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 doesn’t 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 a hippo
- Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)
You may have noticed something different about our daily thread!
People haven’t always had things to talk about each day, threads weren’t posted each day so new conversations often started on old threads, and in general having daily threads didn’t seem to be necessary. So the new format will be a weekly thread, this will be pinned in the !newzealand@lemmy.nz community so you can always find it, and we can have conversations there that we were previously having on the daily threads.
Roughly each week (no specific day) I’ll create a new thread, pin it and unpin the old one, and we will start fresh for that week(ish).
Thanks, this makes sense. Would also help keep longer conversations going (one of the issues with the daily threads being that you were less inclined to go back to an older thread to check for new comments).
Our parents adopted a cat a few years ago now, and they haven’t installed a cat flap yet because he’ll bring home a mouse, and they don’t want him to bring them inside the house. So for now, they’ve been opening and closing the door everytime (they’ve setup a little security cam at the door so they know when he comes back), which unfortunately involves opening the door in the middle of the night.
So I’ve been meaning to try and build a “smart” cat flap that utilizes image recognition to detest if he’s got a mouse in his mouth or not.
I had previously done a bit of research last year and gave up on it for some reason. Here’s to hoping I get a bit further down the road this time, and have some success lol.
That sounds amazing! Would that be some sort of frigate setup?
I’ve always wanted to set up something like that, where you get notified that a van is in your driveway or a person is at the door via image recognition from a security camera. But I think the hardware is a bit hard to track down, though I haven’t actually done much research towards this thing that I’ve “always wanted” 😆
There are other options. I use deepstack on my nas for object recognition so that I only get alerted by the camera if it recognises vehicles or people in our driveway
Would that be some sort of frigate setup?
Honestly I just started thinking about this again yesterday so I basically know nothing lol. Though i did come across frigate, and it did make me want to try and setup a local home security system (as I’ve been meaning to get away from using a wireless one from one of the big manufacturers of such things).
I’ve been doing a bit of a dive into something called YOLOv8, which seems to be an object detection model, where you can use existing models, or train your own. Utilizing that on maybe a RPi 5 with a camera and a Google Coral (which from my understanding, supercharges your hardware’s ability to process such things), and then using the output from the model somehow to control some type of actuation (electromagnet maybe?) to lock or unlock a catflap.
But I think the hardware is a bit hard to track down
Yeah I think from memory, one of the main reasons I had abandoned it last time I looked was that it was so hard to get the relevant hardware. Having a look again, it seems that most things are quite readily available now :)
I’ve been doing a bit of a dive into something called YOLOv8
Not knowing what it is, I’m not sure if using software called YOLO is advisable 😆
it seems that most things are quite readily available now :)
Oh man, don’t tell me that, now I’ll have to do it!
An easy “cheat” way to do it would be to use ChatGPT 4, you can submit a picture and ask it a question like “is there a cat in this scene and is it holding a mouse? Respond with either ‘true’ or ‘false’”.
Python examples here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/vision
Huh. Super interesting! I should give this an initial go, and maybe when I come up with my “own” solution, benchmark them against each other. Wonder if there’s a trade off (e.g., chatgpt is more accurate but takes longer due to all the back and forth required, whereas the local solution may not be as accurate but is faster)
It’s honestly amazing how quickly all this stuff is evolving and growing. Thank you for that tip 👍😄
Cat flaps are psychologically bad for cats.
Also keeping them in overnight means way less catfights/vet bills.
That said I love those image recognition catflaps they yield some hilarious picturs, especially the lightbox/silhouette method.
Not all cats have a problem with flaps.
I have two cats they have zero problems with the flaps. They sometimes use the flap as a short cut to sneak up on the other one when playing.
I have those electronic ones you register with their microchip so only they can use the flaps.
But, I still get gifts like mice, skinks, praying mantis, cicadas, leaves, etc. The flaps don’t stop gifts.
What was the problem with cats and cat flaps?
Doesn’t seem to be an issue for this guy. They installed a cat door on the little pool storage house thingy they have in the yard, so that he can get in and out of that as he pleases (it’s sort of like his own little house 😄), and he doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.
Also keeping them in overnight means way less catfights/vet bills.
