Having my status turn yellow when I so much as look away from my screen is bad enough. I really hope this “feature” stays off.

How does Teams give away your location? I’ve used it extensively, but I’ve never seen someone’s location unless the enter it manually.

When it comes to writing code, there is a huge difference between code that works and code that works *well." Lets say you’re tasked with writing a function that takes an array of RGB values and converts them to grayscale. ChatGPT is probably going to give you two nested loops that iterate over the X and Y values, applying a grayscale transformation to each pixel. This will get the job done, but it’s slow, inefficient, and generally not well-suited for production code. An experienced programmer is going to take into account possible edge cases (what if a color is out of the 0-255 bounds), apply SIMD functions and parallel algorithms, factor in memory management (do we need a new array or can we write back to the input array), etc.

ChatGPT is great for experienced programmers to get new ideas; I use it as a modern version of “rubber ducky” debugging. The problem is that corporations think that LLMs can replace experienced programmers, and that’s just not true. Sure, ChatGPT can produce code that “works,” but it will fail at edge cases and will generally be inefficient and slow.

Social media companies, adult websites, whatever, can try to find ways to block children from accessing their content, but kids will always find a way around it.

It’s the parents’ responsibility to control their children. I’ve said 1000 times, children don’t need access to smartphones and tablets. A desktop PC or laptop with strict parental controls is adequate enough for school work, learning about technology, and some basic entertainment.

When a child is old enough to work and pay for a smartphone themselves, then they’re old enough to have a smartphone. A prepaid flip phone with basic voice and SMS is more than enough for a 15-year-old.

This is kind of a shit article. Most of these are just old hardware that eventually had modern improvements, not “trends.”

A “trend” is cold cathode black lights inside the case, not a silly naming scheme for CPU revisions.

I’m fortunate enough to be a homeowner, but I rented places for most of my adult live. My current home doesn’t have central AC, and none of my rentals did either.

Everywhere I’ve lived, the mounting hardware that comes with portable ACs just didn’t work for me. What I found that did work is to throw away the existing window mount and build your own. I’ll take two pieces of plywood, cut them to the space that exists in my window (at one point this was a sliding door), and sandwich a sheet of insulation foam in the middle. Then drill holes for your AC tubes and screw on the mounts that came with your AC.

Also, if at all possible, avoid the single-hose portable units. You’re wasting cold air. A dual-hose unit uses outdoor air to cool the unit itself, and the hot exhaust gets expelled through the second tube. Do make sure you have a screen on the inlet, though, unless you want to be cleaning out bugs from inside your AC. I have used window units, single-hose portable, and dual-hose portable units. At least in my experience, the window units work best, the dual-hose units are a close second, and the single-hose units are crap.

As far as HA integration, I recently went through the process of finding a new AC that works with HA. What I found is that everything available either requires internet access and works with proprietary “cloud” access or just doesn’t have any sort of remote connection. Some of the “cloud” solutions have decent integration with HA, but I have a hard-and-fast rule that none of my IoT devices access anything outside my home network. What worked for me is buying a “dumb” portable AC with a remote control and using a Wifi-connected universal remote to provide access to HA.

I’ve been an electronics hobbyist for years, and I still don’t own a 3D printer. You can buy premade enclosures in almost every size you can imagine. Then just drill holes to mount IO ports.

I do want to get a 3D printer exactly for this reason, but I’ve just never gotten around to buying one. They are certainly not a necessity if you want to build your own stuff.

One of my favorite automations is my “temperature lamp.” HA takes an average temperature, humidity, and illuminance from various outdoor sensors around my property. I have a template sensor that uses these values, then gives me a “feels-like” outdoor temperature. Another template sensor takes this “feels-like” temperature and converts it to a percentage between 0 (freezing) an 100 (> 120 degrees F). It uses this percentage to calculate a value between blue and red on a perceptually-uniform colorspace (CIELAB) and spits out an RGB value. An automation watches this RGB value and applies it to a RGB light bulb in my living room.

The result is that I have a light that displays what the temperature “feels like” and changes color in a way that people perceive as matching the temperature. So if the lamp looks “kind of blue” it’s going to feel “kind of cold” outside. If the bulb looks “kind of red,” it’s going to feel “kind of warm.”

I set this up for fun, but it’s actually ended up being really useful. Before we leave the house, we can just glance over at the lamp and know if we need to put on a sweatshirt or a coat, or maybe leave the outerwear at home.

I really wish there was a viable alternative for physical backups. Blu-ray just doesn’t have enough storage space, tape is expensive, and hard drives need to be periodically read.

I’ve read about holographic WORM media, but I just don’t think there’s enough consumer demand for the hardware and media to ever be as affordable as blu-ray.

