Software engineer (video games). Likes dogs, DJing + EDM, running, electronics and loud bangs in Reservoir.

  • 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle


  • I’ve played around with using PLA to make plant pots on an old Ender 3. It wasn’t quite waterproof, but pretty close. If you wanted a perfect seal for underwater shenanigans, I’d probably experiment with different wall thickness settings, and maybe temperatures/fan cooling settings. You want to try and minimise the tiny air pockets between layer and filament drawing lines. (Resin 3D printers are probably better at this tbh.)

    I had reasonable success using a hot air gun to melt the outer layer of PLA to make it perfectly smooth, but this can deform your object if it heats up too much, so I’m guessing very hot temperatures and less contact time would be the ideal setting.

    You could also try smearing Vaseline or resin coating the outside of the object.




  • Best place to start would be to look at the thermostat hardware you’ve currently got, and start searching online if anyone has integrated it into Home Assistant.

    I’ve lived at a few houses now with Home Assistant. In all of them I was able to integrate my HVAC and automate it, but some brands and hardware are definitely easier than others.

    I think the most extreme of them required a custom esphome device connected to its PCB to talk to Home Assistant, and another required me to write my own custom component.

    Hardware and brands make a huge difference, but sometimes you’re stuck with what you’ve got.



  • I’m no expert but just helping you kick the tires a little bit - for the audio outs, are you thinking of just running speaker wire from an amp in the server closet to the ceiling of all of the audio out locations?

    For what it’s worth, I’ve dabbled with wifi/Bluetooth speakers and while they generally work well, there always seems to be some software update or connectivity dropouts enough that I’d much prefer a wired system to eliminate over-the-air issues for a long-term robust solution.











  • The basic idea is that a huge company with infinite money creates software that supports an open standard, such as Threads. Next they spend significant amounts of money driving users to their software, rather than an open software equivalent. Once they’ve captured a huge percent of all users of the open standard, they abandon the open standard, going with a proprietary one instead. They’ll make up some new feature to justify this and sell it as a positive. Because they control almost all of the users at this point, many of the users they don’t control will decide to switch over to their software, otherwise the value of the open standard drops significantly overnight for them. What’s left is a “dead” open standard that still technically exists but is no longer used. You can find plenty of past examples of this pattern, such as Google and XMPP.


  • I can’t speak for Craigslist, but in my area Gumtree is big, and I know from first-hand experience that they “handle it” by waiting for the crime to occur and be reported to police, then they give police the list of all IP addresses that viewed a listing. Having stared down the pointy end of a knife right outside my own home, I feel there’s an opportunity to build a better system that keeps people honest and discourages thieves.