It’s not the answer you’re probably looking for but, my cookbooks. I happen to have a bunch of old cookbooks I’ve inherited from family members and friends. It takes some research skills sometimes, but it works.

I also maintain a personal blog site which is my online cookbook. It’s not only my own recipes, but also a link dump. When I find a good, non-AI article I’ll share it there like a clipping with the usual tags for how I catalog things. It takes a bit of discipline, but for me its second nature by now. It also lets me take notes on how a recipe worked out, and what substitutions or adjustments I’d like to make next pass.

The HA Ecobee integration requires a developer API key which ecobee no longer distributes, if you already have a key it still works, but they stopped giving out new keys a few years ago.

On the other hand, the HomeKit integration allows new users to control most of the thermostat’s features locally over WiFi. I got my thermostat after the Developer program ended, and this is how I control it today. Once you install the HomeKit integration, it will discover the thermostat if its on the same LAN, and then prompt you to add it.

I have an ecobee I mainly control locally through the HomeKit integration on HA. Just about all of the basic features are covered: setpoints, heat/cool/auto/off and fan on/off/auto. Some of the more advanced features like Home/Away/Sleep profiles are not available through the integration, but they tend to be set & forget.

It doesn’t need Internet access or the companion app to operate your system, though it will use external access to track local weather and energy rates. (And probably collect usage data.) The companion app gives access to a few more features remotely, but the unit is completely programmable from its front panel.

It’s worked out fine for me so far. My local power utility sells them at a steep discount through their online storefront. Check around for rebates.

Can this be done with foil or metal?

Based on a layman’s knowledge of these things, I’d guess that’s probably a bad idea there since the microwave reflectance off the metal could saturate the receiver on the sensor. Best case, the hot signal confuses the sensor making it unreliable for tracking objects at a distance. Worst case, it could shorten the device lifetime if not outright burn out the receiver.

Rather, you’d want something to absorb the microwave energy like, say, paint with carbon black in it. It’ll still covert the absorbed energy to heat (like your microwave oven), but at the power levels we’re discussing you could at least dissipate it somehow.

Edit: just realized I didn’t address shaping. What I mentioned above, I was thinking of sticking a strip of foil across a portion of the plastic lens. You could probably form a sort foil visor for the sensor, like a ball cap, but you may still run into issue with false positives and ghosting of objects as signals would now be bouncing around in ways the sensor wasn’t designed to account for, if they even get picked up.

Federal police are still investigating whether the aircraft was involved in drug trafficking

Um…

And I genuinely hope it stays that way for years more to come. Cheers.

Oracle Cloud will also delete your shit for the price of admission.

Caveat emptor, hey?

So, uh…

Digital Ocean Is pretty inexpensive at US$7 monthly for 1 vCPU/1GB RAM with 1TB transfer. Decent platform. US-based, alas.

(2025 September, for the archives)

The FAA/ICAO use a similar system to name aerial navigation and fixed GPS waypoints. It addresses the challenge of communicating identifiers of unique nodes in a vast network using VHF communications.

Have you heard of Proquints?

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-rayner-proquint-03.html

I have some logic around notifications and a few actions. My spouse and I both grew up in houses with heat, but no AC, so I’ve programmed HA to send notifications to our phones if the setpoint on our Ecobee thermostat is warmer than the outside temperature in Cooling mode, and cooler than the outside temp in Heating mode. Outdoor temps are a blend of three weather service feed “feels like” observations and two outdoor temperate/humidity sensors.

The outdoor sensors are a ZigBee sensor, and some area sensors I snoop a few times an hour with an RTL-SDR radio single via MQTT bus. I have a helper that blends the weather service and local obs to compare with the thermostat. It bothers us every 2 hours to open some windows.

We both also have a bad habit of not closing the back door all the way, so the Assistant bugs us if a door or window is open for more than 10 minutes and the outdoor temperature is below the heating setpoint, or above the cooling setpoint. It turns off the HVAC a few minutes later if the condition persists and sends a snarky notification about not being made of enough money to fix climate change. However, it will turn the heat back on to 60F if the house falls below 58F and send notifications every hour til the condition is addressed.

Otherwise the ecobee does a fair job adjusting itself to maintain a desired inside temp on its own.

You’ve solved it by now but this Jellyfin doc article was helpful for me, beginning with the section Naming.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/

There at similar guides for TV Shows, Music, Books and other mixed media.

There are also guides for “stacking” multi-segment media titles, for example Lord of the Rings movies which come on several discs.

Jellyfin can be a bit opinionated about detecting bad metadata. The override tags in the media data filename or folder name can help clean that up. In fact, I’ve started hard-coding those [tmdbid=…] tags in my encoding workflow because I’m just so damned tired of fighting with the metadata feature.

Hope it works form you,.too.

Good move. I’ve driven my Sengled E11-N1EA bulbs for years now over ZigBee with an old HubZ HUSBZB-1. Works fine, no regrets. Didn’t even know those bulbs were cloud attached.

Look into the GE Enbrigjten series of Z-wave dimmer switches & 3-poles. They’re about half the price as what you linked, and use a more modern protocol stack. You’ll need a Z-wave hub, but you can get a USB dongle for about the cost of one of the switches, and it will probably Al’s include ZigBee on board as well.

