• 6 Posts
  • 116 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • 1983 Lenco LRP 5450 DD record player &

    1998 Yamaha RX-496 RDS stereo receiver

    My stepfather got them for us 2nd hand for a joint present. Quite a decent system!

    Not a real audiophile, but it works well and we enjoy it.

    I also made a Google Home kind of thing out of it using an ESP32S3 that uses ESPHome, Home Assistant, and Music Assistant to make it a Spotify connect node to play Spotify through it, control it with an IR blaster, and use Voice Assistant with it if I am not too far (it has a single mema mic)




  • I listen to his podcast weekly. I haven’t listened to the one from the OP, but in the past year I have become very disillusioned with Stewart.

    Every interview is an absolute softball “what’s your favorite color” BS where each and every answer is a boot that is slobbered on with “BAM”, and “BARS” and every misdirect and deflection by the guest is just accepted and the root of the few harder questions goes unanswered without protest outside of maybe the Christie interview.

    The Jeffries interview was absolutely embarrassing, for example.

    It’s very different from Stewart 15+ years ago.



  • The few things I don’t like about flatpaks (which become a problem on atomic distros that use almost all flatpak by design):

    • Some types of embedded development is essentially impossible with flatpaks. Try getting the J-link software connected with nrftools and then everything linked to VScodium/codeoss

    • Digital signing simply doesn’t work, won’t work for the foreseeable future, and is not planned to get working,

    • Flatpaks sometimes have bugs for no reasons when their package-manager counterparts don’t (e.g. in KiCAD 8.0, the upper 20% or so of dialog boxes were unclickable with the mouse, but I could select and modify them with the keyboard, only the flatpak version)

    • The status on whether it is still being actively developed or not (at least I hear a fair amount of drama surrounding it)

    But besides those small things, it seem great to me.


  • Some drives are worse than others and higher capacities get worse and worse, in my experience, Seagate drives are extremely loud.

    If you get helium drives (like wd red plus > 8TB i think),or 2nd hand hgst/ WD enterprise drives) they are significantly quieter.

    But, having an ssd is cheaper probably. I have an SSD for the boot drive and all databases, configuration folders, etc… In docker so general IO is fast, then media, documents, pictures, etc… On the big HDDs.



  • KNX.

    Everything is decentrally programmed, and you can do extra automations and stuff from home assistant, but KNX devices are wired (generally) and will always Just Work™. More expensive that the cheaper retrofit options, but if you factor in manual overrides or getting the “better” wireless smart devices it is comparable. They generally also have a manual override at the panel. For core functions like lights, HVAC, roll shutters or blinds, etc… That is honestly the best option (unless you want every light to be an RGB light for some reason, then you still need smart bulbs)




  • XP-pen has much more cost-effective options that are just as good nowadays since wacom hasn’t innovated in like 15 years lol.

    They also work out of the box in Linux, but for all of the shortcuts, they also have driver packages for every distribution and if it isn’t available, support will package the newest version for you (in my experience) in your chosen format and then send it to you and update the driver downloads.

    The XP Pen Deco Pro Gen2 is an absolute beast for a drawing tablet.

    XPPen also has a android drawing pad but that is normal android I think.

    If OP wants the drawing tablet experience with a screen, they can also get XPPen Artist Pro display tablet series which of the few artists I know in real life, are what most of them use.

    An actual drawing pad is much better than even an IPad for drawing, and you can also use whatever program you want (like Krita), not just the neutered programs that come on iOS or android.









  • Different person, but I have had my Xperia 5ii for 4 years. It hasn’t gotten any updates for 2.5, but in Belgium, bank apps and a national identity authentication app HAVE to work because the national ID reading software doesn’t work on atomic linux distros so I can’t risk putting Lineage on it to extend its lifespan. The fingerprint sensor stops working 4-12 hours after a reboot due to a prolific software bug and the battery life has degraded quite a bit.

    Maybe the FP6 would be a good successor. FP5 actually got 3rd for me when I took the MKBHD blind photo test after the pixels, the camera seems quite good now.