I am. We always vaccinate our cats as well, and since that incident we give them regular flea and tick preventatives (well, two of them for the flea and tick - the third one is way too skittish to let us do that). In our case, there’s always a risk the dog brings something in, too, so it’s good to do.
Yeah, I can’t do it. We have fox around, and plenty of community cats (one evening, I walked down the ravine looking for our dog after he ran off, and I shined my flashlight upward to see about 6 pairs of eyes staring at me). We had a cat get some sort of blood borne disease, we think she got it from a tick that was in the house when we moved in (it’s our only theory, we have no idea what actually happened), and she spent a few days in the animal hospital, and barely survived. (It also cost several thousand dollars.) Unfortunately she passed away from multiple medical issues a few years later. :(
(We adopted another cat after she passed - we’ve never had more than 3 at once.)
I cannot imagine having an indoor/outdoor cat. I’d worry so much about them while they were away. And if they just disappeared and didn’t return…I don’t know how I could stand it.
We have 3 indoor-only cats. Obviously I’m pretty attached to them.
I haven’t used Homekit, so I can’t speak to that, but I have had an ecobee for several years now, and it’s integrated into HA.
It’s not clear to me if your setup is “1 heating system for one room, and a second system for a different room”, or if it’s two heating systems for the same area.
In the first case, I don’t think it’ll work - ecobee is only designed to control one heating system. The remote thermometers just tell it what’s going on where they are, so it knows if that room needs more heating or cooling. If they do, then it fires up the HVAC to make that happen. You can tell ecobee which thermometer(s) to use to trigger the HVAC - at night, you probably care about the bedroom more than anything else, while in the day you probably care about the living room more. But it can’t simultaneously control two separate systems.
If it’s the second case, ecobee does, I think, have provisions for two stages of heat, so it’s possible you could set it up to use the second HVAC as stage 2. But I’m not certain about this at all. You might need an additional relay, I’m not sure.
But I think there might be an easier solution that doesn’t require a full blown second thermostat using HA, and this is what I do for our pellet stove (we have a main household HVAC, and a pellet stove for extra heat). Get something like a Shelly 1 and use that to trigger the second heat system. Then put in a temperature sensor - an ecobee remote sensor, bluetooth, wifi, Zigbee, etc., whatever works best for you - and with those two things, you can create a “thermostat” entity in HA, then use a thermostat card to control it. Assuming HA is running and it’s getting info from the thermometer, it works well. Of course you’d mostly access it on a phone or computer, not something mounted on the wall (unless you put a tablet on the wall to view and control HA, but that’s a whole different project).
This isn’t necessary for it to work, but I have a script set up that has logic such as: []If the outside temperature is above 50 degrees, set the thermostat to 50 so the pellet stove shuts down and doesn’t restart. (Don’t need it.) []If the outside temperature is below 45 degrees, set the thermostat according to the rules below. []At night set it to 70 degrees, during the day, 72.
[]If the outside temperature is below 32 degrees, set the thermostat to 78 degrees so the pellet stove stays running.
Are you talking about people breaking in and stealing them? While I agree that was a stupid problem, it’s quite a bit different than a remote hacker taking over your brakes while you drive.
To FCA’s credit in that case, they listened to the researchers and implemented several fixes very quickly to address the problem. I wouldn’t put it past many manufacturers to do the hands-over-the-ears “la la la” thing when faced with the same situation.
My “dream” car is a V6 Accord from the last year they made them, which I think is 2016. I’d buy one of those right now and just keep repairing it, and hope no one t-bones me. Unfortunately I think my wife is still in the mindset of “we should buy a new car and keep it forever”, which used to be my mindset, too. But she’s not seeing the news on this stuff like I am, either. I suspect if I explained “heated seat subscription” to her (a feature she will not buy a car without) she would object strenuously.
But I don’t like where new cars are going, at all. I don’t like subscriptions, I don’t like the backseat driver nanny features that blare out false alarms, and on the whole I’d rather not have adaptive cruise control (there are times when adaptive cruise is nice, but overall I prefer the old-style cruise control).
We have a 2020 Mazda that I absolutely hate driving; if that is the future of cars, I’m not interested.
I’m hoping my car and our pickup last forever. The other day we took the Mazda for an errand in poor weather because, as I said, “It’s the most expendable car.”
Organize? Hahaha ohmygod best laugh I’ve had in a few days.
Some devices have the generic names from the manufacturer because I had issues and had to re-join them a few times, so I got tired of typing the “correct” names. Also I have a light switch labeled “front porch” which is really inaccurate because I’m not turning the porch on and off, it’s the lights! And those lights are now zigbee bulbs of their own, but they at least got more sensible names (“porch light doorbell side” and “porch light right side”).
But I may switch to zigbee2mqtt, so I’ll have a chance to redo all of it anyway.
In general I don’t have so many devices that knowing what is what isn’t a major issue. I name them better in Lovelace, of course.
Yeah it seems to work very well on my server. I’ve always just wondered why I don’t see more people recommending it when they’re switching from Ubuntu/Kubuntu. From what I’ve seen on the server (which I mostly access remotely), it seems decent.
I run Kubuntu on my desktop and laptop machines but I’m seriously considering switching to Debian (which I run on my server). Any reason I wouldn’t want to do that on my desktop or laptop?
(Previously I ran Slackware on everything, so both of them feel like gliding softly on a cloud to me.)