Dave.

Our monkey-brain has put millions of years of evolution into a vision system designed to pick up 3d cues from our environment so we can use our fine motor skills to manipulate small objects. It’s a fantastic piece of wetware that uses shading and colours to pick up 3d hints about the objects we deal with daily and - once you’re a few years old - it’s completely automatic and requires no effort to use.

And then we remove all the 3D cues and skeuomorphic hints from our computer systems so that now the previously subconscious “monkey-click-button” process is now a foreground task where cognitive energy is burned up to identify the correct UI element to manipulate.

I should be able to shift the mouse pointer and click a UI element out of the corner of my eye. I shouldn’t be required to look at and then parse a ‘flat’ UI to determine if this element is a button or just a panel with text. GUI elements should map to recognisable physical objects wherever possible, and where they are more abstract (eg wifi icons) they should be clearly distinguishable from others in the icon set. You’re burning up cognitive energy needlessly otherwise, and that’s why I dislike the monochromatic new age UI/icon sets.

Have you seen some of the stuff at Adafruit?

A lot more DIY but a wide variety of stuff. I had a MagTag unit from them that ran for a few months at a time off a 1000mAh battery with hourly display updates over wifi.

In litres and MJ because SI units make it easy:

Approximately 34 megajoules per litre for petrol/gasoline.

50 litres filling up in 4 minutes = 1.25 litres/second pumping rate. lol don’t do calculations before coffee, let’s just say you’ve got a hi-flow pump doing 1l/sec.

1 litre/second x 34MJ per litre = 34 MJ/second.

1 watt = 1 joule per second, so:

An average fill up runs at about 34 megawatts.

It’s not a sign of AI, but when every second post manages to slip the “not x, not y, just z” phrase into their wording, you get pretty over it, pretty quickly.

Ditto for posts that worm in the phrase “just physics”. No, it’s not “just physics”. Physics is complicated, and I wish AI slop would stop handwaving away a decent explanation with that phrase.

Friends:

hisses though teeth

“That’s good, buddy, good for you!”

Why

Monoculture isn’t great.

Having and maintaining other options is good for if/when things go bad.

Try Mint Mate, the desktop environment is lighter than Cinnamon. When I was running systems from that era, Mate was much speedier than KDE / Gnome 3.

After that it’s just looking at what’s running after boot up and deciding whether you need it or not. As long as it’s not hogging precious RAM/CPU don’t worry about disabling it.

“The Most Powerful Subaru Ever Is This Electric Family SUV, Yes”, says Yoda.

Bet it isn’t more than 15 minutes before pieces of metal come out.

That’s just a materials engineering problem at that point.

And does it really matter if your mach 6 hypersonic missile only has a 1500km range before its engine blows up? Still rather handy to have a few around.

I would put a temperature sensor on the line feeding to your shower to trigger on a temperature rise, but it all depends whether it’s accessible somewhere. Setting your trigger to something like 33 degrees would mean it only triggers on warm showers, cold showers you’re on your own.

My department just gives them a PDF explaining with cool graphics how Linux can save more money, how more secure it is, how we can avoid the constant force fed bug filled updates that MSFT pushes, how we can customize it exactly to our and users needs, we can actually own our own keys… The goes on and on.

No, because there is no simple point and click group policy/active directory equivalent in Linux that allows a group of 5 IT techs to manage 2000 desktops. And if you get your shit together and actually use the tools that Microsoft provides, you don’t get surprise updates, you can image PCs via a gui over network booting, you get bitlocker keys backed up in your domain etc etc etc etc etc.

All the things that allow a business to manage hardware and software with the minimum amount of expensive employees, Microsoft provides it, for money of course. That money is offset by the reduction in IT guys needed to look after everything.

It’s that simple. CorporateLand won’t touch Linux on the workstation until that’s possible.

I’m not sure, but if cake is being served, count me in.

Anyone completely switching off windows needs a bulletproof system

A solid 90 percent of home users just need a browser, email, and access to some kind of app store or repository where they can click on the big colourful icon and get a program they want.

Any modern distro can provide that, it doesn’t have to be the particular one that you’ve got an obsession about.

There’s slack time in people’s daily work hours. You work an 8 hour day, possibly you’re only actually productive for 4 to 6 hours.

Take that into account and suddenly that thing that claims it can cut an hour or two here and there gets a lot more interesting.

Ha, If you’re alluding to my post being similar to generated output, you obviously haven’t experienced the pure blandness of LLMs trying to write engaging content.

It’s statistical blandness writ large.

The stack of single-sentence paragraphs after the introduction paragraph trying so hard to have an impact.

The tendency to put “not X, not Y, just Z” everywhere.

The perfect conclusion written at the end of each piece , summarising three bland paragraphs with yet another bland paragraph.

Statistically regurgitated bullshit, all of it

It has a smart controller with a wifi module from SpaNet. The app is quite “open” in that it allows you to set your own auxiliary MQTT server and send home assistant compatible data to it while still being able to use the existing app.

Added edit:

So everything is controllable by HA - blower pumps, temperature, the sanitiser routine, the lights, whether to put it into sleep/low power mode, etc

Lots of things can be hooked up through it. One of the biggest things I find I like about it is the way you can merge ecosystems with it.

At home with HA I have an LG TV, Philips Hue lights, a Tapo vacuum cleaner, my EV charger, my own home made solar hot water system controller, a presence sensor that also does CO2 and temperature, a hot tub, and a few other bits and pieces. All of which can be viewed and controlled in the one interface, not the 6 or 7 apps that every individual device wants me to install.

But automations and notifications are the big thing. The presence sensor in the living room turns off the tv if nobody is in front of it for more than an hour. The EV charger tells me when the car is charged. An hour before sunset the light in my living room slowly dims on, and dims off after 9pm when the presence sensor says there’s nobody around. When my solar hot water system is a bit slow to heat up on a cloudy day, I get an email telling me to turn the electric booster on (and off when the water’s hot). Every Tuesday and Thursday evening the vacuum cleaner is set to clean the living areas, but it doesn’t if someone is watching tv, as detected by the presence sensor and the television.

I also don’t have to get off the couch to turn on a light, but the idea is that you set up automations that do all the button-pressing for you.

Maxbotix make robust ultrasonic sensors that range out to 6m, they have a 3/4" pipe fitting on the back for mounting them.

So with that you can get a few lengths of 3/4" pipe and an elbow and have an easy way of mounting it a little ways into your well.

A little on the expensive side but simple to use and easy to weatherproof.

Having a need for a “valid travel document” to cover for your perceived ethnicity stinks of “papers, please” and I am alarmed that you cannot see that connection.