Open, or standards-compliant local-only gear is the way to go for smart home stuff IMHO. Never had a problem with a Zigbee, Matter, or ESPHome device suddenly deciding it would stop working because manufacturer said so.

Yeah it’s missing the text, “…then the Planck X would be…” for the first two.

And a big plastics shill, unfortunately.

For back-of-the-envelope or mental calculations, pi is often 3 or 10^(1/2).

The latter is better than 1% accurate, and has nice properties when doing order-of-magnitude/log space calculations in base 10.

ZigBee router thing:

I’ve been happy with the SMLIGHT SLZB-06M. You can easily flash firmware, and it has PoE which was important for me. I believe it also supports Thread, but I haven’t tried this yet (and I’m not sure if it supports it at the same time as Zigbee).

Zigbee smart plugs from Third Reality have been pretty solid in my experience, and they report power usage.

For circuit breaker level monitoring, I have an Emporia Vue2. I have it running esphome, completely local — unfortunately this requires some simple soldering and flashing, so it’s not turnkey. But it’s been rock solid ever since flashing it. (Process is well documented online.)

I’ve had decent luck with cheap wifi Matter bulbs, but provisioning them is finicky, and sometimes they just crap out and need to be power cycled; Zigbee bulbs (e.g., Ikea) have generally been reliable, though sometimes I’ve had difficulty pairing them initially. After power cycling a Matter WiFi bulb, it takes a while for it to respond to Home Assistant; Zigbee bulbs generally respond as soon as you power them on.

I have a wired smart light switch from TP-Link/Kasa (KS205), and it’s been completely hassle free (and totally local — Matter over wifi). The Kasa smart switch dongles I have work flawlessly but need proprietary pairing, and I’m afraid to update firmware in case they lose local support.

Good luck! Fun adventure :)

Most Linux filesystems, being case sensitive, won’t find the SUDO command.

Talk to your manager.

Shortly after I was hired, my manager told me I should feel free to decline any meeting that didn’t seem useful, or that if it was preventing me from getting “real” work done.

Eurythmics 🫱 sailing the seven seas 🫲 Village People

I think a lot of companies view their free plan as recruiting/advertising — if you use TailScale personally and have a great experience then you’ll bring in business by advocating for it at work.

Of course it could go either way, and I don’t rely on TailScale (it’s my “backup” VPN to my home network)… we’ll see, I guess.

…are Turing Complete, so what you can do with them is exactly equal.

But they’re only equal in the Turing complete sense, which (iirc) says nothing about performance or timing.

Yeah, though it looks like the cyan (which would be ~500nm) is actually false color UV image, judging by the same color scale as this https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/5-3-2024_sdo_x1pt6_flare_131/

Awesome, thanks for the detailed answer!

I remember when phones used to be good.

Telemarketers have been around for a long, long time (Wikipedia claim “…the practice of contacting potential customers by telephone originated in the late 19th century.”).

I personally recall a lot more telemarketing in the 90s, though I was a kid and just passed the phone to mom or dad. But that was also a time when caller ID was a luxury, and not everyone had answering machines.

Inconceivable! Some also look like Winston Churchill.

Some numbers are missing…[due to] out of memory error.

The S7+ seems to have 6 or 8GB RAM, but the iPhone 7 only has 2, yet it seems the iPhone ran the test and the S7+ didn’t. I wonder if the iOS implementation is that much better, or Android isn’t set up with any swap, or…?

I know the “attack helicopter” bit is a transphobic trope, but given how hard those fans are probably working, I think this computer might actually identify as one.

(If this comment is offensive I can remove it/mod can obviously remove it — not trying to be a dick!)

Human gestation is 10 months

“Full term” pregnancy is ~40w from last menstrual period, or ~38w from conception. There are ~4.345 weeks/month, putting full term at ~8.75 to ~9.2 months. Note the 9.2 months includes ~2 weeks before fertilization.

(Not sure if I’m being whooshed or not…)

People praise the female reproductive system as miraculous because it can make a baby in only 9 months. Like that’s neat and all, but my reproductive system can make a baby in approximately 13 seconds, so I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

Can you explain the Ethernet requirement more? Was that just that the computer didn’t have WiFi, or was it set up such that only the wired interface worked with their VPN, or…?

Can you explain your travel router situation? Did you use the travel router to access WiFi and provide an Ethernet port for the computer (I think this is called “WISP mode”)? Or was this an 4G/5G router?

In any event, at least on Android you can connect to WiFi and tether to a computer over USB. It’s very useful for setting up a computer without WiFi drivers, as Linux will almost always recognize the shared Internet (so, it’s functionally a USB wifi dongle with very good driver support).