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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 10th, 2024

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  • Looks good, really love those ceiling beams! Personal opinion, not that you asked for it: I like the white walls. I would be concerned with the countertop material that the room would become a little too dark, especially in winter.

    You could put a white tile up as the backsplash on the wall. That would keep it bright but easier to clean (totally understand what you’re saying about the wall getting dirty, especially from the coffee maker, but if this is just temporary and you know you’ll be covering it soon who cares?). I think a lot of people go with what they call subway tile in the US, to the point where it may be over done, but I think it’s popular because it looks pretty decent, is fairly easy to install and usually not expensive, and is simple enough to not be distracting. Of course, you could also do a more geometric shape, perhaps two different shapes where the larger is white and the smaller gives pops of color for contrast.

    I’m not the decor person, though; I generally defer to my wife on that because she usually has stronger opinions in those areas. And I’m generally not up to date on what’s currently fashionable, so don’t put a lot of stock in my opinions.







  • I accidentally let my personal domain expire because I was using PayPal with my registrar but they couldn’t use that for auto renew. Someone else bought it but they’re not doing anything with it. I can’t see who owns it because they’re doing a private registration with the same registrar I used, so as far as whois is concerned it’s the same registration it’s always had. This happened once before to me years ago and the people who bought it that time put up a fake YouTube clone in French but I just waited them out and they abandoned it a year later. This has been going on two years now and it still hasn’t been abandoned. It’s not critical to have but it’s annoying that someone’s squatting on it hoping I’ll pay a premium to get it back. It’s not that valuable to me.


  • Are you looking to measure draw for one specific device or across circuits in your whole home. I’ve been considering two systems: IoTaWatt and Lantern Power Monitor. Both are open source and open hardware.

    IoTaWatt uses entirely custom hardware for the actual device but serves its own webpage that can be accessed easily at home from any device and if you’re technically savvy can pass to other services. My reservation with it is if at some point in the future the hardware dies, how easy will it be to recreate if the main project goes dormant, even with the hardware open source? What if a chip manufacturer goes out of business or discontinues a part?

    In contrast, the Lantern Power Monitor runs on Raspberry Pi with a relatively basic custom board you can solder yourself with minimal skill; I suspect you could even make it work with a breadboard. Recent shortages notwithstanding, Raspberry Pi seems to keep their models pretty available for a long time, so that inspires a little more confidence. On the flip side, the software primarily runs on a mobile app. There is an iPhone app but it doesn’t have as many features as the Android app. But what happens if the project is abandoned and the app is no longer updated to stay compatible with newer phones or operating systems? And the app by default sends the data to an outside server maintained by the main developer. He doesn’t charge for the hosting and it makes it easy to access from anywhere, but some people might have concerns about that. You can also configure it to self-host from the Raspberry Pi but then you need to have the know-how to make it accessible outside your home (if you want). Underneath it also relies on some other open source data analysis components and I assume if you really know what you’re doing you can pass it out to other software.

    Of course, in the end I don’t have the budget to do either project right now.