late_groomer

Lost my grandfather to it in his late 80's. He did indeed become more responsive and engaged the day (maybe two) before he died, but he was non-verbal at that point. I recalled my mother telling me he was having a surprisingly good day on Sunday and seemed to recognize people, then getting the call from her the following evening that he had passed.

Yep, I could have made it a better situation with some extra addition$ (I always put my Pi on a quality AC adapter from the start, those constant command line voltage nag warnings had their intended effect), but the cost of the SSD + another Pi is actually more than a used SFF device with a substantially more powerful Intel processor that comes with a M.2 SSD. It's amazing what you can get for < $50 these days. Great time to be alive for us tinkerers!

Home Assistant has been nothing short of amazing. I started out just wanting to control my Christmas lights back in early December; tried going the HomeKit with HomeBridge route, only to realize I needed an iHub or some other (i) device on my network to have it work remotely. It was a bad experience even while on my network, luckily stumbled upon Home Assistant looking for better options a week or so into the journey. Now I'm controlling everything, even watching my security cameras, through HA.

The one caveat in my experience has been trying to run Pi-Hole on the same server as HA Supervised or using Adguard Home. Trying to run HA and PiH, even though they were both in docker containers, caused the Pi 3B+ to freeze every few hours. HA makes it clear running anything else is a bad idea, and that proved correct. I deleted PiH and tried the Adguard Home addon for my DNS for awhile, it was really slick and had a lot of features, but I found myself missing the PiH for several reasons. For one, it really sucked to be tinkering with HA while other people on the network were on the web; every time I needed to restart HA (which was often setting up the cameras), I'd get constant groaning and moaning about the internet being out. I also found it harder to control white/black lists; adding individual sites here and there was not as simple as it is in PiH. It also lacked the simple "disable for X minutes/seconds" feature I used so much.

I ended up installing just PiH on the Pi 3B+ and grabbing a cheap Chromebox off ebay to run HA. All the things I was doing on HA really pushed the Pi at times and I read one too many stories about SD cards dying from heavy use. Now everything is zippy and I feel safer with HA installed on the internal M.2 SSD.

Really glad to see this write-up. I love my current PiHole setup, but replicating it for family/friends (especially with my blocking so many sites they might want) hasn't seemed doable. I would be having to help them constantly with blocked sites, etc.,.

My setup could be even better if either Fios or Orbi provided a half-decent router, but just using PiHole as my DNS server has been awesome. When my Pi (SD card) crashed and I had to revert to my old router setup, it was shocking how slow everything was. I'd become so used to pages loading in a blink, waiting a second or two while ads loaded seemed to take forever.

If you have any unused SFF computer gathering dust, give PiHole a try (runs on any of the major linux distros). Initial setup takes under an hour. You can customize the backend out of it with blocksite lists; I'm blocking so much my wife and kids can't even install new iPhone apps. Amazon Devices, Rokus, Google, nothing gets to call home unless I allow it. I have it forcing all Google/Bing searches to use their clean filter; worrying my kids might google "porn" is a thing of the past. There are easy to find tutorials out there, just be sure to filter Google images, as well.

One of my browser tabs is always open to Squoosh, it's an awesome tool. If only I could hook Squoosh in during Hugo site builds...(looks like that might be possible with their CLI, hopefully some whip-smart kid with lots of free-time figures it out for me).

"Down went Shia's white flag of defiance, up went a red Trump hat..."

"The main reason for non-adherence to the FMD was dislike of distinct components of the diet, perhaps induced by chemotherapy [...] The FMD is a 4-day plant-based low amino-acid substitution diet, consisting of soups, broths, liquids and tea"

Occam's razor, patients couldn't stick with the diet.

"Importantly, DNA damage in T-lymphocytes was less in patients who received the FMD in combination with chemotherapy compared to those receiving chemotherapy while on a regular diet"

Does this not qualify as a protective effect?

My inspiration when it came to me learning/building/programming computers and most everything else I undertook in my 20's. It made me strive to be a know-er of things, not just a user.

The PBX usually chunks the send, Watson returns a % for each chunk it processes and then the overall average upon completion.

I use it to transcribe voice messages that come in through our PBX. The PBX sends the voicemail mp3 to Watson, it sends back the transcription along with a guess (%) on how accurate it is (then the PBX emails the transcript attempt and voicemail attachment to whoever). It's almost always good enough to know what the message is about, sometimes perfect, often hilarious.

We need a like button (not really, but your comment was +1 funny)

You can boost it by eating chocolate or other high-energy foods, but all digestion takes some energy and you aren't replenishing the brain benefits of sleep/rest (and you'll probably start packing on weight if you do it daily...).

I have found getting out of the office for some exercise after a good morning session can get you a good hour or two of similar focus/concentration when you return (again, you must get right on task). It's not the same quality, a squirrel running down the wire out my window can easily take me off task, but I'm in the bonus round for the day, anyway.

I can't attest to your no noise tip, I'm one of those people that likes/needs background noise to focus, but IM, phone, and email are task-killers for me, as well. I also agree with limiting progress; I set a daily task goal in my head for each task as I start it. I often work through that daily goal, but it has really helped me tackle large projects without getting burned-out.