It definitely has a learning curve but as someone who is much more hands on with very little programming experience, I actually found it pretty intuitive. And frankly for the things that aren't super intuitive, there's a community support thread for basically anything you could want to do.
Never thought I would have one, but homeassistant made it easy enough for me to program my own wall mounted control panel, that it just made sense.
There was a car talk puzzler long ago that this reminded me of:
RAY: This is from my delivery truck series and it was sent in by Rob Gretigney.
He writes:
I once worked as a delivery truck driver. The truck I drove was about 25 feet in length. One of the places that I routinely delivered to required that I pull into a narrow alley in order to unload my truck. One cold January day after making my delivery I discovered that my battery was as dead as a hammer. I had probably left my lights on when I went for coffee.
Another delivery driver had pulled into the alley right behind me and I asked if he had a set of jumper cables and a strong battery that I could use. He did but the jumper cables were only 16-feet long and wouldn't reach from his battery to mine. The alley was too narrow to park the truck with the good battery next to mine, and my truck was too heavy to be pushed into a better position. We did think about temporarily replacing my battery with the one from the other truck so that we could at least get out of the alley, but the cable connections were so corroded on both vehicles that they wouldn't budge. And, to top it off, we didn't have any tools anyway.
Then I struck upon an idea that allowed us to get my truck started in only a few short minutes. What was the idea? Answer:
TOM: I know the answer! You put the two cables together and you put the bumpers touching.
RAY: Exactly. Jumper cables consist of two wires with clamps on each end so you've got four clamps. They're kind of stuck together through the insulation, and if you peel them apart and then clamp the ends together, you have instead of one 16-foot long pair of jumper cables, you have one 32-foot long cable, but you only have one. But trucks have steel bumpers and steel frames, and the steel of the frame is the conductive path for all the electrons.
TOM: Phew.
RAY: You've made the electrons travel through one cable, and then through the frames of both vehicles to get back to the original jumping battery, and voila -- the thing was started. Who's our winner?
For me, it's the fact that that entire space could be filled with water.
I used to get the same eerie feeling lifeguarding as a kid, walking around in drained Olympic size pools. Always weirded me out for a minute. Like any second it could fill back up.
I used to be able to play a song or yt video and use an aux cable to go from the pc's headphone out, right back into the pc's mic in, which audacity recognized as a mic, so you could easily record anything playing in original quality.
Fun fact, after my motorcycle accident and c5-7 spinal cord injury in my neck, my entire body felt like this constantly. 3 years later, now only my hands do.
That's fascinating. I just picked up my first 10M radio, can you elaborate a bit?
Pick up an emisar d4v2. Amazing flashlight and tons of custom led configurations depending on your use case. The firmware it runs on has so many modes and custom config Its crazy. Click 3 times and it'll display battery voltage ffs. Only like $50ish too.
Iirc they are custom made by this dude in China so shipping does take a while, but soooo worth it.
The more I see from this sub, the more I think I need a diagnosis lol. Idk if I really want to change my brain though, what if I get more productive but level out and lose creative drive?
My case fans run at 20% generally. Even cheap ones nowadays are super quiet. Can't be heard over my air conditioning.
As for moving parts. My main 3 drives are ssd and my media hdd's spin down when not in use. I'm pretty sure that's the windows power plan default actually.
Yall turn yours off?
Seriously, the last time I turned my pc off was when I moved. It draws all of 30w at idle, and I've frozen all updates until I manually do it anyways.
I ran an xz1 compact for YEARS. probably still would be if my replacement screen hadn't kept popping back off. It was literally the perfect size phone. Big enough to watch yt videos on but it actually fit in your pocket!