I tried Jellyfin once about a year ago and it was… OK I guess? Certainly nowhere near as polished as the rabid fan base would have me believe, and there was something in my library that it flat out refused to play.

If I didn’t already have a lifetime Plex Pass, and it was just me hosting my own media for a user count of one, then sure, I’d use it. But none of those things are true. I need something that “just works” and Plex fits that bill.

Like most people here, I bought a lifetime pass when it was $75 and it’s paid for itself over and over again in the time since. I honestly think I’ve had more than $750 worth of value from my purchase. Sure they’ve made some odd decisions recently, but until they start actively taking away functionality or rescind existing lifetime subs then I will continue to use it.

Meanwhile, not to belittle you personally, but the fact that every thread that mentions Plex in any way, good or bad, is guaranteed to be dominated by people circle-jerking over their beloved Jellyfin has put me completely off the project, to the point that I’ve had to add the word to my blocklist. Obviously that’s not working too well or I wouldn’t have seen this post!

August 1999. The last total solar eclipse visible from the UK was 72 years ago, and the next one would be 91 years later. Young Ted woke up to a gloriously sunny day. This would be it!

An hour before the event we drove out to a nice remote viewing spot with minimal obstructions for miles around. 30 minutes to go, the clouds rolled in. Thick, blanket cloud from horizon to horizon. The eclipse happened. From under the cloud it got a bit darker and the birds had a bit of a freak out but it was otherwise a non-event. We drove back home, disappointed.

30 minutes later the clouds cleared and the rest of the day was as glorious as the morning had been. 27 years later I’m still bitter about it. Seattle’s got nothing on us!

That first line is what CGPT helped me with. I wanted something that I don’t need to modify when I add or remove lights, so this just gets everything. Ideally I’d just get the lights that don’t have the power restore feature but most of my lights go via Hue and that doesn’t expose the feature to HA at all.

The input_boolean is a thing I already had setup. The UPS fires a webhook event when it goes in and out of battery mode and there’s a separate automation that switches the helper based on those.

Got a little help from CGPT so it might not be perfect, but this seems to work from my limited testing:

triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - input_boolean.ups_power
conditions: []
actions:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: state
            entity_id: input_boolean.ups_power
            state:
              - "on"
        sequence:
          - action: scene.create
            data:
              scene_id: light_states_backup
              snapshot_entities: |
                {{ states.light | map(attribute='entity_id') | list }}
      - conditions:
          - condition: state
            entity_id: input_boolean.ups_power
            state:
              - "off"
        sequence:
          - action: scene.turn_on
            target:
              entity_id: scene.light_states_backup
            data: {}
          - delay:
              hours: 0
              minutes: 0
              seconds: 10
              milliseconds: 0
          - action: scene.delete
            data:
              entity_id: scene.light_states_backup
mode: single

I’ve only tested it by toggling the UPS boolean manually and not actually cutting the power, so I’m probably going to need to add a delay, or a retry loop or something to make sure the scene applies consistently but so far so good! Thanks for the inspiration.

Thank you. I’ve also never used scenes beyond what comes built-in with Hue! This is all good stuff.

Thank you, that’s food for thought at least.

Can I ask about your light script? I have a bunch of smart bulbs that either don’t support or don’t expose the ‘power-on behaviour’ option, so in a power cut they come on full bright when power is restored, often in the middle of the night.

My HA is on a UPS so I’ve been trying to have it store the states of lights when the UPS switches to battery power (before they go to unavailable) and then restore those states when power comes back, but it’s apparently way beyond my skill set. Curious as to how your “input list of lights” works and whether it could help me…

Curious as to what you’re using scripts for? I have 88 automations and have so far found no need for a single script and I feel like I’m missing a trick somewhere.

Yes, I do have some automations that share functionality but it’s one or two actions and it seems redundant to call a separate script.

Laziest eh? Probably the one that deletes completed items from my shopping list when I leave the supermarket, because I got sick of doing it manually.

