ZigBee router thing:

I’ve been happy with the SMLIGHT SLZB-06M. You can easily flash firmware, and it has PoE which was important for me. I believe it also supports Thread, but I haven’t tried this yet (and I’m not sure if it supports it at the same time as Zigbee).

Zigbee smart plugs from Third Reality have been pretty solid in my experience, and they report power usage.

For circuit breaker level monitoring, I have an Emporia Vue2. I have it running esphome, completely local — unfortunately this requires some simple soldering and flashing, so it’s not turnkey. But it’s been rock solid ever since flashing it. (Process is well documented online.)

I’ve had decent luck with cheap wifi Matter bulbs, but provisioning them is finicky, and sometimes they just crap out and need to be power cycled; Zigbee bulbs (e.g., Ikea) have generally been reliable, though sometimes I’ve had difficulty pairing them initially. After power cycling a Matter WiFi bulb, it takes a while for it to respond to Home Assistant; Zigbee bulbs generally respond as soon as you power them on.

I have a wired smart light switch from TP-Link/Kasa (KS205), and it’s been completely hassle free (and totally local — Matter over wifi). The Kasa smart switch dongles I have work flawlessly but need proprietary pairing, and I’m afraid to update firmware in case they lose local support.

Good luck! Fun adventure :)

My recollection is that the DVD included that library, but it’s been a while…

Cadence definitely the right place to start, since it shouldn’t break the bank.

I’d do some research on cadence if you haven’t already — you mentioned getting up hills in a higher gear to be faster while also keeping HR down. That’s definitely an option, but it can come at the expense of your legs (and worst case, knees).

Conventional wisdom today (as I understand) is that if you thrash your cardio, it’ll recover fast; thrash your legs, they’ll recover more slowly. So there tends to be a bias towards higher cadence (80-100rpm or so) for performance, with lower cadence useful for strength training.

Good luck! Cycling is a wonderful sport. Focus on the numbers and gadgets if you like, but at the end of the day remember to have fun :)

Nice! If you want a more quantitative way of comparing performance, a power meter is a great way. Average speed is affected by the route, the weather, etc., whereas power is much less influenced by these things (not entirely of course — I put out more power on hills, and temperature has an effect, etc.).

The only downside is they are really expensive, and for MTB I’m not sure what the options are.

For reference, ~800kcal in ~2hours should mean roughly 110-120W average power, but without a power meter that’s pretty much just a guess.

In San Francisco, a ticket for any event at the big arena (Chase Center — home of the Warriors) gives you free Muni transportation: https://www.sfmta.com/fares/your-chase-center-event-ticket-your-muni-fare

It’s a start.

On the one hand, that sucks, on the other…well, what really sucks is that it’s probably necessary given the state of public transit and bikeability. (Haven’t been to Nashville, so I can’t comment on public transportation there.)

Any city in the US

I don’t think that’s correct, for example, San Francisco:

On December 11, 2018, the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance (the “Ordinance”) eliminating required parking minimums citywide for all uses.

This does exist in major US cities, especially the older (by US standards) ones. I’m in San Francisco, in a “good” neighborhood, and restaurants, groceries, bars, and multiple forms of public transit are all a short walk away. This is very different in car centric suburbs/cities though.

I think a lot of companies view their free plan as recruiting/advertising — if you use TailScale personally and have a great experience then you’ll bring in business by advocating for it at work.

Of course it could go either way, and I don’t rely on TailScale (it’s my “backup” VPN to my home network)… we’ll see, I guess.

…are Turing Complete, so what you can do with them is exactly equal.

But they’re only equal in the Turing complete sense, which (iirc) says nothing about performance or timing.

Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

That’s…not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

So the irony is

I see what you did there…

I think you mean more scrupulous, not less.

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

I’d say it gets a little different with command line utilities — maybe “utility” is the appropriate term here, but I’d call something like grep a program, not an application (again — “utility” also works).

To be sure, grep is extremely powerful, but its scope is limited.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

from stdlib.h import cout

Wait this looks wrong, shit…