patrickk

More like “how do we shovel the UX of a very niche, overpriced product that barely anyone will use (Vision Pro) on everyone that uses a recent-ish Apple product?”

This, this, this.

Just never, ever connect the TV to the internet. Connect up an Nvidia shield, or a mini-PC/raspberry pi configured with whatever apps you desire, hidden behind a pi-hole. Connect a steam deck if gaming/linux desktop usage is your thing. I only touch the TV remote to switch on the TV, and even that could be automatable with home assistant+CEC if that's of interest.

Caseking and Alternate.de for PC components.

There are some great 3D printing services out there for those who don’t have access to a 3D printer locally. You can upload the CAD file and get an instant quote.

Fair enough.

I think the "form over function" dogma has taken over to such an extent that it's creating miserable, concrete and glass hellscapes that are foisted upon the public by detatched "starchitects". A great point that was mentioned somewhere (maybe in that artlicle I linked) is that unlike other forms of art, architecture is forced into your view, whether you like it or not. If you hate modern art, you can simply avoid that msueum.

With newer stone CNC machines now advancing, hopefully we can recreate the beautiful, intricate craftsmanship of the past, and indeed even develop wacky, creative new forms too and move away from these horrible, bland designs that have taken over everywhere, and made every cityscape look generic and indistinct.

> they have tons of unnecessary ornamentation

That's in the eye of the beholder.

Pertinent HN article + discussion, which I love to revisit every once and a while, even though I do not work in anything related to architecture.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582942

The fact that so many people from all over the world are drawn to older architecture with "tons of unnecessary ornamentation" makes you think where we went wrong in recent decades.

Freetube is a way to achieve this with YouTube. You just get RSS feeds, you avoid endless scrolling.

https://freetubeapp.io/

https://github.com/hyperion-project/hyperion.ng For a DIY version of Philips Ambilight is a really cool implementation of addressable LEDs.

The Wled project is another amazing implementation. It allows the creation of all sorts of light fixtures, there’s some insane setups on YouTube.

Yes indeed, this article is outdated. But I posted it to counter the other comments here which are trying to draw links to Trump bring the reason that the Bundesbank don’t believe the US Fed. In fact, some in Germany have long mistrusted the Fed’s word on how much German gold is still actually in the vaults.

Here is a very fun, deeply speculative article from Zerohedge on this topic, from 2013:

https://archive.is/dVIK3

> That's right, ladies and gentlemen, as a result of our cursory examination, we have learned that the world's largest private, and commercial, gold vault, that belonging once upon a time to Chase Manhattan, and now to JPMorgan Chase, is located, right across the street, and at the same level underground, resting just on top of the Manhattan bedrock, as the vault belonging to the New York Federal Reserve, which according to folklore is the official location of the biggest collection of sovereign, public gold in the world.

> At this point we would hate to be self-referential, and point out what one of our own commentators noted on the topic of the Fed's vault a year ago, namely that:

> Chase Plaza (now the Property of JPM) is linked to the facility via tunnel... I have seen it. The elevators on the Chase side are incredible. They could lift a tank.

> ... but we won't, and instead we will let readers make up their own mind why the the thousands of tons of sovereign gold in the possession of the New York Fed, have to be literally inches across, if not directly connected, to the largest private gold vault in the world.

Edit: more details about the underground vaults- https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/ronan-manly/keys-gold-vaul...

> A secret report by Germany’s Federal Audit Office leaked to the public last week states that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York refuses to allow Bundebank staff to even view the gold, triggering suspicions that the vaults are empty as well as calls for the gold to be shipped back to Berlin.

> The Fed implements stringent security controls, and refuses even Bundesbank staff full access to the German gold hoard. A team of personnel demanding access in 2007 were only allowed to visit the anteroom of the reserves, and when Bundebank auditors visited in May 2011 only one of nine compartments was opened for direct handling.

> The Federal Reserve’s fervent secrecy has engendered suspicion and concern, with some claiming that Germany’s gold has long ago disappeared or been lent out, and that only promissory notes of nominal value are sitting in the vault.

https://www.mining.com/germans-begin-to-demand-their-gold-ba...

They integrate with Home Assistant via MQTT:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/networked-artifacts/air-lab/upda...

Usually in such cases either copy and paste the error message from draw.io, or screenshot it and upload to chatGPT. It will debug it for you.

There’s also a specific sequence of steps to import mermaid scripts, I don’t remember the menu location by heart, ChatGPT can also give you the steps needed to do this.

LLMs (I use ChatGPT) can take a generic process description, spit out the result in mermaid, which can then be imported and refined in something like draw.io. Yes, you’ll have to correct a few things by hand, but it drastically speeds things up. Last time I check draw.io is supported in obsidian.

They also have them in Germany. I used to have the manual "flat roll of fabric" in the past, and upgraded the entire rollers in the house to electric ones (I don't know if it's possible to only upgrade the fabric roll -> electric switch without upgrading the entire shutter).

After you have electric-controlled rollers, you can control them via any automation you want by installing a "Shelly Plus 2PM" device behind each switch.

I connect the Shellys to home assistant, and from there, trigger all the rollers to go down a certain number of minutes after sunset. They all rise at a certain time in the morning. You can always trigger them manually too, of course. ChatGPT can spit out very complex YAML for HA if you want to make life easier, your only limit is your imagination.

x100 this. You can sort of derive the meaning of a complex word if you grasp one or two parts of it and offer a hacked together English translation, even if it doesn’t map directly. I find that people online who haven’t actually studied German like to meme this often.

