Home Assistant

WHEE! My Home Assistant Blue arrived! I did the migration a couple of days ago, and so far, I'm impressed.

1.) I did not realize the case was metal. Sweet.
2.) It seems to run more smoothly than Home Assistant ran on the Pi, which I'd expect since the Blue was purpose-designed to run Home Assistant.
3.) The resource usage is much ( Read more... )

So among my accomplishments this year, I have successfully flashed my new bluray drive back to older firmware to gain unlimited read/write speed and also to rip 4Ks. My old drive is starting to be quirky, and as my pandemic sanity project is ripping and encoding movies, I went ahead and did some budget magic to upgrade it. Now I did not--at the ( Read more... )

So I am always in search of working universal remotes for my mom and myself because it's guaranteed you will lose or break it and a lot of TVs now don't come with any physical buttons or a limited selection.

I've been using the Logitech elite; hideously expensive, but it worked with literally all my media. I love it, it was definitely worth the ( Read more... )

Due to so much current stress I've been skipping out on my posting here. I really am not feeling doing an update on life at this time, but I want to spread this far and wide.

I talked about starting to use open source Home Assistant for my home automation needs with a Raspberry Pi. since then I updated to an 8 GB Pi and added booting from an SSD.

( Read more... )

New laptop arrived! Her name is Medea.

( about medea )

So I ordered a new laptop and am starting prep to refurbish this one for my mom.

The new laptop (name pending) is a Dell XPS 17 9700, upgraded to 32 GB RAM and a 4K touchscreen. I left the drive alone since I'm upgrading it myself to a much faster Samsung Pro 980, but happily, unlike Manhattan, this laptop has two M.2 drives and I seriously, ( Read more... )

I'd been back and forth about trying Home Assistant for my home automation needs, mostly due to a.) inertia and b.) SmartThings pretty much covered what I needed.

Then: SmartThings has been transitioning to a new platform and app for two years, and they managed to break a lot of my custom code and other people's--basically, half of why I loved it ( Read more... )

I am taking a month off social media--by that I mean tumblr and twitter--to see if that helps calm me down. I'm officially bored with anxiety; I didn't know it was possible to experience both together, but here we are.

In the last few weeks;
1.) learned new exercises for PT.
2.) installed Home Assistant on my Pi, which is something like SmartThings ( Read more... )

A good one!

Review: NVIDIA Shield TV Pro - a dissertation apparently

Two months later:

I am seriously glad living in semi-isolation made me crazy enough to buy this, and that's apart from the Plex server, which has had some growing pains.

Streaming

This is an incredibly good media streamer. I cannot emphasize enough that it's upgraded my entire ( Read more... )

Partially to share in case anyone else uses Alexa to control their TV, but also in case I lose (again) my list of working commands that I've tested. This is not exhaustive but the ones I know work. Organized by type and configuration, because each has quirks; will update as new things found.

( Using Alexa on Sonos Speakers to Control TV )