I’ve honestly never understood people who feel the need to “replace” Spotify. … Spotify has never made sense for my use-case.

I don’t know how to say this, but…you have extremely uncommon use-cases:

…during those times, my phone is either fully turned off (so I’ll use an MP3 player), or it’s in Airplane Mode.

Many people listen to music on stereos and don’t necessarily want a device plugged in, so

I just download the music I like to my device and listen to it via VLC.

either doesn’t work or is substantially less convenient than e.g. casting from a phone.

Not hating on your setup at all, but it’s very niche, in my experience.

It’s a line from The Kinks’ Lola.

The first bit, not the bit about fascists. But I suspect they’d be on board with that.

Some would call the former command cat abuse.

In short, unless you want the contents of a file printed to stdout (or multiple files concatenated), the command can probably be written without cat, instead using the filename as an argument (grep pattern file) or IO redirection (cmd < file).

Stylistics and readability are another thing though.

Yabai+sketchybar make tiling+virtual desktops…at least usable on mac.

Of course, I’d take i3 any day of the week.

Coming from Debian, it was…not expected. I understand how and why it happened, but the user experience was surprising.

Debian keeps the previous kernel around, which makes perfect sense to me — in the event that a kernel update borks your system you can just load the previous one. This would probably only happen due to out of tree modules (looking at you, Nvidia…).

Coming from Debian, it was…not expected. I understand how and why it happened, but the user experience was surprising.

Debian keeps the previous kernel around, which makes perfect sense to me — in the event that a kernel update borks your system you can just load the previous one. This would probably only happen due to out of tree modules (looking at you, Nvidia…).

Linux distros can still do…questionable things. In grad school I tried Arch for a bit, and I once was late to a video call because I had updated my kernel but did not reboot. Arch decided that because there was a new kernel installed, I didn’t need the modules for the old — but currently running! — kernel, so it removed them. So when I plugged in a webcam, the webcam module was nowhere to be found.

But yeah…somehow, still not as bad as Windows updates.

Our Internet went out for a few hours today, so naturally my smart switches, lights, cameras, motion sensors, door sensors, and power monitoring… continued to work as of nothing was wrong.

Home Assistant is great, and using local-only devices is awesome. If my smart home stops working it’s my own fault, not some 3rd party.

Is he coping or just surviving?

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.

One of the best things about having an instant pot is the ease of making refried beans from scratch. They’re fairly low effort, and so so much better (not to mention cheaper).

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.

In San Francisco, a ticket for any event at the big arena (Chase Center — home of the Warriors) gives you free Muni transportation: https://www.sfmta.com/fares/your-chase-center-event-ticket-your-muni-fare

It’s a start.

On the one hand, that sucks, on the other…well, what really sucks is that it’s probably necessary given the state of public transit and bikeability. (Haven’t been to Nashville, so I can’t comment on public transportation there.)

Any city in the US

I don’t think that’s correct, for example, San Francisco:

On December 11, 2018, the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance (the “Ordinance”) eliminating required parking minimums citywide for all uses.

This does exist in major US cities, especially the older (by US standards) ones. I’m in San Francisco, in a “good” neighborhood, and restaurants, groceries, bars, and multiple forms of public transit are all a short walk away. This is very different in car centric suburbs/cities though.

Have you encountered modern shifters? They’re fairly involved.

Electronic shifting, hydraulic brakes, liberal use of sealed cartridge bearings, carbon fiber parts requiring strict torque specs…these are definitely different than 70’s friction shift ten-speed bikes.

Or, they’re about to collect their paycheck from the photoshoot they just participated in.

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.