Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented at the front page.

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Useful post (in Dutch) by Max Roeleveld on his home automation using a RaspberryPi with Home Assistant. On how to do these things without silo’d hard- and software. To motivate others to take more online and offline things into their own control, not beholden to some service provider that then basically controls your off-switch, and harvests your behavioural data in the process.

In our household we are very much addicted to our Philips Hue lamps all over the house. We run those without external access or connections (we don’t use it to switch on/off lights when we’re not at home), but still it’s a silo of course. It could integrate with Home Assistant I see. There’s other unused stuff (Ikea’s Trådfri lamps a.o.) around the house too.

Bookmarked for the ‘someday’ project list.

Bookmarked Home Assistant, en wat ik er momenteel mee doe by @Max

Home Assistent met RaspberryPi, Zigbee en lampjes in de woon- en slaapkamer. Een kijkje in de… nou ja, niet in de keuken.

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Conspiracy theorists, or those with fringe opinions all are ‘snowflakes’ at heart, judging by the consistent accusations of being censored they make. You are not being censored, you merely don’t have your expectations met. The expectation that platforms won’t care what you publish, as they will care if it hurts their bottom line in some form. The expectation that your opinions will be amplified in the outrage machine. You are not being censored. You may be denied the use of someone else’s channel and infrastructure, you may be told you’re not welcome on someone else’s turf. You can still say whatever you want, and put it online on your own dime. You can’t demand anyone else paying attention though, or have attention automagically arranged for you in the walled garden of your choosing.

It reminds me of a group of protesters in my hometown some years ago. For about two weeks they were on the front page of the local paper almost daily, with photos and all. Towards the end one of them tweeted “we’re not being heard”, and I answered “you’re heard plenty, it just doesn’t automatically mean people agree and do as you wish”. I’m probably still blocked. Which ironically is how they confirmed my point precisely. They heard me, but didn’t agree, so I got ‘censored’.

Lack of amplification and attenuation are not censorship.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes about note taking as tending a mind garden, as a deliberate practice.

“A mind garden is not a mind backyard. It’s not about dumping notes in there and forgetting about them.”

Ouch. That describes well the bookmarks in my Evernotes. It also, on the flip side chimes with how I treat my blog archives, which I regularly browse seeing new connections between postings. Evernote bookmarks in the backyard, my blogposts in the garden.