The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.

> Also what’s the watchband compatibility? Will this work with the original pebble bands or with standard watch bands or something new and proprietary?

It says it works with standard 22mm watchbands, so it seems like you can just put on any 3rd party band you like.

Seymour Hersh published a detailed piece outlining his case that it was carried out by the US military with assistance from Norway (who have expertise in that part of the seabed), using the cover of a NATO naval exercise as partial cover:

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the...

I find it more credible that these were the actors involved. Biden wanted to end a future link between Germany and Russia. In Germany there is significant segment of the population that is distrustful of the US (even before the recent Trump shenanigans) and the potential stronger infrastructure ties to Russia. I find it more credible than a ragtag group of Ukrainians did it personally.

Although the truth may never be known.

Edit: for clarity

I didn’t misunderstand what you meant. I just meant you can “hack” the live TV feature of Jellyfin, and use it to create a “live” tv experience from local media.

For live tv listings, there are companion apps like Ersatztv and Tunarr (easier to use than Ersatztv but less features) which feed into the live tv section in Jellyfin. You create 24/7 “tv stations” running whichever collection of local media files you wish to have in a “channel”. It’s great if you plop down and can’t decide what to watch, or want to replicate the look and feel of childhood cartsoon, right down to inserting 90s ads in between episodes.

You can use Ersatztv to create an automatically updated playlist, based on a Trakt or IMDB list. Back in the day, there was/is a a cool addon for Kodi called “PseudoLiveTV” and these apps replicate this functionality.

So you can have an always updated Christopher Nolan collection, Halloween movies, westerns, 24/7 90s cartoons, BBC nature documentaries or whatever.

You can pull any imaginable tv or movie list from Kometa using Ersatztv:

https://kometa.wiki/

See here for one idea: https://youtu.be/Ibaj6NiS8xM?si=eiPhTzZuwGAwa8Id

That’s true, intensively farming in a small country will come with serious downsides. But if it’s a choice between starvation vs mass producing bland food and creating pollution, there is only one choice to make.

The Netherlands managed to dramatically raise crop yields after WWII by intensive farming methods like building a massive amount of greenhouses. The crop yield per hectare is insane as a result. It was as a response to WWII that this system of farming was adopted.

So if we reach a point of mass starvation many counties will adopt similar strategies and drastically raise crop yields.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33763087

English and German are EU languages. Russian is not.

The EU maintains a large translation service to translate most EU official texts into all EU languages. So Google Translate is using that to train on. Google gets a free gift from a multinational bureaucracy and gets to look like a smart company in the process.

This is also why English-Mandarin is often poorly translated, in my opinion.

There’s loads of hacker spirit still alive in the homelab and home automation space just to give one example.

Having lots of fun tinkering with Proxmox, Wled, Shelly devices to manipulate electric rollers, and more. Couldn’t quite get Valetudo running on my robot vacuum (my model isn’t the easiest to hack) but the concept is so cool. Triggering automations With dirt cheap NFC tags or a cheap wireless numpad is so satisfying.

Building an *arr stack is another area where there’s tons of amazing creativity online and the hacker spirit still lives on.

One proposal is to link the UK to Morocco, which would supply up to 8% of the UK's electricity consumption with a single project. The site would generate 24/7 clean power by a combination of predictable sunshine, predictable wind patterns, and the remainder by batteries.

From reading about the project, it seems the biggest hurdle by far is getting the lengthy cable built. The project is forced to figure out the manufacturing of it's own cable, as there doesn't seem to be enough global capacity to provide it to them externally.

> Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists." BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.

Source: https://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

It's horrendus in Germany trying to cancel a mobile phone subscription, internet service, gym membership or the likes. You have to jump through hoops like sending a registered physical letter, 3 months before the end of the service period for it to be considered a valid cancellation ("Kün­di­gung"). Without this, you're forced into paying for another year.

EU regulation is badly needed to cut out this anti-consumer nonsense.

A quick search showed up this RTK press release from New Holland:

https://media.cnh.com/North-America/new-holland-agriculture/...

You can see videos of rtk tractors on YouTube including DIY applications.

This is how GDPR works, explicit opt-in consent is needed from the customer.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

I’m not sure if there’s a been a study done, but it’s interesting to see some potential solutions to the intermittency problem and how close they’d get the world to a completely green grid.

Orientating solar panels differently than simply south facing to better match usage patterns: https://youtu.be/LqizLQDi9BM?si=4uqsRO3qEGfm4Yxr

Building out a “supergrid”, like what’s already happening across Europe. Balance intermittent supply across a wide geographical area. There’s always wind blowing somewhere, Iceland has massive, 24/7 geothermal that’s not yet connected to mainland Europe, Southern Europe has huge solar potential, and so on. The UK has a project to get 8% of its electric demand from a massive solar/wind/battery project built in Morocco linked via undersea cable to the UK.

Finally, batteries. Lifepo4 batteries are constantly dropping in price. We haven’t seen a huge deployment of Chinese sodium ion batteries for homes yet, but it’s coming.

And that’s not touching on some of the other possible solutions.