Definitely agree with this one, though unfortunately this fella really does needs to take his (what we assume is his toilet break) little wander at 4am. The whole thing with him not wanting to use a toilet indoors is another thing all together… Maybe it has something to do with the fact he was basically a street cat for a bit.
The animal psychologist that convinced me put it like this: how would you like it if there was a door into your house you couldn’t lock and violent people could randomly come in, day or night.
Even the ones that are chip controlled, cats themselves don’t know and will engage in catdoor guarding behaviour.
If your cat is young and likes the odd fight it’s probably okay though.
This is really interesting - will done (I know, it’s not done yet)
I fear you’ll spend months occasionally retraining it though? (I have no experience in this, I just knows how brittle my code is)
So what is everyone else doing with the glut of feijoas? Getting a little tired of eating them everyday
There are 4 heavy eaters in my house (everyone except me), so our problem is they aren’t ripening fast enough 😆
We’ve got lots as well. Looking at how to use them in other dishes, I found a Herald article - “24 Feijoa Recipes”.
It’s an archive link to skip the “pay-for” - https://archive.ph/TzMXj
Your comment didn’t show up until now, I’m guessing due to the federation delays with lemmy.world. In any case is the link still working for you? Doesn’t seem to load for me
It works for me, BUT I need a VPN enabled to read it. The Herald link is a “pay to view” article which the Archive link bypasses. If you don’t have a VPN, take a Google for “Feijoa cake recipes”, there’s lots of links to different sites.
Baked some Feijoa cup-cakes today, came out great. Not overly sweet but really yummy.
If you’re tired of feijoas you’re tired of life.
In muffins
Stewed with icecream
Smoothies
I might be a little tired of life… smoothies sounds like the least effort, so just have to think what other ingredients will go well with it now
My wife does the stewing thing. The trick is that you stew so many you haven’t eaten them by the time the next fejoa season comes around, then you stew some more. Repeat each year.
Fuck my mate who went out for a fish with us whilst sick.
If you’re sick just stay home. I’m tired of this convoluted game of germ tag we keep playing.
I just want to say that windows troubleshooting is unbelievably frustrating and needlessly complicated.
They constantly point you to tools that run but don’t fix the issue then redirect you to forums that tell you to run the tool.
Then you search the problem and find posts telling you to install a random 3rd party tool to fix the problem. No I’m not installing a random non open source tool to run with admin privileges that would be unbelievably stupid.
Also I’m bombarded with system tray notifications because programs on windows think its ok to serve the user an ad via system tray. I expected better from malware bytes but I expected exactly this from Adobe and one drive.
Another thing is that the windows forum advice is really bad like really bad. It doesn’t teach the user anything about problem and instead gives them a solution that will work but might break other things.
I’m not a noob to windows either I’ve used it for 20 years at least. I think after moving to Linux I’ve realized how simple things can be.
And the settings ever since windows 10, like the main interface is the slick new style but it doesn’t provide all settings info, so it ends up back into the old layout/control panel that traces back to windows 95 (but is still better). It’s all just a mess as far as ui goes.
I switched to Linux again for my home laptop last year and pretty much use it full time. The only major sticking point for me is ms office - libreoffice feels like office 2003 and you can never be confident a libreoffice docx is going to look the same when someone opens what you’ve sent them in ms office.
Plus when I troubleshoot in Linux I can use the terminal and feel like a real hackerman™ (even if I am mostly just copying stuff off Google).
The only major sticking point for me is ms office - libreoffice feels like office 2003 and you can never be confident a libreoffice docx is going to look the same when someone opens what you’ve sent them in ms office.
If you haven’t tried it already, check out OnlyOffice - looks very similar to MS Office and has great compatibility with it too. I once did a side-by-side comparison with the same .docx running in Word (M365) and OO, and they looked virtually identical (I posted the screenshots sometime ago on Lemmy, if I can dig up the post I’ll link it here).
Ah yes I have heard of onlyoffice, it looks great. I had assumed you need a backend given how much it pitches it as an online collaboration tool thing so hadn’t gotten around to it. If you can run it locally like a ms office type thing I might check it out soon.
