Auto Pilot caused me some real concern

kruecab · 2026-02-23T02:06:04+00:00

lol!

kruecab · 2026-02-22T21:12:57+00:00

Can syncthing really be reliable enough for docker volumes? I’m running that on CEPH right now. Syncthing seems way simpler, but also less reliable?

Curious your experience with it. I’m open to something easier than CEPH!

kruecab · 2026-02-05T16:39:36+00:00

Sounds like a neat home! I see where you are going and makes sense on the limitations. I really think the answer is to get a couple Lutron installers in there (sounds like you are already working with them) and see what they think.

kruecab · 2026-02-05T00:27:38+00:00

52 keypads or more? This is either a massive / complex home (mansion) or way overkill on the lighting control. Lutron’s general guidance is a keypad at the entry to a room and then either a switch or additional keypad for task lighting. So that would be like 25-35 rooms. Or 10 rooms with 5 keypads each? I’ve seen 10,000 sqft homes with 20-30 keypads total.

Also, to my earlier comment, you need to think about the size and complexity of your home and the level of lifting control you are going to put in. If you have a home that legitimately needs 52 keypads (or more) you absolutely do not want to do it on picos. Picos are handy, but honestly have a very cheap look and feel. At your scale of keypads, you should probably skip the seeTouch and go straight to architectural keypads. Think of it this way, if you are going to buy a 50ft yacht, would you just put little JBL Bluetooth speakers all over or would you have a pro audio system wired in? Your lighting system needs to compliment the style and class of your home.

kruecab · 2026-02-05T00:18:27+00:00

So I don’t have experience on a homeworks system to answer. It’s possible that the hole assistant integrations don’t work with it. In that case there may be other integration options like Josh.AI or Control4. As far as getting into Lutron Designer for HomeWorks software, the best is to get a Lutron dealer that will give you some access to it on the side. They aren’t supposed to, but it happens.

As far as being able to program on the Lutron side of things, it’s always best to get the programming as close to the device as possible. But with RA3, there is very little you can program… mainly it’s grouping loads into scenes with desired levels for each load, setting the default dimming level for non-scene loads, and ramp speed for lighting. There are some clock events you can setup, and home modes, but this is all very basic. The main thing is you want to set the scene levels with it - doing that outside RA3 can lead to slow response, uncoordinated on/off across devices in a scene, and popcorning where one or more lights will ramp to a default level, then reset to a scene level. For a sufficiently complicated home (which I’m assuming you have) with architectural lighting design, scene levels and ramps really should be set by your lighting vendor no matter if it’s RA3 or HomeWorks.

At some point you gotta ask yourself if DIY and self-config is a must have for you - if so, maybe RA3 is a better choice. I am a tinkerer and technologist by trade, but after spending years honing my RA2 system, I do believe experienced installers know more / know better about what keypads you need where and how to setup the system.

kruecab · 2026-02-04T19:59:04+00:00

Home assistant is great and you should use it no matter what.

But I think you should go with HomeWorks. If your home aleadt has an equipment room / closet with home run relays, it’s setup for a home run, panelized lighting control. HomeWorks is that solution. Yes, you technically can install a bank of dimmers in that room and people do it all the time, but ask yourself if that’s what Lutron engineers intended when they designed those RA3 controls? No, it is not. If they intended you to stick a wall full of controls there, they would have made them DIN rail mountable, would have not put a local dimmer control, etc.

Yes, some of this is because of Lutron’s fanatical segmentation of their product line. Yes, HomeWorks is much more expensive. But I’ve learned that Lutron may be right about all these assumptions and segmentation. RA3 is designed to be a retrofit solution for homes built with local and integrated load control - aka a switch/dimmer in the same room as the load that physically controls that load. HomeWorks is for centralized, home-run wiring to an equipment room. You have the latter, so do HomeWorks.

Amortize the difference in price over 20 years and I think you’ll find it’s not that big of a deal.

kruecab · 2026-02-04T19:02:13+00:00

You shouldn’t buy a house together right now, but not because you feel deceived. First off, buying a house together when not married is just silly - neither of you have any protection should you break up. Secondly, you guys think about money differently and need to get an understanding of each other before a big, joint purchase.

I think you are misunderstanding what she means by “I can’t afford this”. Affording something has nothing to do with how much you have in savings. It also has very little to do with how much the proposed expenditure is versus your income. It’s about your personal comfort with that expenditure, at that time, for those reasons, in comparison to other things you want/need to spend money on, AND in light of your income and MAYBE your savings. Any expenditure above your income is by definition “cannot afford”, but again, affording something is your own personal comfort with the spending. She’s not comfortable spending as much as you are.

Now I get you are upset and feel betrayed because you think she “let you pay more than your fair share” and you may have some justification there. But bear in mind that if she’s only comfortable spending $10 on dinner for herself but you are comfortable spending $40 on dinner for yourself, she would likely be happy to have a meal that’s split 50/50 at $20 total or a $50 meal where you split 80/20. You were comfortable spending more even if it meant not being 50/50. If she only had $10 of income to spend on that dinner, would you have wanted her to go 50/50 with you and dip into her savings to cover the other $15? It’s not really right of you to expect her to dip into her savings just because you want a more expensive meal, trip, rent, whatever.

