Steve Hill 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺 / is on Nostr

|🦆| Climber, windsurfer, Welsh speaker, Technical Director of [@opendium](https://social.opendium.com/@opendium ) |🐱| Dringwr, hwylfyrddwr, siaradwr Cymraeg, Cyfarwyddwr Technegol [@opendium](https://social.opendium.com/@opendium ) |🦆|

Last Notes

2024-04-09 13:32:49

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suspect the current government would not defer EV VED, hopefully the next government will be saner. Don't understand why they don't apply the same banding to all diesels, regardless of their age though.
OTOH, I'm not a fan of "fixed cost" taxes like this - we drive an EV almost all the time, but also run a 20 year old diesel van, which only does about 1000 miles / year to the beach and back, but the VED is eyewatering. Replacing it wouldn't be environmentally sound.

2024-04-07 10:56:56

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to be clear, SIP over TCP only used TCP for signalling (which does make some sense). The media is always UDP.

2024-04-07 10:55:16

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I've said ot before, but although the PSTN is unencrypted, I don't think there are so many people in a position to remotely snoop. E.g. since we support customer firewalls, we can snoop on their phone calls using just tcpdump and wireshark, as can the ISP and every hop up to the VoIP provider (in many cases, also applies to internal calls!). None of us would be in a position to do if the customer was using ISDN to carry the calls.

2024-04-03 18:05:34

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I would presume that even trying to charge you is fraud though, since you didn't accept the T&Cs...

2024-04-03 09:22:08

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the others usually hold your package hostage, so you have to pay even though they have no right to charge

2024-03-24 20:47:20

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I'd prefer zigbee. However, my Tuya zigbee temperature sensors were bought on the recommendation of a blog article where a bunch of sensors had been tested and that one produced frequent updates and good range. So either the article was wrong, or the hardware/firmware has changed. So pretty difficult to figure out which sensors are good if the manufacturer is going to update them to be worse without notice :(

2024-03-24 19:52:34

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on the heating front, my office room thermostat died so I decided to try using Home Assistant to run the heating (zigbee temperature sensor and a zigbee relay to turn the boiler on/off). Pretty happy with the result - just need to find a more reliable temperature sensor because the Tuya one I have is crap (updates less frequent than I would like, occasionally stops sending updates, and seems to have poor zigbee range)

2024-03-24 19:48:41

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But, my car relies on VW's servers and a non-changable eSIM. EV charger relies on Ohme's servers and a non-changable eSIM - would love an entirely local EV charger, but I think Intelligent Octopus Go compatibility precludes that.
I have a wifi connected Bresser weather station and was disappointed to find no local API. It sends (limited) data to Weather Underground and you have to get Home Assistant to pull it from there instead of getting complete data directly from the unit.

2024-03-24 19:43:07

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I try to avoid IoT stuff that relies on someone running cloud services (not always successfully). Buying Zigbee instead of wifi stuff seems a good bet - a quick Google tells me whether Zigbee2MQTT supports the device, then I can guarantee it can all be handled locally with Home Assistant. Bought a DECT based baby monitor for the same reason - it's guaranteed to all be local. In many ways a wifi baby monitor would have been more useful, but so hard to know if it will be local or cloud based.