mic_check_one_two
@mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on A new quest appears... 5 days ago:
Home Assistant is entirely self-hosted. No third-party required. It can run in a container or on a raspberry pi, but it’s typically easiest (and most functional) when you use a dedicated Home Assistant Green. It connects to Zigbee, Matter, etc via USB adapters. Or if your devices are networked (instead of using a hub), it can often find them directly on your network via local device discovery. It integrates with Alexa really well, so you wouldn’t need to immediately ditch your existing smart speakers.
If you really want to get fancy, you can even set up a local machine to do local LLM processing for self-hosted smart speakers.
- Comment on A new quest appears... 5 days ago:
The funny part is that blue LEDs were historically the hardest to make. Engineers tried for years, but the shorter blue wavelength was elusive. But one Japanese dude managed to figure it out, and they exploded in popularity because they were the new futuristic thing. And now they’re actually one of the cheapest colors available, because every single manufacturer was rushing to jump on the bandwagon and has the equipment to make them. Sort of like the flatscreen TV crash in the early 2010’s, when TV prices suddenly crashed because every manufacturer was getting better and better at making the (historically very expensive) screen panels cheaply.
And to answer the question on why they’re so fucking bright, it’s because blue is a very short wavelength. It takes less power to produce shorter wavelengths. When you compare the relative brightness of two different colored LEDs, shorter wavelengths will be brighter. Like if you send 1 watt of power into two different LEDs, a blue LED will always be brighter than a red one (if everything else about them is the same). That’s why so many of the cheap RGB LED lights tend to be sort of blueish when they’re set to “white”. The “white” is just all of the individual diodes at 100% brightness, which means the blue tends to beat out the other colors.
But the engineers who design those things don’t stop to consider that a blue LED needs less power. They’re just checking the “has a power light” item off of their design punch list. They could undervolt the diode to make it dimmer, but that requires extra circuitry. Just get a diode that works on the same voltage as what you’re already using (probably 5v or 12v for a wall charger) and hook it up to the same voltage that you already have. And use a blue one because they’re the cheapest option. Congrats, you’ve just designed a charger that has a fucking blinding blue LED. The whole “people will want to use this in their bedroom in the dark” thing was never even a consideration.
This is also why red (and infrared) light is better at heating things up. Longer wavelengths carry more energy, which means they heat things up more when they come into contact. The wave takes more power to make, which means it is able to carry more energy to whatever you’re trying to make. Trying to design a blue heat lamp would be an exercise in frustration, because you’d be fighting physics. It’s also why the sky is blue during the day but sunsets are red. The blue light tends to get scattered by air molecules, (which is why the sky looks blue) but red light is able to punch through and reach the surface when the sun is at a steep angle (like during a sunset).
- Comment on Meet UpScrolled, the anti-censorship TikTok alternative 6 days ago:
Yeah, my linked comment was actually in response to an earlier comment I made, basically saying “this app’s explosive rise in popularity feels astroturfed.” I caught a couple of downvotes for that original comment. But the more I tried using it, the worse it got. It will 100% contribute to the normalization of Nazi viewpoints.
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 1 week ago:
It only applies to steam keys though. Like if you want to sell on other storefronts for cheaper, it’s perfectly fine. You simply can’t sell steam keys on other storefronts for cheaper. It’s not really “price fixing” as much as it is “Steam ensuring their servers aren’t used unless they get their cut”…
Like imagine a company wants to sell more copies of their game. So they set up their own site to sell directly to consumers, and it’s cheaper than buying on Steam. This is totally fine. Consumers can still choose to add the standalone version as a non-Steam game to be able to launch it via Steam.
It’s only a breach of contract if they start offering steam keys for that same (cheaper) price, which allows the game to be downloaded via Steam, includes achievement integrations, includes Steam’s friend list “join game” multiplayer, includes Steam Deck/Steam Machine optimizations, etc… If they want all of those nice Steam integrations, they need an official Steam key. And that Steam key can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam’s official store.
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 1 week ago:
Yeah, I bought my own domain specifically so I could set up a catch-all email service. Everything sent to my domain hits the same inbox, but I can easily see who has sold my info. If I start getting spam addressed to “walmart@example.com” then I know Walmart sold my info. And I can easily set a rule to automatically mark anything addressed to that burned account as spam.
