Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!
This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.
It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:
- Something interesting that happened to you
- Something humourous that happened to you
- Something frustrating that happened to you
- A quick question
- A request for recommendations
- Pictures of your pet
- A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
- Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)
So how’s it going?
Been off on stress leave the last couple of days but I’m lucky to have an extremely supportive manager. They let me take the days off without using annual or sick leave. Also found a good psychotherapist through work’s EAP services which has helped.
That’s really cool they let you do that. Hopefully you’re feeling less stressed, and not sitting at home worrying about all the work that’s piling up.
Part of the stress is that there’s no funding for the next 3 years and therefore very little work. There’s a wave of redundancies that’ll be announced this coming week.
Going to be tough.
Good luck, hopefully you’ll get through unscathed.
Thanks. Unless something has drastically changed I’ll be safe but will be losing a lot of good colleagues.
Yeah that’s usually the way. All that institutional knowledge gone.
I have a loose definition of “week”. This is the first thread in almost a month…
Anyway, a while back I asked about gateway routers, and @thevoyagekayaking@lemmy.nz recommended the Ubiquiti Dream Machine SE. I eventually built up the courage to spent that much money on it, and it arrived this week.
After a few challenges I managed to get it set up. It has now replaced my ISP router, and I’ve also replaced the Pi-hole with the UDM’s options for local DNS entries and ad blocking. I also have set it up as a VPN client with Wireguard and ProtonVPN, and I can choose which devices are routed over the VPN and even customise it per domain so streaming services that don’t like the VPN can be excluded.
I have a 300Mbps connection that normally averages about 280Mbps, and ProtonVPN lets me keep this speed (I’m on a paid plan).
The internet in general feels more snappy too, lower latency. I’m pretty happy with this purchase, and keen to get some cameras plugged into the PoE as soon as my wallet has recovered.
It begins! Here’s a mug of kool-aid ;) So, who’s taking odds on TTC and TTA*?
There’s a legitimate criticisms to be made of Ubiquiti’s products, but they perform very well, are relatively simple to setup and maintain and most importantly for me, you get a perpetual license in the up front purchase price - no annual ransomware like other similar providers. Plus you can host the controller yourself, you don’t have to be tied to their cloud offering (if they even still bother with it).
I haven’t setup their built-in ad blocking yet as the local DNS was a bit of a pain so I still use pi-hole for all my own home stuff’s DNS anyway, and I have wireguard running off their box as I set that up when their implementation was very new and not quite what I was after. But only a matter of time before I switch to the same setup as yours.
*(time till cameras, time till access-points)!
Actually on cameras, I think Ubiquiti are adding Onvif support to Protect which should let you add non-Ubiquiti cameras to their setup too. Of course then you won’t get the special detection features so i’ll continue to use frigate & offload the “is human?” analysis to a GPU.
I’ve been looking at Reolink with built in detection. Would I still need frigate?
I’d want it integrated with Home Assistant anyway, so might not even need Unifi Protect in the stack.
I really like the frigate project, and the detection models it has are really really good, and that meant I could use really cheap Amcrest (I think) cameras because the brains was on the server end rather than camera end. Plus I kinda prefer the device side to be as dumb as possible as they can often have all sorts of vulnerabilities baked in the more IoT they are.
Though I also really hate Home Assistant so I use Frigate as a standalone app, and I manage notifications in a somewhat roundabout way (mqtt -> loki -> grafana -> pushover). I did that because I got heartily sick of how awful Home Assistant was at determining whether I was, or was not at home.
So now I use Unpoller to get my device states from the UDM, that gets stored in prometheus, and my Grafana alert rule works out if my partner or I are at home based on our device being connected to the WiFi or not; then each MQTT event for a detection it only sends a notification if both phones are away.
Haha I fought with Home Assistant on the home/not home thing too. It’s really food now, though. I think the issue is HA uses the google significant motion update, so it doesn’t get realtime location data but instead updates on some black box google schedule. They have a high accuracy mode but it still doesn’t seem to poll regularly. It’s unclear to me exactly what changes.
On my phone I also use PhoneTrack synced to Nextcloud for location tracking, and that updates every minute. I think this seems to allow HA to get more frequent updates, as it works great for me now. Still a massive problem on my wife’s phone, who has no need for PhoneTrack. Detecting WiFi network is my next plan for her, which you can do in HA as well.
