Panq

It’s the first nice day for a bit, so I rode the push bike in to work today. Forgot how slippery everything is in the wet and had a brief lie-down in the mud, but still made pretty decent time. I’d call it a fairly decent start to the day.

Tangentially related: we’ve got an electric sit/stand desk that sometimes needs the controller resetting, but the only way to do so is to unplug it and wait for the capacitors to discharge, which takes at least 12 hours or so. I wonder if I can just add a push button and a resistor… 30 seconds is annoying, but would be a huge upgrade from can’t-move-desk-until-tomorrow…

The solar/battery models don’t run 24/7 - you can trigger them remotely (so you can check the live feed whenever) or they can trigger with motion. Still perfectly useful for a bunch of use cases (e.g. just checking if you closed something, or installed somewhere that motion sensing is reliable like a low-traffic corridor) but not super useful for, say, a front door.

Just to second this - I’ve upgraded all but one camera to Reolink RLC-810A a few years back and they’re rock solid. All offline (no internet, but connected to Home Assistant on a separate LAN), all powered by a cheap unmanaged PoE switch from PB Tech. (Edit: this one).

They’re recording 24/7 to their local memory, but I almost entirely use them via Home Assistant’s ability to pull a JPEG directly from the camera (because it takes a fraction of a second at 4k vs the unbearable pain of waiting >10s for video to buffer even at SD resolution).

We had good weather for once, so I went for a reasonably long (43km or so) bike ride and then climbed [a very small mountain] (https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/auckland/places/mount-william-area/tracks/mount-william-walkway/) that we’ve been meaning to check out for a while.

You’re right in that running HA just for a WoL timer would be silly, but (presumably) it’s already running for other, less silly purposes.

I’d say the main benefit is when the machine requires regular (as in daily) reboots, or if it’s something you don’t trust is fully private and want to be powered off outside work hours. Not useful for me, but I can see why it would be handy.

Rode up a steep hill and found a decent bit of weather this morning. And a rainbow down the other side, too.