Yeah exactly this. A lot of the humour feels very dated today, even occasionally crossing the line into offensive, but at the time it was essential viewing. There’s a reason they were the most highly paid actors in TV comedy for a while (or TV in general?), later to be pipped by the cast of Frasier IIRC.

Speaking of Frasier, unlike its star, that has aged pretty well IMO, and I would still recommend it.

O rly? I will look into this, thanks!

Maybe somebody’s asked this already but how come, in this day and age, there isn’t a way to snapshot your entire phone into some sort of encrypted blob for storage in a location of your choice? You could wipe your phone and setup a throwaway profile with some basic apps before traveling, and then restore the snapshot once safely through customs.

Border issues aside, it would be very handy to be able to snapshot a phone like that anyway…

I feel bad for laughing so hard at this. Bravo.

Just to confirm: I tried this, it works.

I tried Jellyfin once about a year ago and it was… OK I guess? Certainly nowhere near as polished as the rabid fan base would have me believe, and there was something in my library that it flat out refused to play.

If I didn’t already have a lifetime Plex Pass, and it was just me hosting my own media for a user count of one, then sure, I’d use it. But none of those things are true. I need something that “just works” and Plex fits that bill.

Like most people here, I bought a lifetime pass when it was $75 and it’s paid for itself over and over again in the time since. I honestly think I’ve had more than $750 worth of value from my purchase. Sure they’ve made some odd decisions recently, but until they start actively taking away functionality or rescind existing lifetime subs then I will continue to use it.

Meanwhile, not to belittle you personally, but the fact that every thread that mentions Plex in any way, good or bad, is guaranteed to be dominated by people circle-jerking over their beloved Jellyfin has put me completely off the project, to the point that I’ve had to add the word to my blocklist. Obviously that’s not working too well or I wouldn’t have seen this post!

That first line is what CGPT helped me with. I wanted something that I don’t need to modify when I add or remove lights, so this just gets everything. Ideally I’d just get the lights that don’t have the power restore feature but most of my lights go via Hue and that doesn’t expose the feature to HA at all.

The input_boolean is a thing I already had setup. The UPS fires a webhook event when it goes in and out of battery mode and there’s a separate automation that switches the helper based on those.

Got a little help from CGPT so it might not be perfect, but this seems to work from my limited testing:

triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - input_boolean.ups_power
conditions: []
actions:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: state
            entity_id: input_boolean.ups_power
            state:
              - "on"
        sequence:
          - action: scene.create
            data:
              scene_id: light_states_backup
              snapshot_entities: |
                {{ states.light | map(attribute='entity_id') | list }}
      - conditions:
          - condition: state
            entity_id: input_boolean.ups_power
            state:
              - "off"
        sequence:
          - action: scene.turn_on
            target:
              entity_id: scene.light_states_backup
            data: {}
          - delay:
              hours: 0
              minutes: 0
              seconds: 10
              milliseconds: 0
          - action: scene.delete
            data:
              entity_id: scene.light_states_backup
mode: single

I’ve only tested it by toggling the UPS boolean manually and not actually cutting the power, so I’m probably going to need to add a delay, or a retry loop or something to make sure the scene applies consistently but so far so good! Thanks for the inspiration.

Thank you. I’ve also never used scenes beyond what comes built-in with Hue! This is all good stuff.

Thank you, that’s food for thought at least.

Can I ask about your light script? I have a bunch of smart bulbs that either don’t support or don’t expose the ‘power-on behaviour’ option, so in a power cut they come on full bright when power is restored, often in the middle of the night.

My HA is on a UPS so I’ve been trying to have it store the states of lights when the UPS switches to battery power (before they go to unavailable) and then restore those states when power comes back, but it’s apparently way beyond my skill set. Curious as to how your “input list of lights” works and whether it could help me…

Curious as to what you’re using scripts for? I have 88 automations and have so far found no need for a single script and I feel like I’m missing a trick somewhere.

Yes, I do have some automations that share functionality but it’s one or two actions and it seems redundant to call a separate script.

Laziest eh? Probably the one that deletes completed items from my shopping list when I leave the supermarket, because I got sick of doing it manually.

Most ridiculous would be the NFC tag I have on the lid of my cold brew coffee jug. I make a batch so rarely that I can never remember how much coffee to add, so scanning the tag makes my Google Home say; “You want 80g of coffee per litre, or 6 scoops.”

Thanks, yeah, as much as it feels like an overly complicated way of doing things, I think I’m erring towards just biting the bullet and making contacts. Appreciate your detailed reply!

Tell that to Michel Lotito who, allegedly, ate an entire Cessna 150.

Synology walked back their requirement of using their own branded drives.

First I’ve heard of this but you’re right.

It’s really interesting how far I had to scroll down the search results to find it, as the top page or so of hits are from April when they added the restriction in the first place.

Vivaldi is Chromium based, that’s like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

There are plenty of Firefox forks that will be actively removing the AI crap. Waterfox, Pale Moon, Librewolf, Zen, Floorp to name a few. And these will all continue to support Manifest v2 and therefore adblockers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on_Firefox

Does this mean that people will finally stop posting that stupid “sir, this is a Wendy’s” line?

I have a mix of normal Hue bulbs and some Innr brand GU10 (spotlight) bulbs. The difference in quality of light from both brands is quite noticeable, with Hue being far and away better in terms of colour blending and accuracy. There’s a reason the Hue bulbs are 2-3x the price of the competition

That said, I’ve had multiple Hue bulbs either outright fail or one LED die so that it still works but the colour is completely wrong. It’s frustrating for bulbs that are supposed to last decades but maybe the latest generation are more robust.

They’re also regularly on sale for Black Friday and the like, so I’d advise planning your purchases around those events.

I wouldn’t worry about leaving them on. Standby power draw is very low and I think even at maximum output they use about 7W each. It’s just not a big deal.

It’s more like £150/year, but it’s charged every 3 years. Still very expensive compared to .com for sure!

This looks really good and I’m enthused with how responsive you’re being, will definitely give it a try.

It is a bit of a shame you didn’t call it Jott as jo.tt is available as a domain, but then the tt TLD is pretty expensive so maybe not!