Yeah I was using HA to figure out presence from Unifi and that was very flakey as well. Have a look at Unpoller though, its a decent project and can push metrics to influxdb or prometheus.
Will do, thanks!
What trouble did you have with local DNS? I haven’t had any issues.
What I like about Pi-hole is the control. With the block ads setting here, it’s a checkbox on or off. Pi-hole lets me add custom block lists, and see a log of what’s being blocked to help me resolve issues with sites not working.
Annoyingly I have Amplify APs which while made by Ubiquiti they aren’t compatible with the Unifi range in terms of controller. They work fine but I have to manage them separately.
Its only recent releases of Unifi Network that have made it easy to setup local DNS entries - it used to be very kludgy or not possible back when I first deployed PiHole as DNS for me.
Maybe time for an automod to make the thread? If that exists on Lemmy
Tools exist that can do it, but there’s always a pinned post at the top of c/nz if anyone wants to post something or read something.
The problem with using a bot is that people with bots disabled won’t see it! I also just don’t really like the idea, it seems so impersonal. Perhaps a good compromise is setting up the posts in advance with a post scheduling tool, so it’s not a bot but my account still posting them.
Good idea with the scheduled posting. I gravitate to these kinds of threads, mainly as sometimes I don’t really have anything relevant to add to news or political posts.
If we’re gonna get nice and structured, what’s a good day to post? I’ve normally been aiming either for a Monday or Friday as I think people tend to have more to talk about just before or just after a weekend (normally pretty quiet on weekends themselves).
Thoughts?
Maybe Friday? People are generally more relaxed on a Friday than Monday is my thinking…
Sounds good. I’ll set something up to try to get it consistent at perhaps 8am on Fridays.
I’ve scheduled the next post for Friday. Don’t seem to be able to schedule it reoccurring quite with the complexity I need, but I’ll try to keep em stacked up so they arrive on time each Friday.
Just got some Deadly Sin coffee beans.
The taste for me is great, strong but smooth, not the burnt taste some stronger coffee’s have. A blend of Robusta and Arabica beans hence the higher strength.
It’s tough commenting on-line suggesting foods, drinks, movies etc to others, it’s all a very personal preference.
Oooh, I was just looking at ordering more coffee. And the strength of the coffee (as in flavour not caffeine) is something I struggle to get right. Cafe coffee is always a lot stronger than what I make at home, even when I caefully measure proportions.
I might order a bag of this and give it a go!
Just some notes after a few days of Deadly Sin tasting. We found it really has a strong taste, but not burnt like some darker coffees. This makes it taste very strong yet smooth.
Mrs Floofah is not keen, too strong for her, so this morning I made a DIY blend 50% Deadly Sin and 50% Hummingbird Colombia. My blend was noticeably a less strong taste, but the blend has nicely perked up the Colombia.
TIL - roasting and blending coffee is a science.
Mine should arrive today! I ordered 500g which seems like a nice balance between bulk pricing and not having too much of a coffee I might not like.
I order 1kg of wine barrel aged coffee a while back, forgetting I don’t like wine. Took me ages to get through it 😆
It’ll be interesting to hear how it goes for you. The Deadly Sin on-line marketing etc really grabbed me, made me keen to try it, so I guess it did its job for them.
How did you prepare yours? I tried an espresso today when the beans arrived and the flavour wasn’t very strong. Definitely smooth, but not the strong flavour I was expecting in NZ’s strongest coffee!
That’s interesting. I burr grind my own beans seconds before making the espresso’s. I had already adjusted my grind to espresso, and timed it to fill the portafilter, takes about 25 seconds and uses 20-22 gms ground coffee.
Once the grinder has filled the portafilter, I tamp it down with quite a significant press on the tamper. We don’t mess with the milk foamer, simply splash in a very small amount of cold Boring Barista oat milk to each cup. Then for me, a small sprinkle of chilli chocolate powder on top of the crema.
For our blend I simply mixed the beans 50/50 in tne grinder.
I ground it then immedietly used it, though I just have a cheap grinder.
Are you doing 60ml of espresso and a splash of milk? I had about 80ml of water in first to make a long black, the same amount I would normally use, and it was weaker in flavour than my other coffee.
