Ah right, that makes sense!

I could have sworn I read this announcement a couple of months ago.

Your instance would have private/public keys for communicating with other instances. By changing software, all that is gone, and you might find other instances rejecting your federation activities, this is doubly true if you used the same username, because they would already have a record of that user with a different public key.

I’d suggest using a subdomain or a new domain, re-using a domain for a different Fediverse server is likely to have issues. A subdomain would be treated as a different domain so would be fine.

This is also something to know for a different scenario: taking your lemmy instance and changing the domain but keeping the content is likely to break federation as well.

Yeah, I didn’t think about this before but I guess you need to be careful if you have water from a bore hole. I didn’t realise that safe distance was only 30m! But I’m also under the impression that septic systems are quite carefully designed, not just a big hole soaking blackwater into the ground.

Everyone I know on septic systems gets their water from rainwater (something we get a lot of here) so contamination isn’t a problem.

Interesting! They make a good point that you normally have most of the infrastructure needed because you’re already treating wastewater. They mention a couple of additional things thatmight happen before reintroducing into the drinking water system but all in all it does sound pretty feasible!

Now I know what to search for, I found this. It seems it’s not that common yet but there is growing interest in it. Interestingly Oregon isn’t mentioned.

I guess the difference is that it’s presumably quite diluted by the river, rather than directly feeding waste water back to the drinking water pipe.

I don’t even send one to my significant other/partner/spouse.

Well I was thinking there’s a big difference between what is safe to release into the environment (solids removed, UV treated to kill germs, maybe some other stuff) vs safe drinking water. But I guess waste water is mostly just water - not mostly urine. So maybe it’s not as big of a gap as I assumed. After all, they pump water in from rivers and lakes for filtering and treatment before putting it in the pipes, maybe it isn’t that big of a difference after all?

We are, but even simply desalinating water is very expensive last I heard. To turn sewage into drinking water sounds like it would be even more expensive. I know they drink recycled pee on the ISS but that’s cheaper than launching water up all the time.

Woah, they take wastewater and turn it into drinking water? Is that common? I would have thought it would be cost prohibitive.

I think it’s a pretty cool toy to play with. It mostly gets used for setting timers and playing music, but you can add Home Assistant automations that trigger when you say certain things. Lot’s to play with if that’s your idea of fun!

Home Assistant sells units with duel microphones that aren’t too expensive and work relatively well. But the local voice recognition wasn’t great last I tried.

Similar to the other user’s response, I use the calendar integration, then add the things on the calendar (say, putting the recycling out to be collected). Then I have an automation that will read out a reminder at the time it is scheduled for in the calendar.

So the evening before recycling pickup every fortnight, it pipes up and says “Reminder: Recycling” or whatever.

Works pretty well for these regular reoccurring things. I haven’t tried using it for one off reminders, and you can’t say “ok nabu, remind me to wish Steve a happy birthday on the 27th of February” or anything like that. Still, I’m pretty happy.

I seem to remember needing a bit of playing to get the notification working, I’m happy to look up and post what I have in my automation if needed.

In Home Assistant, in the settings, if you go to Voice Assistants then click the … on your assistant and click Debug, you can see what it thought you said (and what it did).

Setting a timer on an up to date Home Assistant will repeat back what it set. E.g. If I say “Set a timer for 2 minutes” it will say “Timer set for 2 minutes”. It says “Done” when running some Home Assistant task/automation, so it’s probably not understanding you correctly (hence what the debug option is good for). I use the cloud voice recognition as I couldn’t get the local version to understand my accent when I tried it (a year ago). It’s through Azure but is proxied by Home Assistant so they don’t know it’s you.

The wake word responds to me, but not my girlfriend’s voice.

My wife swears it’s sexist, she has a bit of trouble too. In the integration options you can set the sensitivity to make it more sensitive, but it does increase false activations. I have it on the most sensitive and she can activate it first time most of the time.

I agree that it’s not production ready and they know that too, hence the name. But in relation to your points, I plugged in some speaker as it’s not really that great of a speaker at all.

For the wake word, at some point they did an update to add a sensitivity setting so you can make it more sensitive. You could also ty donating your voice to the training: https://ohf-voice.github.io/wake-word-collective/

But all in all you’re spot on with the challenges. I’d add a couple more.

With OpenAI I find it can outperform other voice assistants in certain areas. Without it, you come up across weird issues, like my wife always says “set timer 2 minutes” and it runs off to OpenAI to work out what that means. If you says “set a timer for 2 minutes” it understands immediately.

What I wish for is the ability to rewrite requests. Local voice recognition can’t understand my accent so I use the proxied Azure speech to text via Home Assistant Clound, and it regularly thinks I’m saying “Cortana” (I’m NEVER saying Cortana!)

Oh and I wish it could do streaming voice recognition instead of waiting for you to finish talking then waiting for a pause before trying anything. My in-laws have a google home and if you say something like “set a timer for 2 minutes” it immediately responds because it was converting to text as it went, and knew that nothing more was coming after a command like that. HAVP has perhaps a 1 second delay between finishing speaking and replying, assuming it doesn’t need another 5 seconds to go to open AI. And you have to be quiet in that 1 second otherwise it thinks you’re still talking (a problem in a busy room).

You may be misunderstanding how thing work.

Average people create their own communities. Those people control those communities. You can make a community for cars, and if someone poats about busses you can remove the post. The person who makes a community is the one that controls it.

It has nothing to do with the platform, you are just posting in a community run by people who don’t want that kind of post there. So pick a different community? And read the side bar before you post.

Piefed operates the same way.

If you’re open to it, I’ve seen maintainers go to “maintenance mode”.

Write it high in the readme so people see it, and write what it means: basically that you’re not accepting PRs, you’re not developing new features, but you will do bug fixes and basic maintenance (dependency updates, etc).

In my experience it’s not quite the same. Using webdav through the distro account seems that it’s fully online. And folder access or file access contacts the server.

The virtual file experience is more of a hybrid. All the folders actually exist on disk, as well as shells for every file. If you try to open a virtual file, in the background Windows will seamlessly download it for you. At that point the file is actually on your disk. This way regularly accessed files on on your hard drive and seldom accessed ones are not, saving local hard drive space while providing an experience almost like if all the files were actually on your drive.

On Windows, Nextcloud seems to tap into some Windows function to provide files on demand. Is there any Linux cloud file service that can do it?

Interesting! Do you (or anyone) know of any similar one that’s FOSS and available outside of Google Play?