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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I use Canadian Multilingual on a ISO-style keyboard, mostly because my main language is French and typing accents on a US keyboard is horrible.

    Coding makes a hefty use of Alt (“option” on mac), but they’re relatively well-placed (see the labels on the bottom-right of the keys in the pic)

    My main annoyance with it is that the ANSI-style keyboard puts “ù” to the left of “1”, instead of the “/” you get on that key on a ISO keyboard (where ù is between the left shift and z). You can see how annoying this would be when programming or using the command-line. And of course, Apple stores only stock MacBooks with ANSI keyboards…








  • I've had very good success with Zigbee stuff, TP-Link Kasa outlets (but I've put them on a different router / subnet that doesn't have Internet access), and ESPHome.

    Tuya stuff sucks (keeps disconnecting), JuiceBox (my car charger) changed their app so the integration doesn't work anymore, and the Aqara zigbee door sensors never worked for me (they pair perfectly, but then disconnect and never come back on).

    So yeah, in my experience, once it works, it works, as long as there's no cloud involved.


  • For baseboard heaters, I have the Sinopé line of ZigBee thermostats, with home-assistant on my home server. Baseboards are kind of particular in that you have one thermostat per room, so at 350+ for a Nest, it'd be cost-prohibitive as I have like 15 thermostats in the house. Also, they're line voltage, meaning that they directly switch the full power of the heaters, so they need to be well made.

    I've had my Sinopé thermostats for 2+ years now, and I'm very happy with them. No clouds involved here.







  • Well, yes. But when all your friends are already on Facebook Messenger, good luck getting them to install Signal only to talk with you. Network effects are important; a messaging app has no use when you have nobody to message on the app. Supporting SMS was taking advantage of its network effect, and I don’t think their network was big enough to be self-sustaining for most users (it wasn’t in my case, my only contact in there is my wife).