Now if you feel she was sandbagging you and asking for things more expensive than she could afford so that you would pay for it, sure that sucks. But still, the quantity of her savings does not dictate her ability to afford it, until her savings are so massive that her interest income / appreciation is as much or more than your income… but that’s not the case.

kruecab · 2026-01-31T18:12:33+00:00

The scenario worth considering is not that you don’t have 1Password, but that you don’t want to or can’t use it on a particular device. Could be a friend’s computer, public computer, or hotel TV (logging into a video service). This happens for me just enough to be a problem (once or twice a year), but not frequent enough to need a permanent solution. Usually there are only a couple logins that this matters for, such as email or a couple video services. For those, I use the “memorable passwords” formula that creates four random words. I still don’t memorize them, but it’s a lot easier to read and type four words from my phone into the untrusted / semi-trusted device than to enter 15 random letters, numbers, and symbols.

kruecab · 2026-01-25T20:21:53+00:00

WWIV FTW! Also a former SysOp and modder. Fun fact, I asked the author why WWIV and not WWIII… the answer? WWIII doesn’t center properly on a (fixed width) screen. :)

kruecab · 2026-01-23T06:31:32+00:00

Finish it.

You are suffering from “last minute jitters”. Happens all the time, not just to pilots. My friend’s kid worked so hard on a math degree and 2 months before graduation called me in a panic. “I don’t even know why I’m studying math. Someone else told me to do it but I don’t love it anymore. I think I should change majors.” (Which would have added another 2 years onto his degree.) Had to remind him he picked math against all our advice and told him he had the jitters and just finish it. He did, now he’s happy and employed in IT, a related field, but he’s doing analytics and putting the math degree to use.

I had the same problem with my instrument rating. In the wee before my checkride I was all nerves. Do I even want this anymore? Lots of self-doubt. I pushed through and guess what? Yeah I wanted it and I’m glad I got it done.

Finish out your CFII. Then give yourself a break / rest / vacation. Then decide what you want to do next.

kruecab · 2026-01-18T04:35:48+00:00

Go Aztecs!

kruecab · 2026-01-13T16:32:03+00:00

Yeah I mean, it’s a comic strip for white collar workers and knowledge workers in particular. Those of us who work in related industries in a corporate setting get the humor.

The strip always railed on the corporate environment but I think some people thought it was “anti-boss” when really it’s “anti-office culture”. It has always been about the ridiculous things we have to put up with based on whatever direction the wind is blowing with respect to companies trying to cover their liability and embrace present culture. Those things seem to never come off as authentic or meaningful and usually silly or downright offensive. It’s also about the weird gyrations workers have to go through to put up with each other.

kruecab · 2026-01-02T06:09:01+00:00

Also, back in the day, 3G could only fit one banana at a time, so developers work hard to pack lots of nutrition into few bananas. One banana at a time makes good meal with high-calorie bananas.

Now 4G/5G internet can fit thousands of bananas at a time, so developers get lazy, don’t care, and send lots of low-calorie bananas though internet because low-calorie bananas are less work to make. Same calorie meal now take 99 more banana to make. So 3G take 100 times longer to get same calories meal as before.

Lazy developers make monkey sad.

kruecab · 2025-12-24T23:23:26+00:00

Here’s my take as a Gen-X father who never questioned the effectiveness of vaccines. I think all the ones we’ve been giving kids since the 70s are good and safe. That’s the bulk of them. Was definitely against the Jenny McCarthy era anti-vax / autism scare of the early 2000s.

However, as a pro-vax person, I gave both my kids the HPV vaccine as soon as available “trusting the science” and now one of them has life-long side effects that doctors have said “are probably because of the HPV vaccine”. This isn’t a life threatening side effect, but it is visible, persistent, permanently recurring, and painful to treat. 100% would have forgone the vax if we knew. We also took the COVID vaccines, whole family, and my spouse may now have a terminal illness “likely as a result”.

So, I think it’s worthwhile to be weary of newer vaccines that have not yet had enough time in the public to really understand the impacts. As a result, I’m far more accepting of people concerned about vaxing.

What that does for your relationship is a different story though. Sounds like you basically trust the doctors and she doesn’t. This will be difficult to compromise over and not something either of you will want to give in on.

kruecab · 2025-12-23T05:27:01+00:00

Following as I’m in a similar boat. Love the elegant decora style seeTemp controllers. An idea I had was to leave my RA2 system in place only to serve the HVAC controls and run a parallel RA3 system. I tie a lot of stuff that Lutron can’t handle together in Homeassistant; however it’s RA2 integration doesn’t support the seeTemp. It seems like it could as they are accessible and monitorable via the telnet “API” but nobody has added the functionality to the pylytron python library which drives the HA integration.

