Home Assistant now supports wake words, which means it's possible to build a totally open-source, local-only smart assistant.

Home Assistant is such a rad project, and I'm so glad it exists. Time to get scheming about building some devices.

#homeassistant #homeautomation #SmartHome

Year of the Voice - Chapter 4: Wake words

Activate your voice assistant using wake words and learn how to make your own

^{Home Assistant}

Call me a grump, but generally speaking, I'd prefer the online vendors I buy from to send me exactly what I ordered with no extra trinkets.

Business card? Fine, I'll recycle it.

Sticker? I'd rather you didn't.

Magnet? Tiny branded rubber duck? Get the fuck out of here. You're just creating waste.

The artist behind Webcomic Name, the cute abstract comic where almost every strip ends with "oh no", is in a protracted legal battle for ownership of their own intellectual property against notorious board game publishing assholes Golden Bell Studios.

They're raising funds to support their case.

I've been eyeing new #fediverse projects lately: specifically, @Bonfire and @Firefish.

I'm excited to see the possibility space grow, though I'll admit I'm having a hard time fully grokking both of these apps and meaningfully comparing them.

@Sean Tilley, you're my go-to when it comes to understanding different Fedi apps, and I know you're on Firefish right now. Would you be able to shed some light on what distinguishes Firefish from where Bonfire is headed? Extra points if you can compare to Friendica, because that's what I'm currently driving.

Today's amateur sysadmin challenge: my server accesses an external hard drive elsewhere on the network that is shared via NFS.

Presently, when I try to use rsync to sync a directory from the server to the external hard drive, I get a series of permission errors.

I'm gonna have to figure out what the appropriate permissions are to permit this behavior, but I'm not quite sure where to start. (Is it permissions set on the NFS server?)

my favorite part of working with health insurance is when they decide you should be able to complete therapy in X sessions, and if you don't, you don't deserve to be compensated for your services anymore

fantastic system we've got here, just phenomenal

For better or worse, DC and I are still locked together in this unhappy marriage, perhaps for all time.

But you aren’t.

If I understand the law correctly (and be advised that copyright law is a mess; purposely vague and murky, and no two lawyers – not even those specializing in copyright and trademark law – agree on anything), you have the rights to make your Fables movies, and cartoons, and publish your Fables books, and manufacture your Fables toys, and do anything you want with your property, because it’s your property.

Willingham Sends Fables Into the Public Domain

Here, below, is the press release I sent out today to explain what I did and why.

^{Bill Willingham (These Foolish Games)}

Having just seen someone register a new account on mastodon.social and spend a half hour harassing a single specific person... jeeeesus, some people.

(I reported the user to mastodon.social moderation already, so hopefully they move swiftly.)

Unity has absolutely no incentive to accurately report installations to developers. They have no incentive to transparently distinguish between fraud and legitimate installations. On the contrary, they have a perverse incentive to do the exact opposite.

Why the fuck would anyone trust Unity's numbers?

An old-fashioned is my go-to drink for determining if a bar is worth shit.

It's an incredibly simple drink, and if you can't be bothered to actually do it right, then why should I trust you to make anything else?

I'm trying to wire up my new BL-Touch, and apparently, BL-Touch manufacturers don't care a single whit for wiring consistency. The order of my wires appears to be entirely unlike any other BL-Touch anyone else has ever written about.

At this point, I'm barely doing more than pulling them out and reconnecting them at random, in hopes one configuration will work. 😩

#3Dprinting

"if we don't heap shame and disproportionate punishments on our children, how will they ever learn that actions have consequences???"

I am so. sick. of this thinking. 😡

It's 2023 and I can't believe* so-called "progressives" are still making fucking prison rape jokes.

*I absolutely can

I don't have time to get into it right now, but I really want to talk about how disappointed I am by how Wizards of the Coast did New Phyrexia dirty in Phyrexia: All Will Be One (ONE) and March of the Machine.

"You mean how they dispatched the Praetors with nary an afterthought?"

Yes but also the utter Bowdlerization of New Phyrexia and the replacement of body horror ("Oh fuck, that's awful, I would never want that to happen to me,") with grotesque horror ("Oh fuck, that's unsettling, I never want that thing to catch me"). The New Phyrexia of ONE was utterly neutered compared to its initial debut, which drives me up a wall, because original New Phyrexia and the Praetors was, hands-down, one of my favorite bits of antagonist worldbuilding in any fictional universe ever, precisely because it was so unflinchingly horrific.

And don't get me started on the fucking apple-red drapery that's everywhere in ONE. Give me some fucking sinew, you cowards.

#MTG

In the Pinyin transliteration between Chinese and English, the character 'x' carries the sound 'sh'. For example, the Chinese leader's name is Xi Jinping, pronounced 'she jinping'.

I noticed that when thinking about what's happened to Xitter in the last 9 months.

there is a lot that is grim in the indictment, but this annotation from the New York Times really whomped me so hard I had to take a break:

The speaker of the Arizona House at the time, Rusty Bowers, is a conservative Republican but resisted Mr. Trump’s attempt to persuade him to subvert the election. He was later awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for that action, which ended his political career: Last year, the state Republican Party censured him for his resistance, and he was overwhelmingly defeated in a primary election for State Senate.

As non-techy people are transitioning away from Twitter, I see them encountering the challenge of proving that the person who owns and runs an account is actually who they say they are. "Don't delete your Twitter account, or else someone else could take it and pretend to be you!"

It's prompting me to reflect on how we verify our identities online, what has been taken for granted in the age of consolidated social media. I'm hopeful this will lead to a new era of personal websites, at very least serving as online business cards. If my account isn't listed on my site, don't trust that it's me.

at this point I just want him to go away

it's obvious everything is going to fail spectacularly, I just want it to do that tomorrow instead of choking out a painful, drawn-out death propped up on the life support of a thousand Reddit incels

My job gives me a lot of opportunity to reflect on just how eclectic a knowledge base I seem to have.

"Wait, you know [podcast]?" says one client.

"How are you familiar with [event]?" asks another.

I love these little moments of connection.