masto

I have a friend who bought a new house and wanted to do some automation with the lights. While my HA is a total DIY setup, I thought maybe I’d suggest he get one of these boxes I was vaguely aware they sell. I went to the web site and first of all couldn’t find them from home-assistant.io (I see they’re on the front page at least now, but I swear it was harder to find when I looked the other day). Then I got lost trying to understand what the actual box was.. yellow, blue, some third party odroid thing? Didn’t matter, everything was out of stock anyway. Now there’s a green one. I’m not sure this is actually making it easier to get started. I’m somewhat of an expert and I gave up.

I have ADHD.

Not at all. This is not a moral judgement about anyone else. Just answering the question.

I guess I've reached a point in my life where I can easily afford to buy something if I want it, especially in the price range of a video game or book. I used to do all that stuff, not to get back at the man, but because it was the only option that was accessible. Eventually the hassle factor of piracy kept going up while just paying for it became an accessible choice.

I guess I didn’t understand what you were describing. When we moved in to our house, the previous owners had a deadbolt that locked with a key on the inside instead of a thumb turn, and it was the only way to lock the door. This is a pretty bad idea since it creates a potential situation where you’re stuck inside your house, or have to find another exit. In some emergencies, seconds count. Even if you know how to open the door, you might have someone over who doesn’t, which is why fire codes are the way they are. Someone unfamiliar with the setup, panicking, in the dark, in a room full of smoke, needs to be able to escape without solving a puzzle.

Because I already had experience with having to replace that lock with an appropriate one for an exit door, I jumped straight to the assumption that when you said “lock on both sides”, you were talking about a key, and not just a childproof latch of some kind. I have the privilege of not living with anyone who is a flight risk, so it’s easy for me to just dismiss it as unsafe. I looked at some of the solutions out there and they seem to be designed to stop toddlers with no dexterity, not an autistic person determined to turn all the things. Sorry if my answer was unhelpful; people are injured or killed every day because they created a situation they didn’t realize was hazardous until it was too late. My intention was only to prevent the downsides of locking the door this way from being overlooked.

Not being able to exit your home in an emergency without a key is a serious safety problem. In most places it is not permitted.

International Residential Code R311.4.4 “All egress doors shall be readily openable from the side from which egress is to be made without the use of a key or special knowledge or effort”. Most local codes are derived from this.

There are several. I have one as I mentioned in my comment: it's called a Phyn Plus. It works with and without sensors. I have some in strategic places like under the water heater.

It actually caught a leak, although it wasn't from the plumbing. It was rain getting into the chimney and dripping into a puddle in the boiler room that set off one of the sensors. I like the cable-style sensor they have -- it's like a 4-foot-long headphone cord, but the whole length is a water sensor, so if any part gets wet it goes off.

Cutting a pipe and adding a valve is a really simple thing and should only be expensive to the extent that any plumbing job is expensive.

I would specifically ask for a quality 1/4 turn ball valve - there’s no point in cheaping out on that part when you’re mostly paying for labor. And as long as you’re doing that, you probably want two of them. For the same reason the city doesn’t want you touching theirs, you should have a shutoff that you actually use when you need to do plumbing work in the house, and one before that that you never touch unless it’s an emergency and you can’t shut off the other one.

For a bit more expense, you could consider an automatic shutoff leak detector. I have one called Phyn that keeps track of water usage, tests for pressure drops every night, and detects unusual flow patterns and can automatically shut it off.

Nah, you're good.

Risky or Not?

Each short episode discusses one amusingly named food or situation (e.g. “ Unopened Carton of Heavy Cream Almost 3 Weeks Past It's Expiration Date”). Hosted by two food safety experts with good banter.

I've never been happier and more productive than when I was working in Perl. It's a language that, at its apex, had a community of incredibly smart and creative people evolving it and its ecosystem. It's a practical, powerful, multi-paradigm language that let me get work done with a minimum of fuss.

Perl was a language that felt like an extension of my thoughts, like it was working with me and for me. Most other languages feel like I am working for the compiler rather than the other way around. Or at the very least, spending unnecessary effort satisfying some language designer's personal pet peeve, which constantly takes me out of the flow of the job I'm trying to do.

I am confident my parents did not do that.

This is how it should work. I don't want to have to sign up on every different service. If people I want to follow choose to post stuff there that I want to read, I can do so from my Mastodon account.