lightrush

I needed another corded mouse and this time around I thought of @PKL@mastodon.social and @pronk@mastodon.social instead of Logitech's shareholders. These guys make open source mice among other open source hardware under the brand Ploopy. You can order one from them, assembled or as a kit, or you could print and build it entirely by yourself.

The mouse itself is pretty great. Coming from a long line of Logitech (MX518/G5/G500/G502), it's a bit larger than what I'm used to but I think I'm getting accustomed to it.

Here's another shot of it:

PM2.5 is at 104ug/m3 indoors with an open window.

Liberal leadership hopeful Chrystia Freeland says she's running against the "Ottawa establishment" as more federal cabinet ministers rally around her top rival Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada.

"It's central to my campaign to see this not about Liberal elites deciding. This is about the grassroots," Freeland said in an interview on CBC's The House that will air on Saturday.

I see.

A video showing beans being poured into a cup sitting atop of a scale, atop of another scale. Both scales measure the beans concurrently.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/31824976

Lately I've had some obviously inaccurate measurements from my Timemore Black Mirror scale. That would happen occasionally but not always. I was charging it today and as luck would have it, I was sitting beside it. I typically charge it unattended. I noticed that it took a very long time to charge and multiple times it seemed to restart charging. I grabbed it to check the cable and noticed it was quite warm in one spot. I though - that's alright, it's likely where the battery cell is, it's charging, lithium cells get warm during charging. Later I took it off the charger and while handling it I examined the hot spot a bit more. I noticed that when I squeezed the scale at that corner, the top plate wouldn't sink towards the bottom as it does in the other corners. A few mental calculations later I figured this could be a swollen cell that has grown so large that it impacts the plates and doesn't let them come together as they do normally. I took it apart. Lo and behold this spicy pillow:

The marking on it means it's supposed to be 8mm thick. It's currently closer to 12.5mm. Removing the battery allowed the two plates to come together in all corners as normal. That confirmed the hypothesis. Further, the reason why it only occasionally impacted the measurements is likely due to the weight of the cup I was using. When using a lighter cup, the total weight would be lower than needed to get the two plate to touch the battery and produce inaccurate measurement.

I ordered this as a replacement. It fits the dimensions and it's got some safety certification.

To check if your scale is a fire hazard, squeeze this corner:

Normal squeeze action looks like this. Unfortunately I didn't record a video prior to removing the battery.

If it the two plates come together as the do in the other corners, you're probably okay. If the plates don't come nearly as close, you've got an unlit petard in your hands.

I'm syncoiding from my normal RAIDz2 to a backup mirror made of 2 disks. I looked at zpool iostat and I noticed that one of the disks consistently shows less than half the write IOPS of the other:

                                        capacity     operations     bandwidth 
pool                                  alloc   free   read  write   read  write
------------------------------------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
storage-volume-backup                 5.03T  11.3T      0    867      0   330M
  mirror-0                            5.03T  11.3T      0    867      0   330M
    wwn-0x5000c500e8736faf                -      -      0    212      0   164M
    wwn-0x5000c500e8737337                -      -      0    654      0   165M

This is also evident in iostat:

     f/s f_await  aqu-sz  %util Device
    0.00    0.00    3.48  46.2% sda
    0.00    0.00    8.10  99.7% sdb

The difference is also evident in the temperatures of the disks. The busier disk is 4 degrees warmer than the other. The disks are identical on paper and bought at the same time.

Is this behaviour expected?

Here we go. The setup was pretty trivial. The setup for the Zooz GPIO Z-Wave adapter for Yellow was trivial. Adding the T6 was trivial too. I had to install 2x Z-Wave smart plugs to extend the network from where the Yellow is to where the thermostat is. I used Leviton Z-Wave smart plugs. Finally I added the automation I wanted this whole thing for. Seems to work ™

The only downside I can see so far is that the T6 doesn’t support multi-speed fan (G1/G2/G3 wiring) so I had to choose one of the speeds while wiring and I can’t use the rest. From what I can tell Ecobee seems to be able to use G1/2/3 but I’m not ready to give up on the ethernet-independent operation T6 and Z-Wave allow to have multiple fan speeds.

Does anyone know if there’s a (non-retail) variant of the T6 that supports multi-speed fan?

I needed some thermostat automation done and I stumbled upon this thread. I just attempted this and it went about as smoothly as I can imagine. If you're also in need of an offline solution, the Z-Wave version of the Honeywell T6 seems to do the job.

#homeassistant #zwave #thermostat #homeautomation

I have a bit of data that has to be encrypted and stored into a file so that it can be moved across file systems and possibly OSes. Disk encryption like dm-crypt and a loop device isn't appropriate as it may not exist on another OS.

It's been a very long time since I needed this sort of software. More than a decade ago I used TrueCrypt. I know that VeraCrypt is the current re-incarnationn of the project. Is that still the go-to software for this sort of application? Is there something else that's popular these days?