qjkxbmwvz

joined 1 year ago
[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 4 points 4 hours ago

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 :)

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 2 points 3 weeks ago

Sawyer filter inline with a camelback is awesome. I'd just fill up my camelback in a stream using a (clean) handkerchief to get the large debris out and then let the filter do the rest.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 3 points 1 month ago

Yep, you're right


I was just responding to parent's comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

That's...not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum


light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they're just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don't call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don't use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that "physics bandwidth" tends to care about fractional bandwidth ("delta frequency divided by frequency"), whereas "information bandwidth" cares about absolute bandwidth ("delta frequency"), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz


so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 5 points 1 month ago

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban "fiberization" is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it's probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

So the irony is

I see what you did there...

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think you mean more scrupulous, not less.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal


if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 4 points 1 month ago

Most of the time that leads to them dying.

Well, squishing has a 100% chance of them dying. With a toddler and a baby, having them run loose sadly isn't an option.

We live in a very mild climate, and there's under-deck and fence space around our house, in addition to bushes, trees, and underbrush


fairly suitable for a variety of arachnids. It's not the same as indoors, and survival rate certainly isn't 100%, but it's not the death sentence of going from a climate controlled house to below-freezing outdoors.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Because I can trap mine in a jar and take it outside instead.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 31 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I think large planes "look" like they can't work because their "relative speed" is really low


that is, their speed relative to their length. We're used to seeing birds cover tens of lengths per second, whereas a large airliner covers ~1ish per second at takeoff.

Or not, but this always seemed like a plausible explanation as to why planes look impossible. (Though given that hovering birds don't look funny, maybe this is a silly observation...).

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