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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • As long as the punishment is fair and not unduly harsh, I don’t see any real problem with criminalising misinformation in general. It’s already illegal to lie about facts in a great many contexts (e.g. fraud, perjury), and reasonable people don’t have a hugely difficult time distinguishing a fact from an opinion.

    As a trivial example: “This is mine and you can have it for a dollar” is not an opinion someone can be entitled to, it is a statement of fact that is either true or not.


  • Panq@lemmy.nztohomeassistant@lemmy.worldBed Occupancy Sensor?
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    4 months ago

    You’re right in that it’s a useful tool for various kinds of abuse, but so is almost every useful home automation/home security sensor.

    The most obvious/useful use cases I can see are:

    • turn on bedroom lights when the last person gets out of the bed
    • turn off whole house lights when the last person gets into bed.

    Both should be easy with load cells under the bed legs but rather difficult otherwise.

    (Useful assuming a household of two adults in one bed that is).



  • Panq@lemmy.nztohomeassistant@lemmy.worldHA Doorbell
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    6 months ago

    Is dumb doorbell + separate CCTV camera a valid alternative? Even my fairly basic Reolink camera has a much better image quality than any doorbell camera I’ve seen, and HA can pull an image from it and push it to my phone in only a few tenths of a second whenever someone pushes the doorbell.




  • The sad thing is we don’t even drive the Kuga that much, only for long trips. I think it would be a reasonable bet that we’ve spent less on fuel than we have on maintenance.

    Last road trip from Auckland to Wellington, we just hired a big car (a mid-size SUV, I guess). 100% recommend anyone shopping for a car (or whatever) does a quick check to see if it’s actually worth owning it vs hiring. In my case (one kid and no boat), it’s way cheaper to just hire something big and flash for the occasional road trips.



  • You’re right in that running HA just for a WoL timer would be silly, but (presumably) it’s already running for other, less silly purposes.

    I’d say the main benefit is when the machine requires regular (as in daily) reboots, or if it’s something you don’t trust is fully private and want to be powered off outside work hours. Not useful for me, but I can see why it would be handy.










  • Node Red by far gave me the best automation for numerous lights. X minutes after sunrise, it iterates every light that is on and calls turn off with a fairly long (2 min?) transition time, so the lights all gradually fade off.

    It’s been running for years without me needing to touch anything, it doesn’t care if you replace/rename any lights, and the slow fade when it’s still getting brighter outside makes the change invisible.

    I’ll bet you could do the same thing without Node Red, but nowhere near as easily.



  • I use a dumb 433MHz wireless doorbell (apparently this one on Ali Express, but the exact one doesn’t matter) with a Sonoff RF Bridge running Tasmota. It’s far faster and more reliable than anything with the smarts built into the button, and the battery lasts at least a few years.

    I’ve got it set up to take a snapshot on the front door and driveway cameras, send a push notification with the front door camera, announce on the speakers that someone’s at the door, and turn on the outdoor lights at night.

    The doorbell was $8 shipped, the RF Bridge was somewhere in the mid $20s but I already had it for some door sensors, and if you don’t already have a camera, a decent Reolink is under $150 shipped directly (or under $250 from a physical shop in NZ like PB Tech).