I’m gonna assume you’re not using Home Assistant yet.

There is an app for Home Assistant but from your comment I’m assuming you’re talking about something like Smart Life.

Home Assistant takes all these different companies and creates a central hub for them all. So we have Hue bulbs and Nest cameras all talking to each other via Home Assistant.

If you’re already using Home Assistant then disregard and have look into PIR and Mm Wave sensor.

I’ve moved up a level and recently made a bed sensor.

I’ve had the opposite experience with the cube, but I use Zigbee2MQTT so I’m maybe that made the difference.

It’s a fantastic concept and I think everyone should buy one just because it’s so cool and so fucking useless at the same time.

So you have turn like a knob function, then changing sides, a knock knock, a slide and a drop sensor.

I programmed the drop sensor to toggle my room lights then showed a bunch of 40+ year old kids, who had great fun for a full 5 minutes playing epileptic catch.

The problem is that it has all these functions, but you only know what they are because you spent the time programming them. So it’s fucking useless to anyone else, and by the time you’ve set the thing down you’ve forgotten what you set it to do yourself.

I’ve had the turn like a knob set to brighten and dim my lights, then decided it should control the volume on the speaker when it’s playing music too, which lead to a little project in node red. But nobody else in the house even knows that’s what it does.

I should stop this wall of text, get one, it’s useless!

I tested both out years ago when I was first starting with ZigBee and preferred Z2MQTT, it was just way better. I’ve been using it ever since.

Nice! I’ve just set up a couple of daily tasks, and worked out how to get nagged to complete tasks in node red, which basically requires removing the tasks from the to-do. If it’s been ticked then the node errors out, but if it has not then it gets removed, the node completes and I can send a notification saying “You didn’t do X!”

Timers to add tasks sounds like a good next step, I’ll have to look into it

Yeah problem is that your body clock gets synched and you end up waking up early. It’s 7.30 on Xmas eve and I’m up again, although I hear footsteps so it looks like I have company this morning.

Yeah I used to be a Google Keep user. I still am but I used to be too.

Like I say I’ve synchronised Keep with HA now, just my shopping list using a HACs plugin. The only downside was that it required me to use a Docker container to get the Token which was doable but required me to learn how to get Docker running in Interactive Mode in Portainer which I’ve never done before.

If you’re interested there’s a dude on YouTube called FutreProofHomes that’s integrated ChatGPT with ToDo and is doing some cool things with it

Now then, that’s an impressive Lovelace view.

Haha no not anymore but I certainly used to. Now they’re entering teenage years and I have to drag them out of their beds.

It gets better

ESP32 and a pressure strip. Basically this https://github.com/eoncire/HA_bed_presence

I got a cheap Nest E thermostat on eBay from a charity shop seller. It cost me like £15.

Replaced my dumb one with it, then hooked it into HA and made a sensor from all my motion sensors and door sensors which all have temperature gauges in them.

Conglomerated those sensors into one that tracks the average (making sure to only have so many per floor so as not to skew the data to one part of the house) then made a sensor called “Is it cold enough to have the Heating on?” which acts as a simple switch with a lower and upper limit.

Now my heating only comes on when I need it to based off the temperature of the whole house instead of that one place the dumb thermostat was based.

The display unit for it died after less than a year, replaced that for another £20 on eBay and synced the new unit to the Thermostat on the wall.

So for less than £50 and some smarts I’ve upgraded my heating, and saved money on the bills (since it only comes on when we need it to rather than based on the temperature of one location).

I’m not particularly recommending Nest since I have no experience with other manufacturers, but I managed to do it all on the cheap and I’m quite pleased with the results

Yeah my wife’s Granny would buy me some every year. Then she died and now I don’t get socks at Christmas and it makes me sad. Not because I want socks, I want Granny Babs back

Douch or turd sandwich?

