About a year ago, I bought a used ThinkPad and installed KDE neon on it. That has been my daily driver for about 9 months. I've used my 2020 M1 MacBook Air for some items that weren't well supported on Linux but those went away last month. While I've been pretty happy with my Linux set up, I've grown weary of a few things. I can't update the firmware in Linux due to the partition size being too small. I'm getting a stub error on bootup. The sound isn't great for watching videos. Some of this can be fixed and some can't.

While using Linux more and more, I decided to try an Android phone. Specifically, GrapheneOS on a Pixel 9. I wanted to try this as another break-away from Apple. This was more difficult than switching to a new desktop OS. I had an iPhone 15 Pro with an Apple Watch Ultra 2. For the first two months, I kept using my iPhone with my Apple Watch Series 6 and sold my Ultra 2. I quickly realized that I was ok with the old watch. I missed some things from the Ultra but not enough to justify the cost.

After a couple of months of that, I decided to start using my Pixel as my daily phone. This meant getting a watch. After researching watches with good GadgetBridge support, I decided to buy a Bangle.js 2.It reminded me of the Pebble. It's a basic smartwatch, but it has what I wanted. Notifications, vibrating alarms, step counting, and timers. I had my watch and I had my phone. I kept my main number in my iPhone and got a pre-paid plan for my Pixel. I installed BlueBubbles to access iMessage from my Pixel.

Read more…

As part of my trial of Linux on my recently acquired Lenovo X1 Carbon, I wanted to figure out how to get my Obsidian notes on it. I looked into several solutions but ended up with two supported approaches because of iOS/iPadOS. I could use Obsidian Sync or Git. I decided not to spend the $100 per year and go the Git route. I came across this article about using GitHub for syncing Obisian notes on her MacBook, iPhone, and iPad. I also already own Working Copy.

I had heard about self-hosted git services and decided this was a good time to set one up. My first use of it would be for my notes. I decided on Gitea. I ended up with Forgejo.

Read more…

I bought a used ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 to try out Linux as a desktop replacement. I've used macOS personally for 10+ years and Windows for work longer than that. I have recently begun to wonder what it's like outside of the Apple ecosystem; I know I don't want to use Windows personally. I use Debian and Ubuntu on cloud instances but only command line. I have no experience using Linux with a windowing environment. I've been listening to Linux Unplugged recently and have become interested in NixOS. I like the idea of declaritive configuration and being able to role back changes. Those two features were enough for me to try it.

The installation process was simple and straightforward. I was concerned dual-boot might not work because there wasn't mention of it during installation but it worked! I was excited when I rebooted and logged in! My excited diminished a bit when windows and text were too small. This is not an issue with NixOS; I was unaware of the different support of fractional scaling by KDE and GNOME. I selected GNOME because it has a different style. I switched to KDE Plasma 5 after reading about it's built-in scaling support. I changed the config in configuration.nix and had a appropriately sized desktop. It was pretty amazing to switch environments by changing some lines of confguration. I was smiling.

Read more…

After the dissapointment that was Chamberlain preventing third-party api access to MyQ, I looked for alternatives. I wanted to control my garage door from Home Assistant and came across OpenGarage. It is a little more expensive than some of the other options but it ticked off all of my boxes. Plus one I didn't know was an option!

• Open source. I was done with dealing with companies deciding what I could do with something I paid for.
• Local only. I didn't want or need a cloud solution. Tailscale is my remote access solution. OpenGarage does have cloud functionality but it's optional.
• Has a built-in Home Assistant integration. While I was ok with some additional effort like using HACS, I preferred a more plug n play approach.
• Well packaged hardware. This the one area that OpenGarage falls short. It's perfectly fine but won't win any awards.

The extra feature is vehicle presence detection. I am excited about using this in the future. I think this will make some of my Tesla api calls more streamlined. I've found it difficult to determine if the car is at home. The primary method of detecting the state of the garage door is with an ultrasonic sensor. this also allows it to detect if a vehicle is present.

One thing that I underestimated is how it handles Security+ 2.0. I was good with their approach and felt it would work out fine. This turned out to be more complicated.

Read more…