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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Having lived without a dishwasher for many years, I’m never complaining about loading/unloading the dishwasher. From starting the kettle to finishing a pour over is more than enough time to unload.

    And never again having to schlep clothes to the laundromat because we have laundry in our home? Likewise, I’m not going to complain. The only reason laundry takes real effort is when we opt to use the clothesline instead of the dryer.

    Not everyone has a dishwasher, washing machine, and clothes dryer, so I absolutely recognize that I’m very fortunate here. And the crazy thing is, these devices aren’t even particularly expensive, especially since they can be had used — I think a big reason folks don’t have them is the installation+room required. Which probably says something about landlords and the general cost per area of housing.








  • xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

    I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

    IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

    Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

    The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).




  • Especially after adding in all the power draw of the automation requires…

    What exactly is the incremental power draw for automation? My network gear and server (a little nuc) are sunk power costs as I self host other services.

    Idling, my home uses around 100W with the fridge off. One 10W light is an additional 10% of my power budget, and I have a lot more than one light in my house. I also pay about $0.40/kWh.


  • I can be a bit neurotic about turning off lights when I leave a room, so Home Assistant was a nice way to free up brain space for me. A few motion sensors here and there + some simple automations, and the lights mostly handle themselves. Zigbee sensors and Zigbee or Matter-over-WiFi bulbs, so everything is local. A free VPS+WireGuard setup means I can access them remotely should I need to, with TailScale as a backup.

    Cloud failures mean I can’t access remotely, but local control is unaffected—if my smart devices stop working it’s almost certainly my fault :)