• 13 Posts
  • 195 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • You do you - anything is technically possible, and from a purely engineering perspective a Steam Deck is an impressive little piece of hardware.

    That said. I would advise against getting it for any sort of productivity. Having to haul out it, a separate keyboard, and mouse, just to take a quick note in class is cumbersome and distracting, even if we assume everything works on the first go every time (it won’t.).

    As others have pointed out, Linux is nice until it isn’t - maybe you can partner up with a friend when your chemistry lab needs you to reference their archaic software to find some material property, but its a risk you’re choosing to take on. Will it pair with the campus printers? What if you need to run Solid Works? Ansys? The drivers for a digital microscope? Collaborating on group projects in Microsoft Office (the web apps aren’t the same.)? The list goes on.

    Additionally, something like the Steam Deck is built for gaming. Meaning every time you pick it up, it reminds you it’s time to game. As someone with ADHD who struggled to stay on task in college, having a constant reminder of distractions at my fingertips would have been overwhelming.

    That’s before we factor in the ‘cool’ factor of being that person in the class.

    Get a laptop.





  • Fair point! As far as I can tell, the temp sensors are just beacons - anyone can connect and see that somewhere in your house it’s 72 °F, but who cares ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    If you’re running on a Raspberry Pi, you can just use the onboard BT, whose drivers are updated regularly.

    ZigBee ones get occasional updates automatically detected through HA, and have to be moved to somewhere near the controller to update. I assume, as temperature and humidity sensing hasn’t changed, that these are security patches.

    BT ones get no updates, which either means their security goes unpatched, or it really doesn’t matter when all they do is shout out measurements into the void.




  • Of course! From an end-user the experience between Bluetooth and ZigBee sensors is basically indistinguishable, except for range.

    I have a detached garage, on the opposite end of my property from my HA controller, so the Bluetooth sensor out there specifically was a little flaky. The BT sensor is rated for ~160 ft but realistically it’s 50-100 ft if your home has walls.

    Swapping that one sensor to ZigBee so it could tie into my mesh network solved the problem. All other BT sensors have had zero issues, and their AA batteries unsurprisingly last longer than the 3R ZigBee AAAs, but both last at least 6mo.

    Some Shelly devices can be used as “Bluetooth repeaters” but I’m unsure of the specifics of how that works.









  • What’s the alternative, let the red states gerrymander and then just hope and pray that our new Republican-run house does the right thing and outlaws their one advantage in governing?

    Newsom isn’t doing this in a vacuum, California has had a really well liked nonpartisan districting committee. Texas and other red States have gone with the nuclear option and CA is responding in kind - even more importantly, this is something that has to be voted on by the residents of CA in a special election, rather than by a set of politicians already benefitting from gerrymandering.

    I absolutely hate that it has to be done, but as a CA resident I will be voting for it, and I will be pressuring my elected representatives to work towards passing federal legislation outlawing the practice and bringing things to a more even playing field.

    The do-nothing alternative is not an option.