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Started playing AOE2 again last night - lost two hours in the blink of an eye! Don’t think I am ready for multiplayer anytime soon though 🎮
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Playing some Bullet Bill only Mario Kart on Twitch right now, www.twitch.tv/geekyjame… 🎮
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The new usb camera support in iPadOS 17 beta is neat - I am testing it using an iPad Mini and a cheap usb capture card 🎮
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Switched to #Octopus Tracker today from #Agile. Whilst the plunge pricing was fun, we could never shift our cooking from the 4-7pm peak so all the benefits of cheap/negative unit pricing was obliterated by the evening peak.
It will be interesting to see how the average unit price settles for us over the next few months. Over the last 60 days on Agile, our average unit price was 19.06p/kWh. ⚡️
Updates to follow!
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Aqara vs Sonoff Zigbee Sensors
The Aqara temperature sensors for #homeassistant report about 0.2°C higher than the Sonoff units they replace. I’ll probably want to calibrate them properly, but this is close enough for now!
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📷 Sometimes you time it just right
#sunsets #westmidlands
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Bought some Aqara temperature sensors from Aliexpress for #HomeAssistant - they’re smaller, don’t use the stupid CR2450 battery, and they paired first time.
I’ll see how they hold up, and write a longer post about them in a few weeks.
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New Blog Sunday
New blog Sunday!
After losing access to Foresty CMS, I fell out of love with Jekyll. Whilst I love that it cost me £0, it was a nightmare to actually post anything. So I didn’t.
I’ve migrated things to Micro.blog now, hoping that I might post a bit more! Sorry, not sorry.
I’ve been so busy in 2023 that we’ve not stopped to appreciate all the things we’ve done. Time is flying, and it would be nice to write down some of the fun things we’ve done.
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2023
Looking forward to 2023, these are the key habits I want to instill in my day to day life:
Listening to more audio content (audio books, podcasts, and music) Walking more (probably whilst listening to audio content) Less time unconsciously ‘consuming’ I posted on Mastodon recently that my theme for 2023 is ‘Distraction Free’, and these habits should help me achieve this.
Listening to more audio content is key.
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Samsung TV - Hospitality Mode
Yet another post in my series of ‘if I don’t document it, I will forget how to do this again in 2 years time!
To access the Hospitality Mode of Samsung TVs, press the following buttons in order: Mute 1 1 9 Enter
This mode lets you set fun options like automatically turning on the TV when it receives power (like they do in hotel rooms!) which works nicely with a smart plug.
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Home Assistant - Rising/Falling Temperature Indicator
Another post in my series of ‘if I don’t document it, I will forget how to do this again in 2 years time!
I recently wanted a visual indicator as to whether the temperature in our home was rising and falling. This is possible with Home Assistant but the configuration is a bit cumbersome (like most of Home Assistant, honestly…)
To start with, take note of the names of the temperature sensors you want to create Rising/Falling entities for.
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Logging into Youtube in Firefox Multiaccount Containers
Multi account containers in Firefox are fantastic. They let you separate your browsing into individual silos which means Google can’t get track you as effectively across the web.
However, it was a pain to get Youtube to log in successfully even after adding google.com, youtube.com, accounts.google.com to the Google container site list. Every attempt to sign in bounced off to a 500 server error page.
The trick is to add ‘accounts.
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Monitor/Listen to Capture Card input on linux
In Windows, this was really easy. You would just tick ‘Listen to this device’ in device properties , you’d be away and listening to your USB Capture Card audio. I do this quite a lot as my monitor doesn’t have speakers, and I like to listen to various other things whilst I am playing my Switch.
As with most things in Linux, it’s easy when you know how…. These instructions should work for any distro that uses Pulse Audio.
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RSS feeds in 2022
I’ve always loved RSS feeds. From back in the early days when podcasting was the new cool thing to the halycon days of Google Reader right up to the current day when I think everyone should be using RSS feeds to avoid the plague that is modern websites.
RSS feeds give control back to the user and help limit user tracking because you are no longer reading the articles directly in your browser.
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Access the old Sound control panel on Windows 11
This will give you access to the older sound control panel screens. I needed this as I was trying to access the ‘Listen’ mode on a capture card/line in device, and couldn’t find any other way of doing this in Windows 11.
To access the old ‘Sound’ control panel screen in Windows 11:
Enter the following: “rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL mmsys.cpl,,0”
You can now access the Recording Tab, and set listen mode on your Capture Card.
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'"This is above your Restrictions" Error on PC Gamepass'
This is above [GamerTag]’s Restrictions Error.
This started occuring to me after I’d uploaded to Windows 11. I was unable to download Fallout 4 from PC Gamepass,as apparently my account had content restrictions applied.
The easy way I fixed this was to sign out of the Xbox app, and sign back in. Once I did this, I was able to download Fallout 4 without further issue.
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State of the Apps for 2021
Few things have changed over the last 12 months since I wrote the last version of this post. I’ve managed to continue using Firefox for both work and personal use and hardly touch Chrome at all anymore.
We’re still rocking a PiHole to block ads at home, and can’t see this changing anytime soon. I am looking into ways to use the PiHole outside of home, but I think it would just be easier to use something like NextDNS.
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How to make Discord actually display your Xbox Live status
I’ve been unable to make the Discord / Xbox Live integration work since I got my Xbox earlier in the year. I tried unlinking, re-linking, and nothing worked. I gave up for a while but managed to get it working this week. Here is how to get your discord account to show your Xbox live status.
On the Xbox: Unlink Discord in Settings>Account>Linked Social Accounts if you already have it linked.
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The things I use every day in 2020 - Apps & Services
Firefox In the last year, I moved my personal stuff away from Gmail and Google Calendar (see Fastmail below) so it felt fitting to try a life without Chrome as well. Firefox is not as fast as Chrome, but it more than does everything I need it to. Plus, it helps with stopping the google monopoly of the web.
Joplin {:class=“img-fluid” :alt=“Joplin”}
I used to use Notion, but didn’t use the advanced features like the inbuilt database tools enough to justify the cost.
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2020 Wrap Up
2020 has been a strange year. Here is how I spent some of it:
Games I played 66 games for longer than half an hour in 2020 and played at least a few seconds of 109 games in total. Out of my top 9 games, only 2 were released in 2020.
Of my top 66 games, I played each for an average of 6h12m (drastically dragged higher by animal crossing)