jamiehs
Chamberlain Group’s myQ Connected Garage service
Ahh yes, myQ; the service that is randomly up and down when you need it the most.
I had a Chamberlain myQ garage door opener and I hated it. I hated everything about it. It was slow, unreliable, the button doesn’t use a simple open/close contact for triggering the door (so you can’t easily DIY a solution with a relay board); and it just didn’t work half the time because “the cloud!”
$129 for 3 years? For what? For < 10 API requests per day? That’s insane.
Don’t most modern cars (the type that have CarPlay in them) also have programmable garage door buttons on the rear-view mirror?
For most of us, there is no difference though; you get what you get.
I live in a nice neighborhood but I won’t ever get fiber… we have underground utilities and this area is served by coaxial cable. There’s no way in hell they are digging up miles of streets to lay fiber; you get what you get.
My ISP latency is like 16-20ms but when sim racing it just depends on where the race server is (and where my competitors are). As someone on the US west coast, if I’m matched with folks in EU and some others in AUS/NZ, the server will likely be in EU and my ping will be > 200. My Aussie competitors will be dealing with 300-400.
It’s not impossible to share a track at those latencies, but for close racing or a competitive shooter… errrr that just doesn’t work.
The fact that I’m always at around 200ms for EU servers might be improved if we could run a single strand of fiber from my house to the EU sever (37ms!) but there would still be switching delays, etc. so yeah the speed of light is the limit, but to your point, there’s a lot of other stuff that adds overhead.
So here’s the thing. No company selling you a wheelbase (especially a DD wheelbase) will promise you it won’t hurt you. There are disclaimers all over the legal info for these products saying to keep them away from children, etc.
These things are massive, power hungry, industrial strength motors. There are dozens of ways they can hurt you. iRacing and other sims have options to reduce the forces in crashes and when parked. The software that came with my wheelbase also has options like these.
But, there are driver errors, USB glitches, etc.
If you’re looking for someone on the internet to promise you it’s safe and that it won’t hurt you when using it with iRacing, I don’t think you’re going to find that assurance.
Everyone I’ve ever seen using a Simucube base has been using iRacing. I’m pretty sure it’ll work well.
My wheelbase (Accuforce V2) is also not on that page and it works fine.
iRacing’s wheel and pedal compatibility is pretty complete. It’s games like Dirt Rally or Forza Horizon where you see the occasional issue, not iRacing.
I repurposed an old gaming PC as a Proxmox server, stuck HA on a VM and have never looked back. Backups are easier, it’s blazing fast, I can have 90 days of history if I feel to, upgrades/reboots take seconds instead of minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my Pis and use them for my 3D printers and such, but Home Assistant is a lot for a Pi to manage well at times.
Having said that… I too am curious about the performance bump here especially considering the SD card write speed increase and the PCI-E (SSD) capability. I’m sure it’ll still kill SD cards every 6 months with HA running on it though.
Unless I’m mistaken, don’t HomeKit compatible devices need to be local-first too? I remember reading that if I switch my Ecobee thermostat to HomeKit (via HomeAssistant’s bridge), it will use local control instead. It’s on my todo list but I just haven’t done it yet.
I think this thread about Ecobee and HomeKit was where I started…
Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.
It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.
If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.
I’ve used it on and off over the years; ever since 2004/2005 or so.
Firebug was amazing for web development back in the days when it was just IE, Firefox & Safari.
I recently built a couple of sites (for a sim racing community) and one of my users mentioned a Firefox bug. I fixed the issue but then realized I need to be more aware of Gecko specific rendering issues. I decided to use Firefox for a week on my iPhone (yes I know, still technically Safari) and my desktop, and I forgot how much I like it.
I also don’t love the choices Chrome has been making recently.
Firefox’s market share is so low lately when compared to Safari and Chrome that it honestly feels like the battle is already lost.