Christopher Masto

For me, this is a feature. The last thing I want is celebrities and news outlets clogging up my feed of nice people’s sandwiches and cat pictures.

My partner is allergic to coconut. That also means no palm oil. You know what has palm oil in it these days, often randomly replacing the previous oil in something that used to be ok? Everything.

I worked at Google for over a decade. The issue isn’t that the engineers are unaware or unable. Time and time and time again there would be some new product or feature released for internal testing, it would be a complete disaster, bugs would be filed with tens of thousands of votes begging not to release it, and Memegen would go nuts. And all the feedback would be ignored and it would ship anyway.

Upper management just doesn’t care. Reputational damage isn’t something they understand. The company is run by professional management consultants whose main expertise is gaslighting. And the layers and layers of people in the middle who don’t actually contribute any value have to constantly generate something to go into the constant cycle of performance reviews and promotion attempts, so they mess with everything, re-org, cancel projects, move teams around, duplicate work, compete with each other, and generally make life hell for everyone under them. It’s surprising anything gets done at all, but what does moves at a snail’s pace compared to the outside world. Not for lack of effort, the whole system is designed so you have to work 100 times harder than necessary and it feels like an accomplishment when you’ve spent a year adding a single checkbox to a UI.

I may have gone on a slight tangent there.

I’ve made this cake a couple of times. It’s quite good.

https://youtu.be/Yi1W5qgtNYU?si=l6cvn5YZTbAsZZzb

What do you do for entertainment?

Mostly silence, but when I was in high school (some decades ago now) I had a CD of Mozart music I would put on while doing homework. I still associate Symphony 40 in G minor with grinding through tasks.

Stopped eating so damn much.

I read the The Hacker’s Diet by John Walker (who recently died, sadly) and followed his advice.

Leaded gasoline.

Zeiss wipes.

iPhone 15 Pro. Safari.

It’s a little confusing. Nextion makes “HMI displays”. It’s an integrated module that runs its own software, draws the UI, processes events, etc. It’s a black box that just reports back to the processor “button 3 on page 1 has been pressed”. You design the interface with that ugly Windows app and upload it to the display, but there is no direct access to the screen.

To make use of the Nextion display, you need something connected to it, and that’s where the ESP32 comes in. It receives those “button 3 pressed” events and handles them, but crucially, it does not have raw access to the screen, so you can’t just draw your own widgets on it like you’d be able to do on an ordinary display.

There are other projects to build your own controller with a touch screen and a microcontroller; the appeal of the NSPanel is that it’s basically an ESP32 and a Nextion display conveniently prebuilt, has decent hardware and aesthetics, and it isn’t hard to reflash it with ESPHome. Replacing the Sonoff firmware on the ESP32 doesn’t change the limitations of the Nextion display.

I haven’t seen that software, but it doesn’t look like it can be used with Nextion screens, which are totally proprietary.

The way I use them is to reflash the firmware with ESPHome, at which point they have nothing to do with Sonoff. I got really into these things when they came out and made a video about the process: https://youtu.be/Kdf6W_Ied4o?si=4nh7kP28IglwVHBx. There are a bunch of different ways to use them including retaining the original software, but I kind of stopped paying attention when I got mine working.

It’s worth noting that they have two different products. The “NSPanel Pro” is completely different, I think it runs Android. I haven’t played with that at all.

I have one Kindle Fire using the Fully Kiosk Browser and a wall mount with a hidden power cord (https://a.co/d/05GVxVP). It uses the camera to turn on when you walk up to it. It’s ok, but I installed it 3 years ago and never really finished making a dashboard for it. In practice, we control the vast majority of stuff by voice with the Google/Nest Home integration, or switches. The big control panel thing doesn’t hold enough interest to even bother putting controls on it, and I mainly leave it showing air quality graphs.

Of more practical use are smaller panels for area-specific uses. I mainly standardized on NSPanel, because I was experimenting with them and ended up with a bunch. Example: https://youtu.be/DBzg7v1Q5Zo. I have a short attention span and tend to stop when it’s 90% good enough. I also have in other places a DIY HA SwitchPlate, and HASPone on a Lanbon L8.

I suppose that’s true. Rereading my comment, it’s a bit over the top. If I pretend now I don’t know anything and start at http://home-assistant.io, it’s not that hard to scroll down, see the thing, and buy it. I don’t know exactly how I got so off-track when I tried. Probably I knew “a little too much”, as in the words “home assistant blue” in the back of my head, Googled for that and got distracted by “I need to understand why there are two boxes and one isn’t for sale anymore, so exactly what is the difference is between them?”.

Coming back to that naive journey, though, I could see how someone could end up buying Green with no wireless dongle or Yellow with no CM4 (especially since you can’t get one).

I still think that for the limited size of this ecosystem, choosing a box shouldn’t be confusing. I can now understand where it came from, though, once I realized that HA Yellow was designed around a Raspberry Pi board that became unobtainable, so they had to go with a different architecture.

That, but I actually get a lot out of my hobbies and personal unfinished projects (they’re always a learning experience).

It’s more about the cost of struggling with things and thinking I’m lazy or a failure, and the real-world consequences of not having gotten any help until my late 40s.

I have a friend who bought a new house and wanted to do some automation with the lights. While my HA is a total DIY setup, I thought maybe I’d suggest he get one of these boxes I was vaguely aware they sell. I went to the web site and first of all couldn’t find them from home-assistant.io (I see they’re on the front page at least now, but I swear it was harder to find when I looked the other day). Then I got lost trying to understand what the actual box was… yellow, blue, some third party odroid thing? Didn’t matter, everything was out of stock anyway. Now there’s a green one. I’m not sure this is actually making it easier to get started. I’m somewhat of an expert and I gave up.

I have ADHD.

Not at all. This is not a moral judgement about anyone else. Just answering the question.

I guess I’ve reached a point in my life where I can easily afford to buy something if I want it, especially in the price range of a video game or book. I used to do all that stuff, not to get back at the man, but because it was the only option that was accessible. Eventually the hassle factor of piracy kept going up while just paying for it became an accessible choice.

I guess I didn’t understand what you were describing. When we moved in to our house, the previous owners had a deadbolt that locked with a key on the inside instead of a thumb turn, and it was the only way to lock the door. This is a pretty bad idea since it creates a potential situation where you’re stuck inside your house, or have to find another exit. In some emergencies, seconds count. Even if you know how to open the door, you might have someone over who doesn’t, which is why fire codes are the way they are. Someone unfamiliar with the setup, panicking, in the dark, in a room full of smoke, needs to be able to escape without solving a puzzle.

Because I already had experience with having to replace that lock with an appropriate one for an exit door, I jumped straight to the assumption that when you said “lock on both sides”, you were talking about a key, and not just a childproof latch of some kind. I have the privilege of not living with anyone who is a flight risk, so it’s easy for me to just dismiss it as unsafe. I looked at some of the solutions out there and they seem to be designed to stop toddlers with no dexterity, not an autistic person determined to turn all the things. Sorry if my answer was unhelpful; people are injured or killed every day because they created a situation they didn’t realize was hazardous until it was too late. My intention was only to prevent the downsides of locking the door this way from being overlooked.