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Joined
2 yr. ago

I'm a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

  • It has a smart controller with a wifi module from SpaNet. The app is quite "open" in that it allows you to set your own auxiliary MQTT server and send home assistant compatible data to it while still being able to use the existing app.

    Added edit:

    So everything is controllable by HA - blower pumps, temperature, the sanitiser routine, the lights, whether to put it into sleep/low power mode, etc

  • Love me a good MARQUEE!

  • Lots of things can be hooked up through it. One of the biggest things I find I like about it is the way you can merge ecosystems with it.

    At home with HA I have an LG TV, Philips Hue lights, a Tapo vacuum cleaner, my EV charger, my own home made solar hot water system controller, a presence sensor that also does CO2 and temperature, a hot tub, and a few other bits and pieces. All of which can be viewed and controlled in the one interface, not the 6 or 7 apps that every individual device wants me to install.

    But automations and notifications are the big thing. The presence sensor in the living room turns off the tv if nobody is in front of it for more than an hour. The EV charger tells me when the car is charged. An hour before sunset the light in my living room slowly dims on, and dims off after 9pm when the presence sensor says there's nobody around. When my solar hot water system is a bit slow to heat up on a cloudy day, I get an email telling me to turn the electric booster on (and off when the water's hot). Every Tuesday and Thursday evening the vacuum cleaner is set to clean the living areas, but it doesn't if someone is watching tv, as detected by the presence sensor and the television.

    I also don't have to get off the couch to turn on a light, but the idea is that you set up automations that do all the button-pressing for you.

  • Is the ✨sparkly emoji✨ the BLINK of the 21st century? Discuss.

  • I think it's becoming a play store requirement for apps to use various "notification channels" or whatever it's called, so hopefully the all or nothing behaviour will disappear in time.

    Orrrr as you say apps get totally silenced / uninstalled, I don't have the patience for that kind of stuff anymore.

  • But it's definitely not perfect and tends to add unnecessary changes, I constantly have to review and add new rules.

    This is the bit that bugs me. I spend a bit of time to create a relatively simple application in C# with it, and it's constantly tacking on new features and four extra command line arguments and it's frothing at the mouth to add Cool Feature X, "just say the word and I'll do it".

    Just do what I asked. No more. That's enough. There's enough mangled code and logic errors lurking in there already, I don't need any more "features" clouding the water.

  • And newer versions of Android have notification categories for each app.

    So if the developer does their homework I can turn off particular notification types and let others through, and that way you can -gasp!- actually have a messaging app that only notifies you of actual messages, instead of constantly begging for your attention for a bunch of superfluous crap.

    And if I go to the notification settings for that app and it doesn't have a category I can easily drop, it either gets completely silenced, or it gets uninstalled.

  • Oh lawdy, a budget phone shipping with an OS SEVEN WHOLE MONTHS out of date at time of publication. Will the horrors ever end!?

    Quick, someone bring me my fainting chair!

  • I've worked in mines in the desert in South Australia where temps semi regularly hit 46-47 degrees.

    It's OK (ish) because the humidity is low. But you can drink a litre an hour all day (11+ hours) and not need to pee. All that water goes somewhere.

    The underground workings are often more dangerous, with lower temperatures but higher humidity. Once wet bulb temps get above 34 degrees underground personnel need to retreat from the area and the only work that can be done there then is work to fix the ventilation.

    There's heat stress meters that measure wet and dry bulb temperatures and airflow, and can basically compute cooling power in watts. Not enough cooling power -> everyone out.

  • Podcast Addict works well with Android Auto.

  • Revert to a version of nova launcher from a few years back.

    All the features I needed from it were finalised years ago, so why update?

    The usual nebulous comments like "bug fixes and performance improvements" in the changelogs isn't really a strong reason for me.

  • 8.1.6 apk from uptodown.com.

    And then find the app in your installed app list in Google Play and untick "install updates automatically" in the three dot menu.

  • Maxbotix make robust ultrasonic sensors that range out to 6m, they have a 3/4" pipe fitting on the back for mounting them.

    So with that you can get a few lengths of 3/4" pipe and an elbow and have an easy way of mounting it a little ways into your well.

    A little on the expensive side but simple to use and easy to weatherproof.

  • Yeah, I had a surface laptop that had 60GB in there. Real handy when it's only got 128GB of storage.

    I used PatchCleaner and it did the job.

  • Having a need for a "valid travel document" to cover for your perceived ethnicity stinks of "papers, please" and I am alarmed that you cannot see that connection.

  • It is a valid travel document for land and sea travel within North America and the Caribbean.

    The way you've phrased it sounds quite dystopian.

  • Perhaps the pressure difference between a column of fresh water and the equivalent height of salty water is enough to tip the scales.

  • There is a FreeRTOS option for Arduino which is pretty much the next step when you want to do multitasking.

    Basically, you create tasks in your setup routine by pointing to various self contained functions - each function becomes a task - and your "loop" becomes the task that runs when everything else is idle.

    Your functions have their own loops so they never exit, and then when you kick-start the tasks the task scheduler in FreeRTOS does all the heavy lifting of timeslicing the various functions so that they all appear to be running at once.

    If you share resources, like an I2C bus, you can add locking around it so that tasks that need the resource wait until other tasks are finished with it so you don't get tasks treading on each other's toes.

  • Electronics @discuss.tchncs.de

    My customisable solar hot water system controller (project in progress)