This joke is both very good and EXTREMELY local.

I was in the rough carpentry game 20+ yrs ago so it’s been a while for me also. For the most part I think if you buy SPF you’re getting some sort of pine species. But it wasn’t super uncommon for us to find a couple dozen fir studs in a bundle.

Framing material in the US is called SPF, which means spruce pine fir. Any of those species may be used and they have similar enough engineering characteristics that they are interchangeable. Occasionally a building will be designed to use a specific species (southern yellow pine etc). But mostly we engineer stick built structures for SPF framing.

Ha, I roasted you for having the good sense to let somebody else handle some of this stuff for you.

Nobody in crazy rabbit hole club is allowed to do anything the easy way!!

I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.

Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.

HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??

I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.

Sigh…

People who have enormous fame or import like miss swift can’t exactly travel public roads in an unmodified car from fucking Avis. Not only is fame a tremendous distraction on the road, but she is also a lightning rod for insane people who are known to be heavily armed.

I mentioned the president’s motorcade because she has some of the same problems. She and the president share security problems you don’t have. Those security problems have expensive and carbon intensive solutions. You’re not smarter than all the people who work on the problem. I promise.

Now, before you start name calling on the internet why don’t you flip that dog’s breakfast of yours into the on position.

How does car get to the place the jet landed? Another bigger jet full of cars? That’s how the presidential motorcade works. Seems really consumptive, but it’s one person who leads a nation of 350M, so it also doesn’t make me angry.

Meh, sometimes I drive places a really should have walked. Same shit different scale. I am not moved to anger by this. Eliminate fame or accept that it’s resource intensive.

I’m not sure I fully understand the criticism to be perfectly honest. Is it actually possible to have a mega pop star of that type without them having a more intensive carbon footprint? Like she can’t really fly commercially for a lot of reasons. Tour schedules are one thing but can you imagine the scene it would make?

Fame is really just letting one person, who we consider special for some reason, use the resources of many. They get to live an extravagant lifestyle and we get the cultural benefit their work.

Bottom line: private jet travel seems to me like a requirement of her job. I’m not about to sit here and shame everyone for the carbon output that their job requires of them. She is not some capital class, passive income, leech. The lady works.

FWIW, I don’t really think I could name or identify one of her songs. Everything I know about her is what bleeds through into my media sphere. She could be a real shitheal for all I know.

Another vote for home assistant. It is not just the best FOSS option, it might just be the best option altogether.

Some advice, think carefully about what you want to achieve with automation before you start. Take some time to draw up what you are going to do before you buy anything. Think about extensibility and don’t force yourself to lay out big money and time all at once. Will Smith (tested.com, tech pod, not Independence Day) recommends doing one room at a time and focusing on spaces that are primarily yours first.

Things to consider: If you live with other people, it might be wise to make everything transparent. Meaning the light switches still turn the lights on and off on demand etc.

Wi-Fi is sort of a poor solution to communicating with devices, especially ones that don’t have access to mains power all the time. Consider if you are going to deploy zigbee, z-wave, or a matter mesh. Matter, being very new would be challenging but it is clearly the future of low power wireless communication for home automation.

Set a goal that NOTHING requires a external service or internet connection and stick to it. That might mean giving up on some types of devices but it’s YOUR house, not google’s.

Think automation first. Phone and voice control is cool. But having things just happen the way you would want without have to do anything is even cooler. Be smart about complexity though. How would things have to change if your partner started working a different schedule for instance?

Finally, get creative. Lots of silly problems can be solved with this technology. My favorite automation turns the damn hot glue gun off after 30min so my kids don’t start a fire if they get forgetful after a craft project.

All computers are named after dogs. My dogs, dogs in the family etc. the dog name should be carefully match to the computer’s role and characteristics.

My peerlessly reliably golden retriever will almost always have a server named after him. The most powerful computer in the house is named after the monstrously large golden my parents had when I was young. My sons gaming pc is fast but perpetually broken, named after our greyhound. Laptops are named for smaller dogs, SBC devices get named after toy size dogs.

Wi-Fi ssids should always be named after cats.

This is the natural way of things.