Imagine if they introduced a law, that if you had defaulted on your student loans, you were not able to get a passport.
That would reduce the number of highly skilled people leaving the country if it got really shit.

This is why I end up doing so much DIY.

A job that takes a professional half a day could take me a whole weekend.
But having to play “how likely are they to fuck it up, and how much of a pain will it be to fix” drives me up the wall so much, I often just buy the tool and do it myself.

My time to do it: 15 hours, plus £200 in materials.
Cheap tradesman: 8 hours, £450 total, non-zero chance I’ll have to rip it out and re-do it myself anyway.
Specialist tradesman : 5 hours, £900-1200 total.

So it either ends up being lots of work, a gamble, or lots of money. Quick, good, cheap, pick two!

Hosting NSFW content is an absolute ball-ache, so a lot of instances that are not NSFW focussed do not host it.
In the early days of feddit.uk, we decided to go the path of SFW, to simplify things.
I absolutely salute the lemmy-nsfw admins in taking that load on.
And it makes a lot of sense: If you’re going to deal with the headaches, you might as well focus entirely on them!

That’s the main reason I haven’t bothered upgrading mine any more.
100mbits with 3ms latency is pretty rocking.

Reminds me of the time I didn’t realise that my underfloor heating had week/weekend heat settings, and woke up to a 24 degree basement.

Very nice! I’ll have to take a look at this.

So far, I’ve only done some things with variable heating targets, boosting if one room falls behind, and minor adjustments on presence detection.

What’s the pricing like on these normally?

It does look a lot more solid, and less nickable!

A very quick glance at the internet put it around £700 for their home one, a fair chunk more than the Reolink one (£70 ish when I last looked).

This is roughly what we have in the UK.

For electricity, the standing charge is 61.6p/day, then 23.3p/kWh.
And gas is 29.6p/day, then 6.1p/kWh. (The numbers vary, and you can choose to lock rates for the duration of a contract).

There has been some discussion of it in recent years (after it doubled, thanks Putin).
Whether it is fair for people using less energy…But in reality, everyone has similar 100 or 60A connections to the grid.
There are tarrifs for very low users, where the standing charge is combined with the first kWh.

Once I’m off the gas boiler, and on a heat pump, I may get my gas disconnected to save the standing charge.

On a tangent, as you may be interested, we now have the option of flexible electricity pricing that tracks the wholesale rates for the day. Usually, it’s cheaper, sometimes even negative. Link.
However, this week there has been a lot of expensive energy, so it’s been butting up against the £1/kWh limit!

Maybe the best way to think about it is not dark, but the absence of more light.
On a DMD projector, we use tiny micromirrors for each pixel which flash thousands of times per frame of video.
The flash/no-flash ratio decides how much light makes it out of the projector. This gives us over a thousand light levels per colour channel, from near dark, to full light.
When the mirrors are not in position, the light output is very low. (1/1000th of the full output, on a projector with a static 1000:1 contrast ratio)

The screen is designed to reflect light well, which means in a non-perfect room, it will have a light floor of the reflected ambient light, plus whatever still makes it through the projector (as Cygnus mentioned, room treatment).

If you do treat a room well enough that the small amount of light that makes it through the projector at all-off is a problem, you can do things like fitting an ND filter to the lens (reducing the full light output, while also reducing the minimum).
Or you can use the dynamic iris fitted to some projectors (which reduces the amount of light being put out based on the overall scene illumination, similar to the way LCD TVs lower the backlight level to “reach” contrast ratios of 100000:1).

The biggest one was probably a combo of having an anemometer, and heat/humidity sensors in each room.

When it’s cold outside, the top floor of the house (loft conversion) loses more heat. But it loses significantly more heat when it’s cold, and the wind is blowing parallel to the floor joists.

I realised that because they’re not perfectly sealed (old house), enough air pressure means that the floor void can easily hit external temperatures, meaning the rooms have cold on twice as many sides.

I will (eventually) get some suitable insulation in them to stop this.

I love having a projector in the living room.
I won’t lie, it gets used far less than I’d like.
But it cost me almost nothing, and it’s just fun to have a massive wall of video.

Well done!

I too love the fact that HASS is a common platform for everything.
It makes duct taping lots of different devices together into automation so much easier.

AFAIK, LG still do not require internet access on first startup.
At least on their medium/high end lines (C and G series).
This was a hard requirement for me. Mine has never been on the internet.

Not just 240v, but in-wall 240v!

Not even a chance to smell the magic smoke.

I’ve had a temp/humidity temperature in all house rooms for a few years now, and it’s dead useful.

Balancing the radiators and TRVs so everything heats up evenly.

Spotting anomalies (top floor loses a lot more heat when the wind is blowing)

And setting the flow temperatures for the radiators, as I can see the rate of heating compared to outside temperatures.

I knew I shouldn’t have given away my 7850!

For a low tech solution, you could use cold chain labels.
They indicate when a temperature threshold is breached. So you’d at least know when a vial was spoiled. They’re not cheap, mind, when you only want a few.

But I know that’s not solving the problem in the way you wanted to!

If you only need to know when a threshold is exceeded, you could make something simple using (for example) an esp with a PAYG SIM card and a temperature sensor.

Then set it up to SMS an alert when temperatures go out of bounds. And pick the SMS up in HASS (various ways). That way, you’ll only be spending a few cents each time there is an issue.

You could also use mobile data if you felt more fancy, and post straight to HASS.

I look forward to getting my hands on one of these! Just need to work out where to put it in the house first.

And possibly waiting for a POE version. But that’s a nit-pick.

Is it possible to test this out using a phone or PC? I really like the idea of local voice assist.

I’ve eliminated 2.4GHz wifi in the house for this reason.
The only downside is, I really need to get a couple more WAPs installed.

HA has been dead handy when I occasionally need to use an old device, as I can flip the second radio on from a dashboard.

I use them, and I love them.

They’re banned from the internet, and never complain.
I use both SD cards inside the cameras, and dumps over SFTP.

The general standard of integration with HASS is very good (IR control, alerts, streams, etc.)
If you want to access streams over a VPN, make sure that you configure the IP addresses manually in the app, rather than letting it auto-find (took me a while to work this out).

Doorbell cam: Lovely bit of kit. Button press and person detection hooks in nicely with HASS things.
I really like being able to answer delivery people (and be silly with visitors). 2-way audio works well in the app, I keep meaning to try integrating it with HASS now the latest version has capability baked in.

810A: Decent picture quality, the only fly in the ointment is that it uses H265 for full res, and a lot of open source things don’t officially support it.

510: Good value, and decent quality image. There is a firmware floating around that adds pet detection features too.