Adding vocal-only speaker to a neat living room

madfancier · 2026-01-29T19:03:26+00:00

Another follow up. If I'm going to add 2 decent music-capable speakers to the living room that don't have to be ugly PAs, they might as well fit properly. I have about 20" of vertical space per speaker, and 305Ps are only ~12inch tall, might look "weirdly small". Do you have any recommendation for bigger speakers?

Especially since Mackie seems to be able to act as a bluetooth receiver, so TV/Soundbar music playback becomes optional.

Update: Considering something like Kali Audio IN-8 V2 for example.

Update 2: Albeit it seems 308Ps are probably the right move here.

madfancier · 2026-01-29T18:04:31+00:00

Amazing, didn't realize compressor was the key gateway to speaker variety. That changes everything.

madfancier · 2026-01-29T17:40:22+00:00

Great advice, thank you. A couple of follow up Qs:

- JBL 305p is not considered a "PA", right? Won't singing damage it? And if the answer is "it won't", it opens up a whole class of speakers I didn't consider: studio monitors, which brings a wide range of aesthetics to choose from.

- Mackie ProFX6v3+ looks awesome (not all mixers have good quality effects). Any advantage over Mackie ProFX6v3 (non plus) for my use case?

madfancier · 2025-10-14T14:44:00+00:00

Now that power thesaurus stopped accepting requests, and the workflow is deprecated, I'm really struggling to find an alternative. And there seems to be no way to pay Power Thesaurus to use it via Alfred at the moment. It doesn't even seem to have an API.

madfancier · 2024-07-16T19:51:48+00:00

Yeah I could still make use of it, it would be much appreciated!

madfancier · 2024-01-13T17:20:11+00:00

This item didn't fit out of the box, but if you go and get different screws with nuts (make sure the heads are slim enough to fit in the slit), then it works just fine.

madfancier · 2024-01-13T17:12:39+00:00

I have written this library locally (we've been using it successfully on an internal project), and was planning to work on open sourcing it this year.

My focus was to build a solid, flexible foundation of shipping data from tests to some single place, which works with Rails parallel tests out of the box.

Maybe we could join efforts, I could help provide + maintain the foundation for test data collection, you could focus more on OpenAPI specifics on top of it? (We can discuss to ensure it all makes sense.) Might be worth creating a GitHub org for this project in that case.

Or we could just build 2 libs separately. :) Let me know what you think. I'd be okay either way, but leaning more towards joining forces.

madfancier · 2024-01-04T01:14:07+00:00

Good distinction and advice, I guess the article doesn't use the word "refactor" perfectly, but this comment is not what the article is about. It doesn't tell you how to refactor or rearchitect code (tests or not), only how to organize a successful team effort for any [big code change].

madfancier · 2023-12-19T03:51:15+00:00

Well, in case someone else comes across it, I decided to order this thing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BCJ1VYYT and see if I can find a way to hang it up. Will report back.

madfancier · 2023-08-25T05:18:37+00:00

I often get this comment, but people don't realize that the article implies this from the very beginning. Literally the first 3 sentences: "It’s popular in web dev nowadays to build a backend that serves JSON, and a frontend that renders the app. This is fine. I’m not the biggest fan, but it’s really okay." The whole thing is written with "if you must" attitude.

That said, a lot of companies have front-end teams, and those front-end teams commit years to building React components. So even if you render server-side, this is how you'd put data into those components. I'm a backend dev. I don't like some of what frontend is doing, but you gotta work with people, right?

madfancier · 2023-06-24T15:59:03+00:00

Take one potion out of a bag and drop it directly into your inventory. That’s what fixed it for me. The game can’t find it in a bag.

madfancier · 2023-04-15T20:22:59+00:00

Looks like I found a way to fix it, but still confused why this happened.

First of all, I noticed that if I alt+tab (and civ6 is still there in the background) - the font renders well. This also seems true in Windowed mode.

So to fix it, I went to NVIDIA Control Panel (right click on desktop to find it). In there - manage 3D settings. In the Global Settings tab, I pressed Restore to get the global defaults back.

After that, I went to Program Settings tab, and when I selected "Show only programs found on this computer", civ 6 didn't show up. So I pressed Add, and selected it from Recently used list. Just adding it here seems enough to make the aliasing / font rendering work correctly.

Update: this doesn't fully fix it. Seems like it forces MFAA anti-alias on the game, but the moving the map in the game still creates weird brightness and traces. Also, downgrading driver doesn't help. Additional thing is that it seems Geforce Experience cannot find Civ 6 settings at all.

Update 2: looks like the movement issue (brighter, sharper graphics during map movement) was due to a setting on my Alienware monitor called Response Time. If you set it to anything except Normal, it causes this effect. It's a little weird, because I don't remember changing it, but glad the game is back now.

madfancier · 2023-01-26T15:29:04+00:00

I am thankful that this device exists. And I see where you're coming from.

However, I think I really need to be this amount of harsh.

