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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I can’t say anything definitively about any health claims, but as someone who lives (and occasionally struggles) with very hard water, activated carbon filters absolutely do make a difference in regards to calcification at and around every tap/faucet.

    I should probably set a timer or alarm of some sort, but it’s easy to visually see when it’s time to replace my filters.










  • I unfortunately have firsthand experience with this in the US.

    First I was sent to the ER where I was placed under constant monitoring. I was interviewed by the medical staff as well as a case worker from the state, and given the option to voluntarily commit myself to a mental care facility, or take my chances with the court.

    The first time this happened, I chose to take my chances. The court determined that I needed to be committed, and I was sent to a mental health facility anyway. The second (and last) time it happened, I volunteered.

    In both cases, the facilities were basically a mix between a hospital and a jail. Multiple layers of locking doors, no doors on the rooms, visibility into the bathrooms, heavily weighted or bolted down furniture, but also medical equipment, nurses, and the overall asthetic of a hospital.

    They were also both basically a one-size-fits-all for any kind of issue that didn’t qualify for prison. There were homeless people that were stuck in the system waiting for housing to become available, drug addicts going through remission, people with multiple personalities, two different Jesus Christ’s, one at each facility, and people that would be mostly normal most of the time, but would suddenly snap, become violent, and need to be detained while everyone was sent to their rooms. There were also people that were struggling with depression or bipolar disorder, and in one case a kid (18 or 19) who had jaywalked across a normally busy street and a cop decided to harass him and have him committed (because that was supposedly not a mentally sound action).

    I could go on, but I’ve already written a short novel so I think I’ll leave it there. Please feel free to ask any follow up questions and I’ll try to answer to the best of my ability.





  • I’m a big fan of automating as much as I can.

    • Lights automatically turn on when someone enters the room, but only if it’s dark enough to need lights in that room at that moment. Turn them off automatically when presence is no longer detected (not just IR based motion detection).
    • My old washer and dryer alert me when they’re done thanks to vibration sensors.
    • Media downloads when added to a watchlist.
    • Regular backups locally and to the cloud.
    • My phone enables/disables rotation lock based on the app I’m currently using.
    • Phone also opens various playlists when connecting to my car stereo based on date/time.
    • Various “scenes” to turn devices on and off, control brightness, volume levels, etc. This includes controlling devices that are IR, RF, Bluetooth, and Zigbee based.
    • Game servers that update when new versions are released, but only when no players are connected. If anyone is connected, sends a message to a discord server (that is also connected to Matrix) alerting everyone to the available update and asking players to log off at their earliest convenience. Players can also check on game server status with bot commands in the game’s channel on that server.

    Everything runs locally and has a manual backup so I can still control everything the old fashioned way if my phone is dead or if my non tech savvy parents are over and need to operate any of it.


  • I recently set up something similar to this. I can’t comment on your specific hardware, but I was very frustrated with the limitations of TrueNAS and ended up using Debian and Cockpit with BTRFS for the drives.

    I started with two 18TB drives with no RAID, and have since added two 26TB drives with everything’s using RAID1 and ~45TB of usable storage. Converting and adding drives was very simple, but also time consuming of course.