Once upon a time, I could back up all my important data to a stack of DVD-Rs. How am I supposed to back up a 100TB NAS, though? The “best” alternative is to build a second NAS for backup, but that’s approaching tape drive levels of cost.

I sort of understand still selling CF cards. They were used in high end photo and video equipment until not too long ago, and they have storage space comparable with smaller SD cards and USB drives. Plenty of equipment using CF is still perfectly good and still worth using.

I’ve never heard of a zip card. If you mean the old zip disks (I think the largest was 250MB or so), I can’t imagine any reason someone would ever use one of these. Even new, zip drives were notoriously unreliable and not all that widespread. I had one, and I rarely used it in favor of CD-R or RW.

I’d be interested to hear how you have it set up. My issue is definitely with HA. I can see the messages making it to the broker; HA just isn’t recognizing them it seems.

The strange part is that the BlueIris integration already has “Motion” devices for each of my cameras. The documentation made it sound like I just needed to start feeding HA with MQTT messages that these devices were expecting.

I may do like you suggested and just manually set up binary MQTT sensors. It would look a lot cleaner to tie it into the existing integration, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the extra troubleshooting.

In clocks like this, the “set time” is often irrelevant. It’s more important to know exactly how much time has passed since the last time the clock was “checked.” If you’re running a radio transmitter at 6ghz, that’s 6 billion cycles per second. If you synch your transmitter to your clock once per second, it had better be accurate to the billionth of a second.

I haven’t tried W11 LTSC. Even if you cut out the bloat, I just can’t stand the interface. Hopefully 12 is better, but I’m not hopeful.

I switched all of my Windows systems over to Windows 10 LTSC a few months ago, and it’s been a game-changer. I still get security updates, but no advertisements, bloat, or new “features.” I believe it’s supported until 2032.

After that, I’ll probably switch my remaining systems over to Linux, but until then, it’s not half bad.

It’s certainly possible (and probably even likely) that you’re correct. Most of the people I’ve spoken to about that are somewhat tech-inclined and probably much more likely to be using an adblocker than the average person.

So many years of ad-free media has just ruined me on ad-supported content. I sat down in front of a public TV tuned to a cable channel the other day, and it was absolutely unwatchable.

The problem I have always had with cable TV, and now with streaming, is the advertisements. I understand why free services inject ads into their video stream; they have to make a profit somehow. I don’t like it, and I’ll block the ads, but I understand it.

Having experience what ad-free entertainment is like, be it from Netflix years ago, renting movies online, or Youtube with Adblock, I will never pay for a service that’s going to show me ads. Either make the service free and cash in on ad revenue or sell the service for an appropriate price that you can afford not to show ads. Sticking to the old model of “pay for cable TV and watch commercials” is never going to work, be it cable or streaming. I don’t think I’m in the minority here, either; I’ve heard this sentiment from plenty of others.

Depending on how accurate you need your energy usage data to be for individual devices, you might be able to get away with just using a whole-house energy monitor. I’m using one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08LV8DDFP

I already have a large number of Zigbee plugs, so by looking at the power usage from my energy meter before and after one switches, I can get a general estimate of how much power a device is using. Of course, the rest of your home is going to to skew the results, but you can mitigate this a bit with some of HA’s statistics functions. It’s been a while since I tried this, but I did test it with a 3.5kW heater a while ago. I took a median from a certain number of samples before and after the heater switched on (I think 10 seconds worth of samples), and the result was generally accurate to within about 100w.

Is Creative Cloud a requirement for using Adobe products these days? Surely someone can just save data locally instead. Media files (especially raw video) can be enormous.

Microsoft knows that the addition of adds to Windows, Recall, data mining, etc are not suicide. As far as tech news goes, Lemmy really exists in an echo chamber. The vast majority of us at least have some interest in technology. For the majority of the population, though, this isn’t true. The typical person sees a computer as a tool to be used for other things. They’re not reading articles about the latest release of Windows, new CPU technology, the latest GPU, etc. They’re using their computer, and when it’s time for an upgrade, they buy whatever suits their needs.

If I was to ask any of my family, or most of my coworkers, about any of the latest “controversies” surrounding Microsoft, they would have no idea what I was talking about. Microsoft obviously thinks that the added profits gained by monetizing their customers will offset the loss of 1% of their users that switch to Linux. They’re probably right, too.

I like Windows, personally (well, Windows 10 at least). My unofficial rule has always been if it needs a GUI, then it runs Windows, otherwise, it runs Linux as a headless machine. Once Windows 10 is no longer a viable option, my unofficial rule will be “it runs Linux.” Most people will not make this switch.