I had a friend bring up this very topic this weekend and I replied “What would be more creepy and more likely is that the ad giants have algorithms for working out what you’ll buy that are that good that they know what you want before you do and you’re just noticing how good it is”

I got 2 expensive (over £30) ones and the worst one became my travel cube. My cheap but decent cube is my work cube. Work in a factory so I have to not give a single fuck about it.

Thing is, now it’s just sat in my pocket at work for 6 months it’s actually pretty decent. When I bought it and tried to make it decent I couldn’t. It’s like the grease and silicone has made it a half decent cube

Makes sense since the internet is made of cats https://youtu.be/zi8VTeDHjcM

I’m into home automation and self hosting services and the only time I go to Reddit is when a Google search of something I’m researching takes me there.

I don’t log in (which sometimes fucks me, weed subreddits for example need a sign in for ages verification) so if I have to log in I just nope out, and I will actively try to not use Reddit if I can help it.

Honestly the short answer is practice.

Long answer is also practice, but with information lol.

I spent a long time moving from 2 look to 1 look (oll and pll) using this website https://jperm.net/algs/pll I’ve linked the PLL but there’s OLL there too.

On this page I learned as many of these as I could. You can click on the picture and change the status from unlearned to learning to learned, then go to the trainer and you can select those 3 statuses and it will show only things you’ve selected. You can also click on the alg to get alternatives or even put your own alg in.

So I’ve gone to that page and set an alg as training, then just practiced that one alg until I have it in muscle memory. I aimed at trying to get each type of alg learned, so corners are there, or middles need moving, or headlights are there, or even that there is no pattern.

I was advised to learn PLL first then OLL algorithms, but I kinda picked out the patterns I see most in both, or algs that seemed the simplest first. So I have been learning both together and working from easiest to remember to hardest, and also making my own up for the ones that are most complicated.

This meant that I could practice a few, then go and do solves and when the patterns I knew came up I’d get faster solves for those patterns.

Ok so that’s the big time saving out of the way, takes a lot to learn all the algorithms so it’ll take time. But there’s also taking time to plan your cross. That can save you a good chunk because there’s less head scratching when you start.

Then there’s the look ahead, which I’m only just getting. I did a lot of slow solves to get this in my brain and it’s quite big. This is what I’m practicing to get from my 40second average down to 25

So as you’re solving a corner and edge into the corner, once you have it set up into a 3 move insert, you don’t need to look at it anymore. It’s 3 loves to insert, so instead of looking at it as you put it in, you have to train yourself to look for the next 2 pieces you’re putting together.

While your learning the OLL and PLL and just doing solves (not training algs), when you get one you don’t know, try and alg you do know on it. Sometimes this changes your top pattern to an easier pattern that you can solve. It’s like a stopgap 2 look (pll or oll). Eventually as you learn all the algs you’ll find that you can “wing it” with some of the harder algorithms by just doing a couple of easier ones, which is all the harder ones are anyway, a couple of easier algs with a connecting move in the middle.

Hope all that helps. I’d also advise you have a “travel cube.”

I have an extra cube that lives in the pocket of my leather jacket (yes I’m a metal-head Dad, doesn’t quite fit the stereotype does it?) and it comes in useful when I’m stuck in a queue, or at the Dr waiting room or A and E (or emergency care as it’s called in the US). This allows me to cube instead of whipping my phone out when I have time to kill out of the house.

I have up FaceFuck after Brexit and the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

They brainwashed people into voting against their own interests by “Targeted Advertising” which is basically brain washing.

Of course nothing came of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and I can’t do anything about that as a Plebian, so I just left.

I left Reddit when they took my favourite app. I used it to Doomscroll and that wasn’t great for my mental health, so it was a no-brainer

So Lemmy and only Lemmy for me. I got over my addiction to social media by taking up the Rubik’s Cube.

I’m currently working on getting an average solve under 30 seconds…

So if you use your social media time to do something productive instead, you can do some crazy shit

It’s Cock Nose

Scroll on with your day