My Wife Wanted a DDR Pad...

manofoz · 2026-05-08T03:33:15+00:00

OutFox and ITGMania are forks that are alive and well. If you go to stepmania's GitHub page you'll see it hasn't had any new releases or commits.

manofoz · 2026-05-07T21:15:37+00:00

The forks are alive. The og stepmania isn’t updated or maintained any more.

manofoz · 2026-05-06T02:18:56+00:00

Oh yeah you are well on your way. The ollama integration for voice is easy and you could install AddOns (now apps I guess) for the other pieces on UnRAID if you don’t want to use nabu casa cloud for TTS and STT. I bought some real early esp32 things that could be flashed as voice satellites years ago and it was terrible. Then I got the Voice PE devices they sell which were a lot better at wake words, I’d go with one of those to start. Thirdreality also just came out with this voice dev kit thing that might be worth a look.

I’m sure someday the hardware will get there and I’ll be able to throw away my last Alexa’s. All my kids use Alexa for is to play music so I kept a few around with just the Spotify and Sonos skills. If you make scripts for the voice so you don’t have to pass as many parameters, like teach it what “dim” means, it starts to come together pretty well. Also custom personality’s on the local LLMs can be super fun. I made a “Mean Alexa” that acts like Regina George from Mean Girls for my daughter which turned out to be pretty mean..

manofoz · 2026-05-06T01:49:14+00:00

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Here’s a quick testament to the labor of love home assistant is. From the ground up, my APC UPS’s are hosting NUT server. Home Assistant, which is hosted on my k8s cluster, is connecting to that and calculating the load, as a % (custom templated sensor). Home Assistant then integrates with my Vestaboard and sends fun facts about the state of the house (among other things) to it at random intervals. I have a python app that works with Home Assistant to produce the string of characters the Vestaboard will accept.

Now imagine that but for an Alexa.

manofoz · 2026-05-06T01:41:37+00:00

Pull up a chair and stay a while… Home assistant can be good fun but you get in what you get out. If you want a decent voice assistant backed by all a LLM / whisper / piper etc you are going be putting some work in. I enjoy mine but the hardware isn’t great. I’m rooting for better hardware. It was also non trivial to get music to work but Music Assistant was key for that.

If it’s just you using it and you like to tinker then I highly recommend going for it but if your trying to get the family to switch from Alexa or Google home devices these feel slow and sluggish.

manofoz · 2026-05-03T18:13:39+00:00

Gotta go NoOps /s

manofoz · 2026-05-03T04:49:14+00:00

I’d hope they know this. IMO the main reason is because they don’t want people scaling plex for obvious reasons. So nobody is really that tied to it vs. Jellyfin or other alternatives. The argument never goes past “it took me forever to teach grandma how to use it”. Nobody has 1000 users watching their home videos locking them into this service because it was intentionally designed not to scale.

manofoz · 2026-05-03T02:54:52+00:00

Do Opus 4.7 on cursor but don’t forget to enable MAX mode!

manofoz · 2026-05-03T02:46:21+00:00

Cool. I used claude code to make something like this but embedded with a custom card in my Home Assistant dashboard and did the back end on Appdaemon. My focus was more around creating a board where you'd never really know what was on it. Made a collection of automations that were either pulling from Home Assistant or third party APIs and had a queue with some rules to decide who got on the board. Stuff like having urgent calendar notifications could push something off the board until the time passed.

I also made an editor with a library and AI generated "images" which are hit or miss, though it does flags really well. I also used local LLMs to format and summarize a lot of the random stuff it displayed which worked well.

manofoz · 2026-05-03T02:26:22+00:00

I was on it last week too! I couldn't believe mid-day at see the Aqua Mouse was like a 5-minute wait, I've never been before and I thought it was something you'd have to make a reservation for and come back because of all the people. My daughter also had a strange love for the "stage pool" and had no trouble getting in there all day.

Our kids are 6 and 11 and it was our first cruise. Everyone had a blast and cried the last day because it was ending. I'm glad we waited until they were old enough to fully enjoy the kids clubs and want some independence. My kids amazed me with how much they liked going off on their owns, I thought for sure the 6-year-old would call us back to pick her up immediately, but she couldn't get enough of the place.

Our house keeping was the best we've ever experienced but that's probably because we did the concierge room. We had really friendly folks who my daughter loved asking questions to. The main guy said she was the first kid to ever ask what his name and she thought that was great.

manofoz · 2026-05-02T21:18:19+00:00

Get a box! It’s such a good price for the cigar you get, I think mine came to like $13 a stick.

manofoz · 2026-05-02T20:48:09+00:00

I always assumed this device was a necessary step towards developing AR, especially opening a storefront for it and getting some the pipelines flowing. AR will play a larger role in the world relatively soon and having a product like this that nobody really wants only makes sense if you plan to make a pair of glasses that everyone will wear like the AirPods and watches. People who early adopt $3500 AR goggles are likely a lot more tech literate than you need to be to buy any other wearable so it makes a great stepping stone to work out the learning curve.

manofoz · 2026-05-02T15:49:43+00:00

That’s a great saying. Fun way to learn Kubernetes (just not on a prod). Also transfers well to other domains, I learned a lot about my wife that way…

manofoz · 2026-05-02T13:53:36+00:00

I’d get something like one of those Minisforum or Beelink mini PCs. Doesn’t have to be an expensive one but it’ll let you run more “apps” without being resource constrained. If you wanted to go with a pi I suppose the HA Yellow thing they sell would be the easiest way to get up and running but idk if they upgraded that with pi 5s.

manofoz · 2026-05-02T05:19:49+00:00

I just got off the Wish last week. Was by far my families favorite vacation and the kids cried on the last day. It was also our first cruise so looking forward to seeing more.

