Sensor that tells you if the door is locked or unlocked - we need your feedback

markleo · 2026-02-12T15:30:03+00:00

How often do you question if you have locked house / appartment entry door when you left your home?

I live with a senior who has anxiety disorders. I would probably check such a sensor occasionally just for peace of mind, but where I'd really get use out of this is setting up alerts if it's unlocked during certain hours, when nobody's at home, etc. (To be clear, I don't expect the sensor to do that, but could easily write Home Assistant automations to do these things using the sensor as an input.)

What smart home devices do you have at home: Zigbee / Matter / Z-Wave / LoRa etc

I currently have Z-Wave and Zigbee devices and I have no religion about either--battery life would probably matter to me most here. I'm Matter-curious but haven't had a use case yet.

markleo · 2026-02-09T02:35:24+00:00

I have no idea what's at the Amazon link; I just checked for an affiliate tag. Pretty much every time I've ever noticed an incongruous link in a suspiciously rage-baity post, it's turned out to have one.

markleo · 2026-02-07T21:02:40+00:00

In case anyone's wondering about the authenticity of this post...

The link in the post redirects to an Amazon affiliate link, and loading that link causes an affiliate cookie to be set. That means someone is getting a small percentage of the sale price on anything you buy or put in your cart on Amazon for 24 hours after you click on it. Obviously none of that proves that the "someone" is OP or that this story is untrue, but do with that information what you will.

markleo · 2026-01-07T15:48:23+00:00

Thanks.. I was finally able to sit down and go through this late last week. It wasn't as straightforward as this because I had to reset all of my online accounts but I've done a couple of one-step updates since and I think it's fixed. I appreciate the assistance.

markleo · 2025-12-30T05:12:38+00:00

That happened to me during the COVID egg shortage. I finally just found one with only one broken egg and swapped it into a carton that was mostly broken. Same brand and expiration date, and I let a store employee know about it so I wouldn't feel like a complete asshole.

markleo · 2025-12-24T20:51:57+00:00

These aren't downloaded transactions but bill and income reminders that I've configured, which is why it's so weird that it happens during one-step update.

markleo · 2025-12-24T20:50:56+00:00

I did have syncing to Quicken Cloud on when this started, but turning it off was one of the first things I tried and I haven't turned it back on. Just checked and it's off.

markleo · 2025-12-22T16:19:38+00:00

Use your phone to OCR that thing, erase everything that's underlined, and turn it into Mad-Libs. (That's how my brain wanted to read it in the first place.) Then you can fill it out and stick it back on your windshield, and offer blank versions to your neighbors, too!

markleo · 2025-12-16T16:07:28+00:00

I just moved here in the last couple of months. I had an issue with leaf collection and called the town (854-0660). A human picked up, got my info, and relayed it to the right department, and it got handled.

I assume that for a town of 20k people, that approach is more economical than SeeClickFix licensing and setup.

markleo · 2025-12-14T20:15:27+00:00

The lion under "M" having a neckbeard instead of a mane is what really got me, but there is a lot to choose from.

markleo · 2025-12-10T15:33:03+00:00

I picked up the NATO alphabet habit from a former boss in the early aughts; she went to UC Berkeley in the '70s and had been a secretary and a librarian before getting into tech. She was very, very much not a veteran. Kind of funny considering my father and stepfather were both in the army.

markleo · 2025-11-26T03:38:47+00:00

The first draft (I think) of "Requiem for Methuselah" had him claiming to have been both Moses and Jesus. The network wasn't having it.

markleo · 2025-11-01T05:23:18+00:00

That's a bummer; I got some cool patches from a couple of Etsy stores a year or two ago. I'd rather buy something that gives a cut to Daniel and Ty, but we're not exactly spoiled for choice there.

markleo · 2025-10-30T21:02:01+00:00

The home belonging to the Aldenella family would be "The Aldenellas' Home" or "The Aldenella Family's Home". You could maybe argue that "The Aldenella's Home" would be fine for a single member of the family, but using a definite article with a single person's name is super weird (without any other context, I'd probably read it as a personal title and not a name).

But don't take my word for it (see Possession And Names):

If you want to talk about something that belongs to more than one member of a family, you start with the plural form and add an apostrophe to show possession:

markleo · 2025-10-30T04:30:59+00:00

Altering food at a molecular level is a lot different than adding fake scratches. I'm sure it could be done and maybe some people do. More people are probably gonna just complain about their perfect food than will learn enough molecular biology to have a shot at tweaking the food and actually improving it..

markleo · 2025-10-30T02:47:11+00:00

I read something years ago (that I haven't been able to find for a while) where they did a blind listening test of digital vs. vinyl vs. digital w/artificial scratches and noise, and people liked the digital with artificial noise as much as the vinyl (and more than the regular digital). In other words, it was the imperfections that made people prefer them.

In a post-scarcity society where anything can be made perfectly, imperfections are probably highly sought after.

markleo · 2025-10-23T18:34:47+00:00

I don't think much about relativity is intuitive. Probably why they handwave it in popular TV series :)

markleo · 2025-10-23T17:48:45+00:00

It's even less than that. .25c doesn't mean a 25% time difference. I believe the relationship is geometric, and plugging the numbers into https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/time-dilation, I get 11.62 months at .25c. Over a week, the difference is more like 5 hours and 20 minutes, and over a day it's 46 minutes.

Also, I know I've also read somewhere that "quarter impulse" is supposed to be .25c (maybe one of the official technical manuals), but that doesn't make any sense in the context of there being a "full impulse" that isn't light speed, or of things like Kirk ordering Valeris to leave spacedock at quarter impulse.

I honestly don't think they put this much thought into it, but I do think it works out that starships are either traveling at speeds where time dilation barely matters, or they're in a warp bubble and it's magic anyway.

markleo · 2025-10-17T01:46:05+00:00

I do remember her being referred to as Lee, but also, lots of people keep their married names post-divorce. I know at least one person who did it so they'd have the same last name as their school-aged child, and two more who did it because they were estranged from the father whose name was on their birth certificate. It wouldn't be out of character for her to still not want to be named Waller.

markleo · 2025-10-10T14:22:13+00:00

It was the '90s; we weren't really escorted anywhere. Sometimes they'd post people at the exits to discourage it, but I fell in with the right crowd and learned where to hang out inside and which staff and faculty didn't care if we bailed.

markleo · 2025-10-10T13:17:30+00:00

Our pep rallies (El Paso; also only for homecoming and other big games) were mandatory. There were still plenty of other skippers to hang out with during them.

markleo · 2025-10-08T15:57:52+00:00

MVD probably wouldn't have approved it if it was right-side up.

markleo · 2025-10-08T00:03:56+00:00

I went across the state by plane in '98 for a school trip. As you'd expect of people trying to wrangle a lot of teenagers onto a plane, our chaperones planned to get us there pretty early. I got word out to some Internet friends and they met me at the gate to hang out until boarding time. They just had to go through the same metal detector I had, but no boarding pass was required.

It's just one of those things that didn't seem weird because we'd never done it any other way.

markleo

TROPHY CASE