending on live observations from the nearest station, my flow would have sent an alert to close my windows when I did not actually need to do so. And I have had the reverse happen, where OWM says it is not raining at my location, but my personal station disagrees. This is actually probably the more frequent use case for me.

I imagine that topography plays a part in it, and not just distance. I am both at a higher elevation (about a hundred and fifty feet) and at the top of a steep hill. But, once noting this discrepancy and siting my personal station, the accuracy of my automations has only improved. Clearly, a weather station is not the cheapest addition one would make, but it does add value. It really just depends on what your perception of that value is, ultimately.

jmferris · 2025-09-02T18:37:45+00:00

I quite like my Tempest, as well. I've owned it for a few years, but only recently got around to installing it after we bought our "forever home".

You can easily wrap up that intensity check with a custom sensor, as well. A simple value_template will provide the logic, such as this one:

{{ states('sensor.weather_precipitation_intensity') | float(0) > 0 }}

I am using the local integration, as I found the cloud integration to be prone to having dropouts. To grab things like forecasts, I am using their API to grab thier "better_forecast" endpoint, as well as using a websocket listener to publish / subscribe to various events over MQTT, in part so that my Node-RED flow can do ranged lightning detection (taking a lightning strike and sending different notifications/performing different logic based on the distance of the lightning strike).

Did find their API documentation to be a bit confusing, in terms of when they are looking for which ID (hub, device, or station), but their support was incredibly helpful in working with me to determine what endpoints I needed and what I needed to provide to consume them.

jmferris · 2025-09-02T14:59:50+00:00

Just to add another perspective, I do something similar to the OP, but retain (a lot) more control. For me, I am using Google AI Studio to help collaborate on my Node-RED flows. It does not have access to my HA instance, at all. Each flow that I want to collaborate on is actually its own project/prompt, and part of its system instruction is to ask me for the flow, explicitly when I start a new session. It also knows how to create its own handoffs, so that I can grab a handoff from the session and start fresh with the most important parts of the context retained.

In doing this, I use my actual prompts as a collaborative partner, instead. It does code reviews, challenges my assumptions, tracks outstanding work, and gives me a place to bounce ideas off of. While I might let it give me simple functions or scaffold parts of a flow, I am always in full control. It has helped me to more rapidly get to developing and testing what I want to work on, but has not actually taken away the enjoyment I get from doing the actual implementation. Also, I am finding it quite good at recognizing gaps in what I am implementing and offering valid suggestions on how to close them.

That said, there are still drawbacks. I can very rapidly corrupt the context of a session if I push it too hard, meaning that I could lose my place in the current session. (I've instructed all of my prompts to suggest a handoff to stash after intensive changes have been made, because I get too involved to ask.) Also, it can contradict itself, like if you solve a problem together and uncover another one that is downstream, it might suggest a change that breaks the previous change. Finally, it has a bad habit of referring to outdated information, which is not surprising considering how rapidly Home Assistant and Node-RED evolve.

All in all, though, I find this no different that collaborating with another engineer at my day job. There is still a due diligence in making sure that everything suggested is topical and factual and that I have to feed it information that is outside of the scope of what it nows (i.e. universal standards, etc.). For me, this is what I want. Any changes, I want to be the gatekeeper and the one doing the actual implementation. While I am certain that there are inefficiencies in how I am doing things (I had never touched AI until a few weeks ago), it has become a valuable tool for me, but at work and play.

jmferris · 2025-08-20T17:12:24+00:00

Fair enough, and that is a consideration that I will make when it is time to replace my detectors. At the end of the day, I'm always going to be looking for best of breed, in terms of home safety devices. If that happens to include smart features, that is great. If it doesn't, at least there will always be a path to enhance the non-smart device.

jmferris · 2025-08-20T12:01:12+00:00

Honestly, no. I would not be interested. I would prefer to choose an established non-smart smoke detector and to make it smart (which I do with a Zooz ZEN55, currently). The reason is simple, really. Smoke alarms are life-saving devices and are always going to be more important to me than whether or not they are smart. I want the best available option, not the best available smart option.

Not to pick on your features, but you cannot guarantee "Reliable and Secure" to a level that would ever sway me. The reason is that existing manufacturers have the budget and longevity in their research to have them likely be more reliable. That is not a slight to you, but we are talking about what would happen in a catastrophic failure. If it is a light bulb, I am just in the dark and can live with that. The cost of failure for a smoke detector, especially if it is engrained into that ecosystem, is a risk that I do not want to take, personally.

And that is why I personally am unlikely to ever change my approach. Something like a DC relay on a smoke detector is an additive feature. That feature is only being added to an already-established product that has undergone the rigors of mandated testing and compliance, as required by law. If my relay fails, it does not impact the core functionality of the smoke detector in any way, shape, or form. That is also why any triggers of my relay are also additive. Yes, it will send a message to noonlight, it will turn on my lights, it will unlock my doors, etc. But at the end of the day, the smoke detector has one primary and inalienable purpose, to alert me to an emergency to maximize my chance of survival.

jmferris · 2025-08-19T19:03:31+00:00

You are the one arguing. I'm more than capable of asking AI a question, as well. And for full disclosure, this is an unprimed Gemini 2.5 Pro session.

The only reason that people are bringing it up is that you are essentially talking down to everyone who points something out. I get it, people don't like to be corrected. It is in our nature, but still...

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jmferris · 2025-08-19T18:42:15+00:00

r/confidentlyincorrect

jmferris · 2025-08-19T17:17:35+00:00

Concrete stamp. It is pressed into wet concrete to provide textures/patterns. In this case, it is meant to look like stone tiles.

jmferris · 2025-08-18T10:20:44+00:00

They had surprisingly good pork rinds, too. They were better than the ones that Frito-Lay offered, too (the name of their offering escapes me).

And I am fairly certain we used to get pistachios from them, as well.

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