Quick update if anyone is reading this in future - the upgrade was successful!

Hats off to the HA developers and contributors - even though my install was completely unsupported, the updater pretty much sailed smoothly through everything.

It ended up taking several days to process all the database schema changes, along the way I did need to modify the MySQL InnoDB cache size from 128MiB to 1GiB (not the fault of Home Assistant at all - I didn’t set up MySQL correctly 😂) once that was done things significantly sped up.

Looking forward to all the new features HA has to offer 🙂

Oh no 😂😂 what version are you on now?

I remember a looong while ago when I broke my virtualized install by trying to update with too little virtual disk space, had to expand it and manually install the latest core from a shell within the VM. On another occasion the sqlite database completely filled up the virtual disk (I disabled automatic pruning of old data) and that was a pain to export… eventually dumped it into a dedicated MySQL installation and all was well after that.

I’ve seen that they now have A/B boot (similar to how Android devices do) so hopefully these are issues of the past

Still going 😅 database migration has been running for 21 hours so far lol.

Everything has gone smoothly so far. Spent two hours looking through all the release notes and have a loooong list of stuff to sort out as soon as it completes 🤞

Edit: fix spoiler

The few times I’ve needed to man [app name] on a system without internet access or on an obscure utility, I’ve always been able to find what I need in the included docs

I hope the dev eventually gets sponsored, this is one of those utilities that you don’t think you need until --help doesn’t cut it

For anyone who doesn’t have a device that natively supports this feature, there’s an app on F-Droid called “Privacy Indicators” that provides this for camera and mic access. It uses the built-in Accessibility services to provide this, and needs a couple of other special permissions

You can change the color of the indicator, mine’s red for more visibility.

I installed it from GitHub however, since the F-Droid build was really outdated: https://github.com/NitishGadangi/Privacy-Indicator-App

I love this 😂

I use OSMand alongside GMaps WV (a webview for Google Maps, wipes all data automatically after closing). Works well enough for me, but in GMaps you can’t rotate the map or provide your location

I use “Automation” (on fdroid) - the UX could do with some improving but it thoroughly covers the basics.

Newer versions of Android make it difficult to automate certain things though, I find root helps to get around that in some cases

I was looking for Sleep As Android too!! Separately to this I saw a comment on R a while ago asking for FOSS alternatives, and to say the dev’s response was out-of-touch would be an understatement. They just complained about not being able to make a living from a FOSS app…

Regarding Gadgetbridge though, those devs and contributors are running into more and more accessories using encrypted protocols which is a bit worrying. Right now I’ve settled on the BangleJS which has official support, just wish it had a more accurate heart rate sensor!

My dream FOSS health app would be some concoction of OpenScale and Gadgetbridge 😂

I’ve seen the redesign too and not really sure how I feel about it 😂 there’s a lot of additional whitespace and it kinds looks like a blown up mobile version of the site

.NET runs natively on Linux

Only .NET Core sadly

When I moved my personal laptop to Linux I needed WINE to run some source-available .NET apps that were written targeting the Windows-only .NET Framework

And not to mention the custom control panel applets hanging around out there from who-knows-what vendors.

AMD FirePro and Catalyst users are going to probably stay on an older version of the OS, considering most of those users are going to be educational institutions, engineering workshops, makerspaces/hackerspaces etc.

Can’t think of any other vendor products that integrated quite as much into the legacy control panel area

Haven’t watched the video - just my thoughts…

Minetest (specifically Mineclone2) is an impressive feat, and a very faithful reproduction of the original. I pretty much used the Minecraft fandom wiki to progress through the game. Hours of fun was had without handing money to M$.

I only really stopped because the redstone functionality wasn’t fully implemented.

Hats off to the devs on that project regardless

AFAIK on Windows the physical disk containing the partition needs to be marked offline in Disk Management, and the disk or a partition given exclusively to VirtualBox running as administrator, otherwise access is limited to read-only

I would suggest checking some other sources as well, just in case this has changed over the years. If you do successfully pass the physical partition into VirtualBox read-write, you might need to set up a virtual disk with grub to boot into your physical Linux partition

Platforms like Floatplane, Nebula, Patreon etc make it so easy to support creators outside of YouTube, while also giving creators a larger share of income compared to Adsense.

There’s YouTube Premium… but I don’t think I’m alone in not wanting to give Google a single cent of my hard earned cash

Windows 7 being discontinued.

I migrated my HTPC to Linux several years ago, and since then just transitioned more and more of my machines over.

My desktop is the only machine left running Windows at this point due to there being no Freetrack implementation on Linux for sim games

A while back I made a Lolin32-based weather station that lasts for around 60 days on a single disposable vape battery.

It wakes up every 15 mins, and while it’s connecting to WiFi it retrieves the AM2302 sensor readings. As soon as they’re transmitted it goes back to sleep.

I wish there was a more power efficient alternative though, like whatever is being used in those BLE LYWSD03MMC sensors that last for around 3-6 months on a cr2032 whilst also having a display built in

To answer the direct question - no

I do have some thoughts on moving away from the Pi though - warning, heavy personal bias ahead…

If you’re looking at moving away from the Pi I would just suggest a low power x86 box, like a Nuc or some Intel N100 low-power tiny PC.

There is a caveat though - it looks like the OctoPi project only provides OS builds for the Pi, so if you change systems it looks like you’ll need to install OctoPrint manually, and port over your config somehow.

On ebay you can get second-hand NUCs, 6th gen and up, for practically peanuts. The cheaper quad core celeron nucs (i.e. J3455) are roughly equivalent to the 3rd and 4th gen dual-core i5s (3777u, 3230m etc) performance wise, but have an updated QuickSync encoder and support accelerated 4K video encoding/playback, handy if you want to capture timelapses of your prints or just view them live. They also consume 1/3rd of the power at around 10 watts under the same workload.

ARM support for other vendors can be pretty flaky, sometimes even non existent. While you could pick an Orange Pi, and go with a modern community-supported distro like Armbian, it isn’t a turnkey experience like the Pi. There is much less documentation, and still some very early boards floating around with hardware defects and overheating issues (posing a fire risk in the worst case, the OPi Zero being the most egregious - literally melting the optional enclosure and killing the NIC). Some research before buying will let you know most of what you need to know - check around the forums for any common issues and dealbreakers, as well as the manufacturer’s site to get an idea of available support.

If you want to get an idea of the alternatives you could check out Jeff Geerling’s youtube channel, he covers the Pi and occasionally videos on other alternatives, as well as issues he’s had with them and support. I’ll try and link some below…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KghZIgkKZcs

Check the comments on that one for a quick synopsis, as the video is quite long…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjzvh-bfV-E

This video pretty much just echoes my current perspective

The first thing I did after purchasing an MX Master a few years ago was block the update server, after realising it downloads update binaries over plain HTTP and tries to automatically run them on boot 🤡

Very nice mouse tbh, just such a shame the company and their software is toilet water

Thanks for sharing, provided some insight into how YT is doing this.

Seems very easy to bypass if they’re just swapping in new TS HLS/DASH segments, the harder part will be identifying what segments are part of the video and what segments are ads sliced in