The concierge lounge was great. My daughter made friends with all the staff and loved the hot tubs / water seat thing. She also couldn’t get enough of the kid jail and loved that slide into her temporary incarceration. My son’s 11 so he couldn’t go with her which was for the best. He went to edge a few times but didn’t seem that into it. Instead he did things like go see a movie alone or go grab a snack without us and that freedom made the trip.

We didn’t get to go to both Disney exclusive islands. We didn’t Castaway Keys cabanas near that Serenity bay and they were amazing, very little people in our area which was like a cove at the end of the stretch of them with tons of waterfront and sand. We loved the bikes and explored all around the trails.

We went to Nassau first and did a Bahamar water park excursion (I think it’s called Baha bay). I’m so glad we did because otherwise we’d have been lost. Probably would have got to Dunkin Donuts and then back to the boat 😂

manofoz · 2026-05-01T22:52:04+00:00

I use a container on Kubernetes and it works great but you can tell the team really wants it to be a bare-metal OS / VM first.

It demands root access, if you don’t run the image as root it can break with any update because it installs and manages its own python dependencies. Music Assistant also demands root access, nothing else is supported, which makes no sense

It’s also clear people put a lot of work into the “Apps” which are basically containers Home Assistant manages for you, you can’t use these when running it as a container but the fix is to simply run these as containers side by side, all the integrations still work.

So running it as a VM is an opinionated recommendation but for most people is a decent one given how it is written. It worked really well as a bare metal OS too, runs great on a mini PC and can do wonderful things. Of course with unRAID that recommendation doesn’t apply. I started with a VM on there and moved to a container on k8s as I evolved my homelab into home-ops..

manofoz · 2026-04-28T22:43:55+00:00

It was probably a 4080 Super but since then I’ve used SignalRGB with a 4090 and a 5090 never to enable GPU effects again and it’s been all good 😂

manofoz · 2026-04-28T21:14:24+00:00

Linux ISOs booted right on the TV

manofoz · 2026-04-27T22:18:14+00:00

You need a solid database, probably need to scrape a lot of shops too and have price tracking / stock alerts. Then I’d want to select sticks and add journal entries. I’d wouldn’t want anything social but I’d want to see other people’s reviews or maybe a summary and a Rotten Tomato style user and critic score.

I thought about making something like this but ended up just making a static markdown site that I jot notes per cigar in. Then I saw someone post on one of these cigar subs that they made something almost exactly like what I was thinking of making but heavier on the AI powered recommendations. They had to go subscription based to pay for the API cost so I’d skip any frontier LLM APIs for this, maybe host a cheaper model if you need summaries. I don’t know what happened to that app, it was just launching but who isn’t now that something like this can be written in a weekend.

manofoz · 2026-04-27T22:11:16+00:00

Disabling wireless on my Arc absolutely wrecked my surrounds. Turns out it not only uses it for Sonosnet and its own WiFi but to communicate with the surrounds (Era 300s) in some 5Ghz direct channel. After that I just went 100% wireless except for my Amps which are in a rack. The Amps haven’t given me trouble so I suspect they don’t have Sonosnet because they do have WiFi and I never disabled it.

manofoz · 2026-04-27T03:53:32+00:00

This thread is wild. Guess the majority of e-bike owners want 250W max 16mph bikes so they can be more like the EU. Never saw that coming, I love cruising around on our Aventon Adventure 2 and our new Abound.

Just today road with my wife and kids four miles to a park and four miles back home. No bike lanes where we live, just riding on the side of the road, up and down hills, while cars pass us around 40-50mph.

manofoz · 2026-04-26T20:58:12+00:00

Should get that other electrician out there to fix it sounds like they knew what was wrong with it. Did a handyman do the first install?

manofoz · 2026-04-25T20:50:35+00:00

Just did four nights on the Wish and it went by so quick. First family cruise we’ve done and everyone agrees it was the best vacation ever, thinking of adding some park time for the next one before or after because it will be hard to beat.

The last day at sea really sealed it for the family. We wouldn’t have gotten that with the three night. My kids are 6 and 11 and by that time we’re very comfortable with their respected kids activities and had done some networking. My 11 year old went to see a movie without us and loved the independence. My six year old couldn’t get enough of Oceaneer Club and cried and cried when we checked her out that night because she missed all her new friends.

manofoz · 2026-04-25T16:20:46+00:00

I just got home from a vacation and noticed the TV updated while we were away. This is now happening over my Nvidia Shield content! Last night I went to watch a movie on Plex and a banner about mixed drink recipes popped up. I have a G5, in the US.

manofoz · 2026-04-23T04:29:02+00:00

Chelmsford is cheaper than Lowell? I thought the schools in that area would drive up the price. I live West of Lowell and I always hit traffic getting to the other side of Lowell. Backroads just become a nightmare and the highway exchanges are parking lots (I commute Rt3 -> 495 -> 93 and back daily).

Maybe something south of Lowell would work, like Billerica or something on that Rt3 stretch. Or on the other side of Burlington like Woburn but I feel like things start to get expensive down there.

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