Lots of websites quickly caught onto the “just add a + after your regular email” trick, and set up an internal rule to remove any of the + tags. So that old trick is largely useless.
- Comment on Meet UpScrolled, the anti-censorship TikTok alternative 1 week ago:
Yeah, I tried to give it an honest shot. Made an account and opened the Discover page. The very first post was an antisemitic “the Jews are secretly running the world” conspiracy theory post. Whatever, it’s inevitable on an anti-censorship app. Not a great first impression, but I’m willing to shrug it off as a fluke.
Then three or four posts later, there was a blatant “Hitler was right about the Jews and the holocaust wasn’t enough” post, made by an account that was dedicated to glorifying Hitler. Again, this is on the Discover page for a brand new account. Meaning it’s what the algorithm is serving to users by default.
I made another comment about it (with screenshots) a day or two ago. I’ll see if I can dig it up and link it here.
- Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident? 1 week ago:
America bombed its own city 40’ish years ago, and the entire country just moved on without a care. And about 60 years before that, almost forty city blocks were razed to the ground because the inhabitants were black.
Yes, they 100% could risk it. America is an extremely propagandized country, with patriotism on the right reaching jingoistic levels.
- Comment on What's up with "Plex Servers"? 1 week ago:
the fact is, storage is very cheap now…
Lmao maybe a year ago… Storage costs have skyrocketed recently.
- Comment on What's up with "Plex Servers"? 1 week ago:
Https traffic will be enough to hide your streaming activity. They’ll be able to see that you’re streaming something based off of the traffic patterns, but won’t be able to see what specifically is being streamed.
- Comment on Just vibing 1 week ago:
Yeah. Sort of like holding two ends of a chain and dragging it back and forth. Even if the chain isn’t traveling the full length, it’s still moving and you could still extract power from the system if you attached something to the middle of the chain.
- Comment on The #1 trick Furries dont want you to know! 2 weeks ago:
My buddy’s parents used to own a comic book store, and they regularly had to turn away Magic The Gathering players for smelling too bad. They even had a sign on the door that said something along the lines of “we reserve the right to refuse service if you smell like you haven’t showered all week”.
- Comment on If WWIII broke out tomorrow do you honestly believe america would win? 2 weeks ago:
As much as anybody could “win” at war, I don’t think it would be possible with Trump as Commander in Chief. He wouldn’t have a head for tactics, and his blatant narcissism would refuse to allow generals (who are educated in war tactics and know what to do) to make decisions for him.
Realistically? If war broke out, I could see congress using it as a catalyst to finally impeach him. At least by removing Trump from office, they’d have someone who would actually listen to counsel.
But if Trump remains in office, he’d inevitably end up doing whatever is best for Russia. And that means he’d likely end up with the US in a war of attrition, dragging things out as long as possible, with each side taking large losses while Putin sits back and watches it all play out (and quietly takes Ukraine while everyone is distracted by their own wars).
- Comment on Lose yourself 2 weeks ago:
I already had you tagged as “MAGA chode” for this and it always manages to prove true.
- Comment on The consequences of not building enough housing 3 weeks ago:
Ratcheting taxes for unoccupied houses and apartment units. Allow a grace period of one year, to allow for flips. But after that, every home you own after the first is considered unoccupied if it is vacant for more than three months of the year. And taxes on vacant homes become increasingly expensive as you own more and more of them. Then take the proceeds of these taxes, and put them towards first time homebuyer assistance programs. This would solve the three largest issues with the housing market right now.
First, it solves the “sitting on vacant houses to drive up the price of rent” problem. Actively force landlords to keep their apartments and houses full, driving down the price of rent.
Second, it solves the “buying a dozen houses and only selling one of them” problem. Corporations do this to be able to game the market and drive up prices on the few they do sell. But by making it prohibitively expensive to sit on vacant houses, you preemptively wreck any kinds of profits they would make by sitting on them.
Third, it would allow for more low interest loans for first time home buyers, and could even be used to offset the potential downpayment costs.
But of course, this will basically never be implemented, because the lawmakers are all bribed by the corporations that own thousands of vacant homes.