GE makes dimmable 2-pole and 3-pole switches. The good thing about their 3-pole switches is you only need one smart switch for the branch, and can use companion switches to control the main smart switch over the traveler wire.

As always, pay attention to ALL smart switch literature and make sire you have a compatible load. Many switches require a neutral wire, and/or aren’t compatible with halogen fixtures. The product literature should make it pretty clear.

I also use Minoston switches, which I believe are another brand of the GE switches.

You might also want to strip the part of the URL that starts with ?si= since it’s probably a referrer hash. For example, the URL for this popular Rick Astley video (which is not technically a Rick Roll now that I’ve told you)

https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

vs.

https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

(Edit: for the record…

)

I have an ecobee thermostat that I manage locally over WiFi using the HomeKit integration, but I’d stop short of recommending it to new users.

1. Ecobee used to support developer access to their cloud API for controlling the thermostat and collecting efficiency data, but stopped issuing new API access tokens in the last couple of years. They have no plans currently to reopen developer access. If you have a token then the ecobee integration works fine, but if you don’t you’re stuck with HomeKit.
2. The thermostat requires 24V from the furnace to run the display and wifi stack. They provide an adapter you can install if you have available free leads at bother ends of the thermostat control cable. I had to splice a new wire onto the 24V transformer in my furnace since it didn’t have a 24V common terminal on the control block. It wasn’t hard to do in the end, but it was a lot of research.
3. Some advanced thermostat features require the app. I am not sure whether the app uses cloud or local control when on the same WiFi.
4. Not all features are available through the HomeKit integration. I can change the thermostat mode among Auto/Heat/Cool/Off, manage the blower fan mode and manage the heat/cool set points.
5. Data logging. The damned thing does log activity back home, and the data is only available in the app or on thr web portal.

Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the show? I haven’t been unhappy with the ecobee. The HomeKit integration works fine, and I get enough data from the native HA history to track and manage my energy demand. I shied away from Honeywell because my last Honeywell thermostat-- the one I used just before the thermostat I replaced with the ecobee-- tended to cycle my furnace too fast during cold snaps, and it would put the system into thermal protect mode. There was no way to widen the hysteresis (or modify the duty cycle) except by manually setting the temp high, run the house up to that temp, and then lower the setpoint and let the house take longer to cool.

ETA: the ecobee a decent thermostat and I’m happy enough with it overall. It has “spousal approval” accreditation as well. I wish it checked more boxes for me*, but it was essentially free through a power utility program. Its a worthy upgrade for me, but YMMV.

* namely, Z* protocol local control and continued cloud API access

Termux (on F-droid) is a userland environment that runs on top of your Android device’s kernel. It has Debian/Ubuntu-like package management system that pulls from repos maintained by the termux team. If the package is available for aarch64, its probably available in the termux repos. Its not so much of an app as it is an alternate userland that runs on top of the same kernel, but can interact with Android a couple of different ways.

The main Termux app gets you a basic command line environment with the usual tools included in a headless Linux install. From there you can select your preferred repos, do package updates, installs, etc, just like on a desktop or laptop. You could even install a desktop environment and use RDP to access it.

Then there are some companion apps that are useful:

• Termux:boot is like a primitive rc.d feature that executes upon boot up any scripts found in the termux ~/.termux/boot directory. You could use the feature to launch an SSH server, or perhaps start your syncthing service when the phone starts up.
• Termux:Tasker is a Tasker plugin that allows Tasker to launch scripts in .termux/tasker based on whatever triggers or profiles you define in Tasker. For example, stop or start selected services when connected to your home WiFi
• Termux:API is a set of termux utilities to interact with the Android API, and do things like send messages, interact with the camera or battery, and manipulate system settings.

So you could install the syncthing package in Termux and (after setting up Termux access for your internal storage) configure it to sync folders from your phone to wherever syncthing syncs. You’d set up a start script under Termux:boot to launch it when your phone starts, or Tasker to start/stop the service on your home WiFi.

For the F-droid enabled users, it seems there’s a Syncthing app in the Termux repos:

~ $ apt show syncthing
Package: syncthing
Version: 1.28.0
Maintainer: @termux
Installed-Size: 26.4 MB
Homepage: https://syncthing.net/
Download-Size: 7857 kB
APT-Sources: https://packages.termux.dev/apt/termux-main stable/main aarch64 Packages
Description: Decentralized file synchronization

No worries, the other poster was just wasn’t being helpful. And/or doesn’t understand statistics & databases, but I don’t care to speculate on that or to waste more of my time on them.

The setting above maxes out at 24h in stock builds, but can be extended beyond that if you are willing to recompile the FTL database with different parameters to allow for a deeper look back window for your query log. Even at that point, a second database setting farther down that page sets the max age of all query logs to 1y, so at best you’d get a running tally of up to a year. This would probably at the expense of performance for dashboard page loads since the number is probably computed at page load. The live DB call is intended for relatively short windows vs database lifetime.

If you want an all-time count, you’ll have to track it off box because FTL doesn’t provide an all-time metric, or deep enough data persistence. I was just offering up a methodology that could be an interesting and beneficial project for others with similar needs.

Hey, this was fun. See you around.

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