I can try tamping it down more or grinding it more, but then I end up with less than 60ml of espresso with the preset double espresso setting. I figure if I am getting 60ml out (which I practiced by measuring it into a little measuring cup thingy) then I must have the grinding/tamping around what the manufacturers expect. I’ve definitely had issues getting the water through if I grind it too much!
I snagged an OKJ Bronco for a great price a couple of weeks ago as a damaged packaging product. Turned out it was pretty much perfect inside except for a couple of small scratches which I covered up with enamel paint very easily.
Managed to hang a lamb leg in there last weekend which turned out delicious. Might try to do some ribs in there if the weather is decent this Sunday.
I’ve had my Bronco for a few years now and it is so good to use. Have done briskets, pork shoulders, ribs, chickens so far everything’s been delicious.
Early on a cold morning it can be a little tricky to get the chimney drawing air well - so one trick i’ve recently learnt is to switch my vacuum pipe to the blow side and to force air into the inlet which seems to get it cranking pretty quickly :)
Oh, and as you mention Lamb, you really should treat yourself and try some West Kentucky style Mutton BBQ. It can be hard to get actual mutton, but it works with hogget too, its delicious and makes too much sense for NZ BBQ to not start adopting it!
Haha yes I actually figured out the same, I used my small battery workshop blower on low setting to force air into the inlet and it gets it going really quick. It has a flexible rubber nozzle so I can basically squeeze it into the inlet.
I don’t think I’ve seen any mutton around, but I haven’t really been looking. I’ll have to keep an eye out.
Sadly I was too lazy to spritz my ribs yesterday and they ended up way too dry. They weren’t the meatiest ribs either which didn’t help, or I left it at too high a temp. I’ll have to practice more!
I tend to wrap ribs pretty early in butcher paper (my butcher wraps everything, even if its in a vac bag in butcher paper so I get a supply without trying :) and that really helps to keep them moist. I do the same for bigger chunks of meat to get through the stall as well.
I wrapped in foil near the end, but had them hanging without the heat diffuser for too long I think. The meatier parts weren’t too bad, the thin parts were too dry though. I’m going to look for some meatier ones next time.
I meant to post this earlier - its an explainer on how West Kentucky ended up with Mutton BBQ and you’ll see why I was instantly hooked that it was something New Zealand should be doing too.
https://www.foodrepublic.com/2012/03/13/a-year-of-barbecue-kentucky-mutton/
Honestly, that sounds pretty tasty, I’d definitely give that a try if I find some mutton!
Wow, that thing looks amazing!
I’ve been thinking about getting a drum smoker for awhile, but was expecting not to get one until next year sometime. I was kind of tossing up between this and a Pit Barrel Cooker, then the Bronco popped up on one of my saved sellers on Trademe and I had to jump on it.
Pretty happy with it so far!
I was so impressed with the quality of the Bronco that I bought one of their Rambler’s as well. I use that when I just want to grill a couple of steaks for dinner, but my partner also bought be one of the Espeto Sul rotisseries, and I use that with the Rambler as its just about the perfect length for it. I got my brother to fabricate a baffle which lets me hold the lid open, but still keep the box closed for proper air draw & whatnot - its been great for chicken roasts!
I’m quite keen on their offset smokers too, but part of the deal with buying the Bronco was I had to get rid of one of my other BBQs (sold an old Weber Kettle) so I doubt i’ll get the thumbs up to add another even bigger one to our collection!
The Rambler looks great but I currently have a Weber kettle as well, which serves most of my grilling purposes. Mainly setup with a vortex to do chicken wings and other pieces. I have an Espeto Sul too, but it’s a bit annoying to use on the kettle. No one makes a riser for it, so can’t do lid on. I’ve thought about getting a cheap second hand Weber Go Anywhere so I can get a riser to use with the rotisserie. But then I’m also wanting a tabletop hibachi so we can do korean bbq or yakitori for the kids…
I like the concept of an offset (and I’ve watched a lot of videos on them lol), but I don’t really have time for fire management and long cooks :( I love the idea of cooking over wood too, sometimes I’ll do sausages or something on the little firepit. Maybe when the kids are grown up I can get an offset.