- Comment on The consequences of not building enough housing 3 weeks ago:
Which is a concern, but can largely be mitigated by encouraging work-from-home jobs. If people are able to reliably WFH, (and COVID proved that many jobs can be done entirely from home), then the local job market doesn’t tend to matter as much.
- Comment on Terraria 1.4.5 Releases January 27 3 weeks ago:
Final_Project_V3MasterRev4DAVEUSETHISONE.doc
- Comment on [Video] A good cameraman says more than a thousand words 3 weeks ago:
Mine does nothing when the video is full screened. I had to open the post and hit it while it was playing above the comments.
- Comment on Hard choices. Who would you choose? 4 weeks ago:
The real concern is whether taking Courage will also invite all of the weird stuff that seems to follow him. You get a dog, and then suddenly your house is besieged by alien cats who want to steal your eyes.
- Comment on YouTube's long unskippable ads may have finally met their match 4 weeks ago:
Nope, Firefox. YouTube does A/B testing for their ad methods, so what works for you won’t work for everyone.
- Comment on YouTube's long unskippable ads may have finally met their match 4 weeks ago:
Pihole doesn’t work for YouTube, because they host the ads on the same servers as the videos. Blocking ads would also block videos. And uBlock Origin is a constant game of whack-a-mole, with YouTube constantly trying new ways to evade the ad blocker.
Hell, they’ve even started embedding the ad directly into the same video stream if they think you’re using an ad blocker, so it’s all one contiguous video that runs straight from the ad into the video you wanted to watch. Then they just block you from skipping ahead in the video stream until the ad is done.
- Comment on (TW) Phishing mail in 2026 4 weeks ago:
Are you a registered republican, or live in a conservative area? I’m registered R so I can vote for the least crazy candidate in their primaries. Because a democrat has basically zero chance of winning the general election in my district. And I get the MAGA bait too.
- Comment on Humans are part of the ecosystem. 4 weeks ago:
It’s actually “TL;DR rich people bad” but sure, pop off I guess.
- Comment on The new version of PCSX2 2.6.02, the free open source PlayStation 2 emulator is released 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, this post was right below the one about Anna’s Archive losing their .org domain. I started reading this one and was like “oh god a second takedown has hit the towers…”
- Comment on Mom with the real questions 4 weeks ago:
This is pretty much what we did in my first apartment. There were four of us, and we all just circled our monitors around one end of a dining table, and the other end was kept clear for eating, projects workspace, etc… Every night was like an old school LAN party. I’ll admit, it wasn’t the worst setup. Getting around the back of the table was kind of a pain, but the only people who ever realistically needed to get back there were the two people who sat on that side.
- Comment on Hate it when this happens 4 weeks ago:
Ah yes, the Scunthorpe Problem in action.
- Comment on Hate it when this happens 4 weeks ago:
Only with cold water. Semen has a lot of protein in it, which means it will curdle and harden like scrambled eggs when it gets hot. Lots of women make the mistake of trying to use hot water, (because hot water cleans better, right?) but that has it immediately gumming up and getting sticky before they can even get the shampoo lathered.
- Comment on For my older Millennials 5 weeks ago:
Maybe they were thinking of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome? That’s when you take an NSAID and then your body rejects your skin and it all starts falling off. You go from perfectly healthy to spontaneously looking like a critical burn victim in about two days.
- Comment on Among 2025 games with over 10K reviews, Deltarune is the most highly rated 5 weeks ago:
Cost cutting and designing for the lowest common denominator. Suits are afraid to take risks, because they want to sell to the widest possible audience. So they end up playing it safe and making bland milquetoast games that all feel exactly the same.
- Comment on How is Donald Trump able to get away with being part of a child trafficking ring but I get 20 years in jail for littering? 5 weeks ago:
Yup. There are currently ~180 billionaires in the Virgin Islands for a NYE mega-yacht party. Those ~180 people collectively represent ~80% of the entire nation’s wealth.
- Comment on Not so fast! 5 weeks ago:
Housing is also a sort of money pit in Japan because abandoned houses often aren’t considered worth repairing. Old Japanese houses tend to end up with lots of issues, to the point that it is often cheaper to bulldoze and build new. There are plenty of stories of people buying an abandoned house for like $50… But that’s only the initial property cost. It was so cheap because everyone knows that they have to actually invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in bulldozing and rebuilding before the property will be habitable again.