Christopher Masto

For me, this is a feature. The last thing I want is celebrities and news outlets clogging up my feed of nice people’s sandwiches and cat pictures.

I worked at Google for over a decade. The issue isn’t that the engineers are unaware or unable. Time and time and time again there would be some new product or feature released for internal testing, it would be a complete disaster, bugs would be filed with tens of thousands of votes begging not to release it, and Memegen would go nuts. And all the feedback would be ignored and it would ship anyway.

Upper management just doesn’t care. Reputational damage isn’t something they understand. The company is run by professional management consultants whose main expertise is gaslighting. And the layers and layers of people in the middle who don’t actually contribute any value have to constantly generate something to go into the constant cycle of performance reviews and promotion attempts, so they mess with everything, re-org, cancel projects, move teams around, duplicate work, compete with each other, and generally make life hell for everyone under them. It’s surprising anything gets done at all, but what does moves at a snail’s pace compared to the outside world. Not for lack of effort, the whole system is designed so you have to work 100 times harder than necessary and it feels like an accomplishment when you’ve spent a year adding a single checkbox to a UI.

I may have gone on a slight tangent there.

I’ve made this cake a couple of times. It’s quite good.

https://youtu.be/Yi1W5qgtNYU?si=l6cvn5YZTbAsZZzb

What do you do for entertainment?

Mostly silence, but when I was in high school (some decades ago now) I had a CD of Mozart music I would put on while doing homework. I still associate Symphony 40 in G minor with grinding through tasks.

Stopped eating so damn much.

I read the The Hacker’s Diet by John Walker (who recently died, sadly) and followed his advice.

At the risk of facts getting in the way:

1. You can install ad blockers
2. Apps are not able to do that

Browser bookmarks. My trick is I make a new folder every month, for example “2024-01 Bookmarks”, and put it in the bookmarks bar. Whenever I realize I’m leaving a tab open because I want to look at it later, I put it into the current folder. That way I know it’s not lost and I give myself permission to close it.

When a new month comes around, I stick the previous folder in an “Archive” section and make a new one. It costs nothing to keep them forever, but avoids the current list getting out of control.

The 6502 was from MOS.

Instacart and Uber Eats, mostly.

Waiting out this winter’s covid surge living in the hot zone.

I haven’t left the house in months.

Sorry, I forgot about this thread, but I was reminded today when I saw the new bug. The issue that originally affected me was https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/103208. It broke Xbee users, so not everyone. My Zigbee integrations didn’t work after the update so I had to roll back to a backup for my first time with HA. A patch was developed, but it didn’t get integrated into any of the 2023.11.x releases, which I found kind of frustrating but I figured I’d wait it out and eventually there would be a version that works again.

Fortunately I held off on 2023.12, because according to https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/105344 a bunch of people are having problems with this release too.

The last update broke zigbee for a month, so forgive me if I don’t jump on this bandwagon.

I was around pre-Internet, and it wasn’t any better. In fact, this “virtual world” has been a huge positive for me and has given me many opportunities to expand my social group and have a more fulfilling life. I don’t see the value in fetishizing disconnection.

My subscriptions are public: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisMasto/channels?view=56&shelf_id=0

Kind of a mix of well known science and tech stuff, and some out there things.

I flipped through and grabbed a few from different genres:

• https://www.youtube.com/@KathyLovesPhysics
• https://www.youtube.com/@CrimePaysButBotanyDoesnt
• https://www.youtube.com/@HenryPhillips

• Roderick on the Line
• Risky or Not?
• Penn’s Sunday School
• This Podcast Will Kill You
• Reconcilable Differences
• Accidental Tech Podcast

The way I use them is to reflash the firmware with ESPHome, at which point they have nothing to do with Sonoff. I got really into these things when they came out and made a video about the process: https://youtu.be/Kdf6W_Ied4o?si=4nh7kP28IglwVHBx. There are a bunch of different ways to use them including retaining the original software, but I kind of stopped paying attention when I got mine working.

It’s worth noting that they have two different products. The “NSPanel Pro” is completely different, I think it runs Android. I haven’t played with that at all.

I have one Kindle Fire using the Fully Kiosk Browser and a wall mount with a hidden power cord (https://a.co/d/05GVxVP). It uses the camera to turn on when you walk up to it. It’s ok, but I installed it 3 years ago and never really finished making a dashboard for it. In practice, we control the vast majority of stuff by voice with the Google/Nest Home integration, or switches. The big control panel thing doesn’t hold enough interest to even bother putting controls on it, and I mainly leave it showing air quality graphs.

Of more practical use are smaller panels for area-specific uses. I mainly standardized on NSPanel, because I was experimenting with them and ended up with a bunch. Example: https://youtu.be/DBzg7v1Q5Zo. I have a short attention span and tend to stop when it’s 90% good enough. I also have in other places a DIY HA SwitchPlate, and HASPone on a Lanbon L8.

I suppose that’s true. Rereading my comment, it’s a bit over the top. If I pretend now I don’t know anything and start at http://home-assistant.io, it’s not that hard to scroll down, see the thing, and buy it. I don’t know exactly how I got so off-track when I tried. Probably I knew “a little too much”, as in the words “home assistant blue” in the back of my head, Googled for that and got distracted by “I need to understand why there are two boxes and one isn’t for sale anymore, so exactly what is the difference is between them?”.

Coming back to that naive journey, though, I could see how someone could end up buying Green with no wireless dongle or Yellow with no CM4 (especially since you can’t get one).

I still think that for the limited size of this ecosystem, choosing a box shouldn’t be confusing. I can now understand where it came from, though, once I realized that HA Yellow was designed around a Raspberry Pi board that became unobtainable, so they had to go with a different architecture.

That, but I actually get a lot out of my hobbies and personal unfinished projects (they’re always a learning experience).

It’s more about the cost of struggling with things and thinking I’m lazy or a failure, and the real-world consequences of not having gotten any help until my late 40s.