Oh it definetely is a bit hacky.

At one point I tried using home assistant to automatically turn my tv and stereo on or off depending on the state of the chromecast but that didn’t really work consistently unfortunately.

My solution is far from ideal but it works for me.

I have a Chromecast connected to my TV which outputs to my stereo system. Power to TV and stereo are controlled via smart plugs that I can quickly toggle when I want to stream music.

The good thing: It works.

The bad things:

• You have to connect navidrome to symfonium using the IP address and not a hostname when using a basic chromecast since that one has a hardcoded dns server. The Chromecast with google TV allows setting a dns server yourself but you loose software volume control through your phone.
• No volume control except directly on the stereo system. This wasn’t an issue with the basic chromecast but it is now with the better one…
• For some reason some songs crash the casting to the chromecast. Again this wasn’t an issue on the cheap Chromecast for some stupid reason

yt-dlp supports downloading playlists. By using the --archive option it can save all downloaded video ID’s into a text file and will only download videos which are not in that file.

I wrote a docker container with a friend that uses that mechanism to auto download new videos every time it is triggered using cron. The configuration is a bit rough though and there is no gui so if this supports that part as well I might switch.

I hse keepassxc and store my password database in onedrive. My phone has an app keepass2android which can read the database in onedrive.

My father always called my sisters car “Beulchen”, which is the german diminutive word for dent. It was a very basic Ford Fiesta. No wireless car key, no electrically controlled side mirrors but at least it had AC.

Not sure if that’s the kind of device you are asking about but kobo e-readers run Linux. It’s allowed me to sideload my books over SFTP instead of always having to plug in a USB cable

I’m not sure about how this works in kodi but in jellyfin the client might request a different resolution which causes the server to try and reencode the provided file on the fly. In my case my server isn’t fast enough for this which leads to constant buffering

I believe my thinkpad E590 which I bought in 2019 already had captive screws. Still a 10 year difference at least

There’s little physical movement or location variety

That’s the main reason I switched from computer science to electrical engineering with a focus on embedded software. Programming microcontrollers to achieve something tangible is a lot more satisfying for me than writing some application that only runs on my pc to shuffle some bits around

My mother got an HP 255 G8 laptop on which the webcam just will not work no matter what I do.

It’s enabled in the bios and the correct driver is installed but the built-in webcam is not detected. Also the keyboard got damaged with the space button only responsing to center presses after roughly a year of usage.

I know it’s a relatively cheap machine but the driver issue pissed me off

That sounds awesome. I always wished to be able to visit other regions in my pokemon games. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed soulsilver so much

I don’t know if you were aware of this but K-9 Mail has joined up with the thunderbird developers and will at some point transition to thunderbird for mobile devices

I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore

Personally I try to avoid making anything in my home actually dependant on my server. I have a single lamp that can only be controlled from my phone and that’s only because it’s so rarely used that I didn’t want to put in the effort. Everything else is local first and only gets extended functionality from my server running.

I’ve had a couple issues with my zigbee stuff over the years on the server side and I would be really pissed if I wouldn’t be able to turn my lights on because I haven’t gotten around to fixing my server yet.

The point of my comment was that the AldiTalk Kombi Paket S for 8,99€ offers double the amount of data compared to the Daten Paket M mentioned by the previous commenter with the same speeds for a Euro less

The Kombi packages are actually cheaper. The AldiTalk Kombi-Paket S gives you 10GiB with 5G for 8,99€.

Is there actually any car manufacturer that has decent hardware and software? I have never driven a really “modern” car but from all that I’ve seen so far the interfaces are typically horrible to interact with and laggy to the point where I prefer my car as dumb as possible

I believe that is an Android 14 feature, not something exclusive to Pixel phones

Based on all the stories I’ve heard so far about senior engineers, if you get promoted high enough you don’t even have time to write code anymore

I have a degree in computer science. Today I was defeated by my mother’s laptop not detecting its fucking webcam. Downloaded the official driver from HP but I have no clue whether that one even got installed because the install scripts always ended weirdly fast without a success or error message. I will never buy a cheap HP laptop again.

I used KDEConnect in the past but ran into issues where somehow media sent to my phone wasn’t saved somehow. Probably some permission issue but I didn’t manage to fix it. Also the windows client only allows selection of one file at a time.

Recently I’ve tried out LocalSend and found it a much smoother experience.