Most ridiculous would be the NFC tag I have on the lid of my cold brew coffee jug. I make a batch so rarely that I can never remember how much coffee to add, so scanning the tag makes my Google Home say; “You want 80g of coffee per litre, or 6 scoops.”

Synology walked back their requirement of using their own branded drives.

First I’ve heard of this but you’re right.

It’s really interesting how far I had to scroll down the search results to find it, as the top page or so of hits are from April when they added the restriction in the first place.

Yes this! It was so obvious what was going on behind the scenes yet the contestants would merrily show their hand every time.

I have a mix of normal Hue bulbs and some Innr brand GU10 (spotlight) bulbs. The difference in quality of light from both brands is quite noticeable, with Hue being far and away better in terms of colour blending and accuracy. There’s a reason the Hue bulbs are 2-3x the price of the competition

That said, I’ve had multiple Hue bulbs either outright fail or one LED die so that it still works but the colour is completely wrong. It’s frustrating for bulbs that are supposed to last decades but maybe the latest generation are more robust.

They’re also regularly on sale for Black Friday and the like, so I’d advise planning your purchases around those events.

I wouldn’t worry about leaving them on. Standby power draw is very low and I think even at maximum output they use about 7W each. It’s just not a big deal.

It’s more like £150/year, but it’s charged every 3 years. Still very expensive compared to .com for sure!

This looks really good and I’m enthused with how responsive you’re being, will definitely give it a try.

It is a bit of a shame you didn’t call it Jott as jo.tt is available as a domain, but then the tt TLD is pretty expensive so maybe not!

It’s niche but I like to point it out whenever I get the opportunity: if your workplace uses Bitwarden Enterprise, every licensed user gets a free family plan that can be linked to any account. I haven’t personally paid for BW for years.

This is the sort of nerdery I’m here for! Pray tell, how would you go about using those temperature glyphs with a phone keyboard?

This right here. In the UK we have a little box (ONT) where the fibre comes into the home that essentially acts as a modem and converts the fibre to ethernet and back again and then they provide a separate wireless router that plugs into it. Other than for my current ISP where I had to specifically request that they enable bridge mode (which they did for free), I’ve never had any issues plugging my own router into the ethernet side of this box.

If your ISP’s wireless router plugs directly into the fibre then you should be able to request that it’s set to bridge mode so that it becomes just a dumb ONT box like we have here. Albeit a large and clunky one.

Contacting the registrar is worth a shot and could be your best bet. I recently did a similar thing except the expiring domain was on a pretty obscure country-TLD with only one registrar. They told me how long the grace period was and then I setup a script to check the availability every minute and alert me when it came up.

Probably not feasible with a .com or similar but they might be able to help in some regard. Edit: though having read about drop catching, that’s definitely your best bet if it’s likely to be sniped!

My fancy toaster came with dire warnings to not leave it plugged in when it’s unsupervised, presumably because the cut-off on the mechanical timer can fail. Instead I plugged it into a smart socket with an automation to kill the power if there’s a continuous draw for more than 4 minutes.

Not for fun but probably my most pointless. Other than when I was testing it I don’t expect this automation to ever fire.

This is very impressive and I’m highly likely to give it a whirl. My question is, though: would it be something that my very non-tech savvy wife could use?

Eg. I’m thinking setup the app on her phone with a default location and when she asks me for a file I can just tell her that I’ve “put it in the app”, and she’ll be able to easily retrieve it. Also same thing but vice versa, though the video seems to cover that via the Android share menu…

Again, super impressive. Good job!

I used to work at a games studio that would get these delivered fairly regularly, usually paired with a particular motherboard and presumably a custom BIOS.

I think we were technically supposed to return them but the manufacturers never enforced it, so once the chip was actually released to the public - and assuming the sample was stable enough for general use - the PC would rotate into normal stock and eventually get sold for cheap to staff or end up in the spare parts bin.

While it was cool at first to get pre-production chips before anyone else, it became pretty mundane and I’m not at all surprised to see them out in the wild decades later. Interesting piece of history though!