TrenchcoatFullOfBats

I still miss using my iPAQ h4350. It still works; might be time to fire up Doom4CE…

The Dorrito Zone: You can have any kind of burrito you want, as long as it’s made entirely with Cool Ranch Doritos.

When I got started with my smart home setup, my primary concern was privacy and local control, so I went with an ethernet zigbee coordinator and zigbee bulbs, motion sensors, switches, plugs, etc. Everything runs from a micro PC running Home Assistant OS. It’s been rock solid for years, with no reliance on cloud services, and with no data leaving my house.

The only tricky bit was automating some can lights in the bathroom, but I solved that one by installing a wifi Shelly 2.5 dual channel roller shutter relay, with one channel connected to the light switch and the other to the bathroom fan. This was also the project that led to my discovery of WAGO connectors, which are vastly superior to wire nuts. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Reminds me of the story of Golgafrincham from the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy books:

The planet Golgafrincham creatively solved the problem of middle managers: it blasted them in to space.

Golgafrinchan Telephone Sanitisers, Management Consultants and Marketing executives were persuaded that the planet was under threat from an enormous mutant star goat. The useless third of their population was then packed in Ark spaceships and sent to an insignificant planet.

That planet turned out to be Earth.

Same on the computer thing, but I feel that knowing how to tear a computer (or anything, really) apart reduces the “I don’t think I can do this” threshold a bit. Not having a choice also helps, as in “Oh, the turbo died and all the shops say it’ll cost more than the car is worth to replace? Guess I’m learning how to swap a turbo.”

Don’t forget your purity seals!

Be the Ents you want to see in the world

burárum intensifies

Agreed. I’ve been using Krita quite a bit lately and honestly, it’s really good. I haven’t used an Adobe product for a few years, but it’s been able to do everything I want it to do so far.

Yeah, switched to a different company for kitchen stuff, bought it on their site and everything, felt good about it.

Delivery day comes, guess who delivered the package? Amazon. So that was great.

Looks like issues transferred over

That’s definitely been true in the past, but the gap’s narrowed a lot. GIMP (with plugins) and Krita cover most Photoshop-style workflows, and Inkscape does a pretty good job with vector work. For many graphic design tasks, Linux has solid native tools now—just takes a bit of adjustment if you’re used to Adobe.