• 0 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • I tried a similar scenario: The phone has a nfc reader built in, so I put the tag on the charger and tried letting the phone read it, but quickly discovered that android can’t/wont read nfc tags unless the phone is unlocked, which defeated the elegance of the solution. I hadn’t considered buying a standalone reader and attaching the tag to the phones, that sounds a lot more complicated.


  • Using an Automation APP like Tasker to turn off a Home Assistant-controlled smart plug when the battery exceeds a reprogramming threshold, might be a more reliable method & works for any device.

    This is the method I have been using for years and it works great. I use Home Assistant to manage the automation, the Home Assistant client app for Android (you could use tasker for this) to collect the device telemetry to send to Home Assistant (how it knows when the battery hits 85% or drops below 70%).

    I do want to point out there is one small downside to this method: your device charger (and I’m using an Anker wireless phone charging stand as my charger) only works for one device. Example, say my personal phone is charged up to 85%, so I take it off the charger, but my work-issued phone needs to be charged, but when I put my work phone on the charger nothing happens and it doesn’t charge because the charger is connected to a smart plug that’s turned off because my personal phone is charged up.




  • Are you just talking about dynamic DNS services for one or a few home servers?

    There’s always DynDNS, but that’s a paid service. I actually discovered that dynamic IP address service was provided free by Google when using Google Domains as the registrar, so I moved a few of my private domains over to Google several years ago to save myself $55 a year.

    Unfortunately, Google Domains is shutting down and all registrar services and existing customer domains are getting moved to squarespace and I’ve not yet been able to determine if squarespace is going to be offering the free dynamic DNS service or not.









  • All of the Hellraiser movies (some are great, some are not so great, but it’s worth it to work through all of them in order). The newest was kind of a re-imagining and you can start there if you want).

    The Thing - the 1982 film is a classic, but the newest one is a prequel that came decades after the original movie- I’d recommend watching both, starting with the original.

    All the alien movies. Some don’t consider Sci-Fi horror to be true horror, but these are essential watching. I consider it to be the best complete horror series of movies ever made.

    Vampire’s Kiss (Nicholas Cage) - this is truly bizarre and if you are a Nick Cage fan it should be considered required watching.

    Barbarian (2022) - simultaneously mind blowing and absolutely terrifying. Probably the best horror of the past 5 years.

    The Mist - and mainly just for the ending which was a total mindfuck.

    Train to Busan - This is a Korean made film (with subtitles) in the zombie genre, and is absolutely riveting.

    World War Z - an outstanding zombie genre movie - one of the first zombie movies to feature fast moving parkour capable zombies as opposed to the slow moving classic zombies.

    American Psycho - scary because this could (and does) happen and you could be standing right next to the next American Psycho right now and not even know it.

    Maximum Overdrive - doesn’t get recommended a lot, but it holds up and is a great machine-uprising type of horror.

    Event Horizon - propped up as SciFi Horror but this is a classic true horror just with a scifi backdrop.

    I WISH there would be a modern remake of “Scanners”. Scanners is great horror from decades past but it just doesn’t hold up well to modern standards-it desperately needs a modern remake.




  • My story, and my motives, will probably be different from a lot of accounts posted here.

    I started smoking in 1988 and ultimately quit in 2009…so a run of about 21 years, which means I’ve been free from it for 14 years.

    My Story: My tobacco of choice was ‘Drum’ and I hand-rolled and smoked without filters. I liked Drum because it tasted great to me, I liked the idea of hand-crafting each and every cigarette I smoked, and it was a pretty cool party-trick to be able to produce perfect hand-rolls out of tobacco or whatever - where ever I was, I was always the designated roller. It was also WAY cheaper than traditional cigarettes - I could buy a can of Drum that would produce 250 cigarettes for $12 - and that was due to a loophole in the state’s cigarette tax. Prior to 2009, the state only heavily taxed cigarettes, but not the individual supplies to make cigarettes (like loose tobacco). That loophole got closed in 2009 and the cost of a can of loose tobacco went up from $12 to $49 over night. I’d known for a while that I should probably quit, but I just never got to that mental acceptance of doing it, until this new tax came along. Ultimately, I decided I just wasn’t going to pay that new tax and so I didn’t really decide to quit smoking, I decided I was going to quit buying tobacco (which has the same end result). At first, I started cutting back, to make my remaining supply of tobacco last as long as possible. The lower my stock got, the farther back I cut down. At first it was limiting myself to 4 a day… then 2 a day (that I would smoke over 4 sessions), then 1 a day that I’d light and inhale a few times and put out and save for later. I stretched this out for months…and then one day it was gone. I didn’t use any medical aids, I didn’t use any substitution with something else. I just quit. I should also mention that I’d also always enjoyed cigars…and typically enjoyed about 6 cigars a year, but I’d decided to cut that out also. Shortly after quitting, I told myself that I’d treat myself to a cigar only after I could go 1-full-month without thinking about smoking. This went on for months, and I actually thought about smoking all the time. At first, several times a day…and then several times a week, and then eventually just once in a while. It actually took about a year after quitting that a friend and I were talking about it (he was quitting also) and I realized I hadn’t thought about smoking for several months. Finally, I seemed to have fully broken both the physical and mental addiction. It was about six months after that that I decided to treat myself to a cigar. These days, I have about 3 cigars a year (all on special occasions) - which is a small enough number not to re-kindle my desire to smoke more.

    It’s nice to be escaped from the habit, the financial burden of it, and the negative health aspects. The other great side effects: lower life insurance premiums, whiter teeth (and easier/quicker dental cleanings), clothes that don’t smell like smoke.



  • Anonymous tips are less than worthless.

    The first problem is that anyone who is anonymously tipped on is just going to deny it. And now its the word of a named person vs an anonymous tip. That isn’t going to fly.

    The next problem is that people will quickly learn to weaponize the anonymous tip process to persecute the people they dislike - regardless of whether the target was even involved in the vandalism.

    Policies like these are dumb. They don’t discourage the bad behavior (the opposite, actually, perpetrators know that the damage they do will impact far more people, which is the entire point of doing it in the first place, so this policy actually works as an incentive to do more vandalism).


  • I don’t think anyone disagrees with that…I just think it’s important to be realistic here. For niche communities to thrive the way they thrive on reddit, it’s just a numbers game. They have the numbers. Lemmy doesn’t. Lemmy is about two orders of magnitude short of the numbers of users needed to achieve the critical-mass / synergy that would be needed to make most niche communities actually viable here. And even then…it’ll probably take even more users than that because the very nature of lemmy is fragmentation/distributed - so having the total numbers still might not be enough.


  • No, you’re not paranoid. I’d call it diligent.

    The premise of the statement you quoted is faulty to the core. A device internal to your home network knows a lot about the design of your home network and it knows a lot about the other devices on your network, and it can be used to facilitate/relay malicious access to your other devices if it becomes compromised.

    Wyze has always struggled with security problems…and I’ll admit that I do have several wyze cameras…but long ago decided their security was not trustworthy and created an entirely new virtual lan to run just my IOT stuff from. That, at least, reduces the exposure for some of their security issues. I certainly would never have interior cameras built by wyze - that’s too risky even with robust network security on my side of it.