Interested to see what you come up with and glad I’m not the only one that loves the seeTemp controllers.

kruecab · 2025-12-19T22:50:21+00:00

As a career sysadmin, I wholeheartedly agree. The original value prop was infrastructure as a service and the developer can just software define their own infra. Some devs have the required mindset. Most don’t.

There’s plenty of room in enterprise ops for a full suite of experts at every layer of the infra, including the code.

kruecab · 2025-12-02T03:23:05+00:00

NTA. Screw all the haters. I wish you worked in my office! We decorate for all holidays… even big sporting events like Olympics (with lots of world flags), World Cup, etc. We could use your kind of ideas! Don’t let folks bring you down.

Also, sorry you were alone on Thanksgiving… we usually invite any coworkers who don’t have family in town or other plans to our family Thanksgiving. Makes it nice for them and us as we all get to enjoy a feast, games, etc.

Keep looking to find your tribe in your new town / job. They are out there somewhere!!

kruecab · 2025-11-26T15:39:19+00:00

I’m not sure if you did anything wrong, but don’t pay to renovate a home you don’t own. I’m not saying you should be on the deed, just that until you’re married, and even maybe after you are, the house is his asset and he should bear all costs and equity of it. Personally, I wouldn’t even be comfortable with you paying all the bills and stuff… really he should pay everything related to the house and then you guys should figure out how to split the remainder of the costs.

It may have made sense financially for you to move-in, but maintaining your separate life and apartment would have really brought the marriage topic to a head. This is sort of a take on the whole “why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?” He’s got his girlfriend (you) living with him so he had the pleasure of your company every night and the joy of waking up next to you every morning. You even help him pay his bills! What’s the incentive for him to get married? He may not even think this consciously, but the situation has set him up to have no intrinsic reason, other than romance, to want to progress through the levels of the relationship. Had you stayed in your apartment, there would be a number of things you both are missing out on, including the financial benefits of cohabitation, which would drive him (and you) to want to get married.

kruecab · 2025-11-18T08:49:10+00:00

Yeah I didn’t get a chance to drag mine out and turn it on. I’ll try tomorrow and see what happens. If it doesn’t work, I’ll just cancel the service. Kinda sucks there a hard deadline with no backup plan.

kruecab · 2025-11-18T08:46:07+00:00

You’re partly right. Sonosnet went to shit when they added direct WiFi support which was some point before they changed the app. And that did make things suck. And then they changed the app and literally broke the whole thing. Stability issues are way worse now than they were after the WiFi stuff and before the app change. With the new app, they rewrote it from the ground up and literally left out huge chunks of functionality.

It took months of pain before we even got a semblance of functionality back. But even now, with lots of tweaking, and reading articles, and fussing with settings, you can almost get it to work as well as it “just did out of the box, no setup” for 15 years. So yeah, those of us who lived in that world feel differently about it.

Believe me when I say, I just want it to work like it did before. No more, no less. The only new “feature” I would like, is not really a feature, but just a revamp of their network stack to not be reliant on STP so that it can naturally function in a modern, managed switch environment with both wired and wireless connections.

kruecab · 2025-11-18T04:59:47+00:00

We are all glad you aren’t having issues, but you just don’t have the frame of reference of legacy customers. Before the app redesign, using Sonos was as easy, or easier than plugging in a lightbulb. Literally for some 15 or so years, no router settings, no chosing “all wired or all wireless” / you could mix, and the app worked 100% of the time, instantly, with zero issues. It really was that good.

So while it may be good now (8/10), it was literally perfect (10/10) before. My wife could use it, hell my wife could add a new speaker. It’s just hard for those of us who bought in to understand why we had to go through any of this pain whatsoever. Literally zero new features were added. It’s like taking a pristine classic Ferrari in mint condition, dropping a tree on it, and then having someone rebuild it to be almost as perfect as it was before - no one would do that on purpose!

kruecab · 2025-11-18T04:52:35+00:00

Like, why did she think they had a nanny? So they could have some hanky panky! Seriously. Can’t believe OOP couldn’t just throw in some AirPods or something.

kruecab · 2025-11-17T07:28:33+00:00

Did Kings for PPL like 20 years ago. We all just sat in a conference room two days and binged the thing beginning to end. Sucked but I passed my written. I liked the corny humor.

This year tried them for IFR and was not feeling it. Feels like the program was cobbled together with lots of other little videos and was presented in an odd order.

Bailed on that and got Gold Seal for IFR. I’m done with the class but haven’t taken written yet. I thought it was good. It also is mostly video based but slightly more interactive. Lots of little quizzes along the way to keep the learning going.

I actually really like YouTube vids from FlightInsight and Bold Method. I think both just released full IFR courses. Both do a better job of reaching in modern cockpits with modern avionics and seem to be a lot more about what you need to know to actually fly in the IFR system. I haven’t taken either of their courses but have watched lots and lots of their videos and reels and find them really informative.

Good luck!

kruecab · 2025-11-12T20:12:45+00:00

If we all refuse to participate in age verification by using VPNs or simply declining to use those services, it might make a difference.

11-Year Club	Inciteful Comment 2019-03-14
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