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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 28th, 2023

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  • The last place I lived was heated with an enormous pellet stove which would run itself out of pellets entirely before letting out an ear-splitting series of beeps and forcibly shutting off for about an hour. To avoid this, I taped an ultrasonic distance sensor to the lid of the hopper and had an ESP32 send me alerts and display the current pellet level on a little OLED.

    Not a terribly dumb idea, except for the fact that ultrasonic distance sensors seem to be incredibly bad at measuring a constantly shifting mass of porous pellets. I don’t even know how many hours I spent working on an algorithm to get accurate readings, and by the time I moved out it still wasn’t quite right. I’ll also note that this pellet stove was in the living room, about 5 feet away from where I spent most of my time, and I could’ve just, ya know, got up and checked the hopper occasionally.


  • I don’t host music videos, but if I did I’d just put them on my Plex/Jellyfin server. Both services deliver video of any codec to any device reliably, which can’t be said for all self-hosted apps. I also quite like both Navidrome and Plexamp and don’t see a good reason to switch. If I had a huge music video library that needed organization by artist and genre, then maybe I’d try Ampache. It looks a bit basic, but does offer support for music videos alongside your main music library.