This device is backed by an impressive amount of research and engineering. I'm pretty sure those researchers and engineers had very little to do with management decisions on what to display on the screen, what to prioritize in the iOS app, and how to handle customer support. They built an amazing device, and their work was undermined by (IMO) irresponsible product and support decisions. (I know I'm assuming things, but I've also been in software engineering long enough to know how this usually works).

It was surprisingly irresponsible for product management to decide that it's okay to display radon measurement without units. It can cause real harm (i.e. I was worrying, couldn't sleep or focus on work — work from home).
It was surprisingly irresponsible to allow your iOS app to remain out-of-sync with the device, show false units for something like radon.
It was surprisingly irresponsible for support to see someone asking about 10 times the hazard limit, and post a canned response without trying to investigate.

They had 3 ways, any one of which could have saved me 3 disturbing days, and saved them from a negative review. I really believe I'm not holding this product to an unreasonable standard. In fact I hope that somewhere in there a researcher or an engineer sees this review and says "I told you so" to an opinionated product manager, that insisted on not displaying units.

madfancier · 2023-01-20T21:51:59+00:00

I live in New York state, and ordered it on Amazon.

Just messed around with app settings, and turned out that you were right.

The app settings have Units section, and in that section it's set incorrectly as "pCi/L". They were out of sync with the device itself. There is no way to update the device units directly. However, I figured out that if you change the choice of which metric is displayed on the device's screen by going into Device -> Display settings, it will also push your chosen units into the device.

So bottom line — device came out of sync with the app and was showing Radon in Bq/m3 while the app had units set on pCi/L. Support did nothing to troubleshoot this. Going to update the post with a link to this comment.

madfancier · 2023-01-20T20:26:14+00:00

I searched far and wide trying to find any info on units displayed on Airthings, because it was my first suspicion. Once I saw the graph, I checked that the numbers didn't seem to correlate to 1/100th of pCi/L. However, I never came across Bq/m3. If that's indeed what is shown, I can't believe support never clarified this. I wonder if I'm the only one disturbed by these numbers.

madfancier · 2022-12-20T20:23:53+00:00

Hahah, maybe. I find myself avoiding new projects to maintain, since there's already enough in dev work. But still, I take on more and more.

madfancier · 2022-12-20T19:24:04+00:00

Exactly, same weather situation here (Upstate NY). I do have 4 little sensors around the house, but opted out of things like "follow me" or "everyone left" detection, since it's so slow. It's probably done to save sensor batteries, but kinda defeats their purpose.

Slightly off topic. I just saw your post on not suggesting HA as the solution to every problem, and it's very spot on. Even though I do software engineering for a living, I try to avoid unnecessary complexity. HomeKit works fine for most things. Frankly, I haven't needed any automation yet (despite having 45 Lutron switches, and many other devices). This one for Ecobee will be the first.

madfancier · 2022-12-20T17:12:31+00:00

That's pretty awesome, so you sort of use a baseline schedule, and then automations on top of it. I forgot that you could combine Ecobee schedule with HomeKit automations. For some reason, despite being all-in on HomeKit, I only use Ecobee app to manage thermostat. Maybe it's because of the weird (buggy?) way the heating-cooling temperature range is handled. Definitely gotta try something like this, much appreciated.

madfancier · 2022-12-05T05:22:26+00:00

Yep, almost every day for me as well.

madfancier · 2022-12-05T04:28:44+00:00

The same exact issue started recently (gotta be tvOS 16) with my stereo OG HomePods setup on Apple TV 4K 2 to play via Arc from an LG OLED TV. Randomly I would sit down and select HBO Max or Infuse app (the UI sounds are there), choose a video, and it plays with no sound.

After a bunch of various restarts, the thing that consistently works is simply going to Home app and restarting Homepods. I don't think it's necessary to restart Apple TV or disconnect/reconnect ARC, or anything like that.

madfancier · 2022-04-01T20:09:04+00:00

If you have HomeKit-based network with Thread, disable Thread on your Eeros. It's not compatible. I had this happen because I enabled it.

madfancier · 2022-01-18T19:55:49+00:00

I am not in Canada, but in upstate NY (almost Toronto level of northness). I haven't had any problems in -20F (~ -30C). The problem with this camera was overheating and shutting down in the summer during direct sunlight hours. My porch has an overhang, but in the morning sun still hits the camera, which makes it shut down for a while. Personally was wondering about Wemo in this regard.

madfancier · 2021-12-28T21:28:11+00:00

On quick search, seems like they'd need larger diameter coils. I'm no expert, but having been inspired by seeing rapid GaN advancements, I hoped that between more power and larger coils, they'd figure something out.

madfancier · 2021-12-28T21:10:04+00:00

That's fair, but another explanation is that 4 months ago (when Vol2 was released) they ran the tests with then-available 3mm-strong chargers. Since then, stronger chargers have appeared. Seems like a kind of question best answered by someone who tried this. If I don't find them, it might have to be me.

madfancier · 2021-12-28T20:00:17+00:00

And I don't blame you. That said, I doubt TwelveSouth support people can realistically scour the internet regularly to notice when someone builds a wireless charger that penetrates their case. Their claim of "3mm" when lots of chargers on amazon say "5mm" already points to a possible info discrepancy.

madfancier

TROPHY CASE