pvik's recent activity

  1. Comment on Work life balance in a startup in ~life

    pvik
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    There are multiple variable here, but are you willing to work for a few years in a "startup-like-environement" with less than ideal work-life-balance, given the right compensation (equity, pay,...

    There are multiple variable here, but are you willing to work for a few years in a "startup-like-environement" with less than ideal work-life-balance, given the right compensation (equity, pay, etc)?

    If your answer is No to the above question, be upfront about it during the interview.
    All interviews are going to have some time for your questions. Bring up the question of what type of work culture they have, and be straight about what you're looking for.

    It is quite possible that the company had a growth stage in the past and had a different culture, but are at a point where they're trying to change this.

    I have worked at startups and large enterprises, and both have their pros and cons, and what type of environment you prefer to work in is purely up to you!

    I know this doesn't answer your primary question, which seems to be more from a perspective of wanting to work at a place where you have a mismatch with the expectations of what the management has for you.

    I personally try to avoid these situation, and if I find myself in one, start looking for another job immediately.

    5 votes

  2. Comment on The race to replace Redis in ~tech

    pvik
    Link Parent
    The fact you're able to use GPL code, even if you disagree with it's philospphy, is the crux of GPL in my view. GPL was created to make sure code remained free, and from that perspective it makes...

    it infects projects and their downstream products with a philosophy that I don't really agree with. I don't want to participate in that, although I have and will when necessary.

    The fact you're able to use GPL code, even if you disagree with it's philospphy, is the crux of GPL in my view.

    GPL was created to make sure code remained free, and from that perspective it makes sense that the license "infects" projects that use GPL code. You're more than welcome to write your own code from scratch and release it however you see fit, but if you want to build on top of work of other people, who have made the decision to release code for free and under GPL, you need to honor that.

    As you identified GPL does have a philospohy behind it and I think it does a pretty decent job in spreading that philosophy.

    In my opinion the current state of software development owes a lot to GPL licensed code.

    a GPL user is putting legal requirements on users of that source, in order to control them and the future of that source code, so that they (and others) get those future benefits.

    GPL requires that work done on top of GPL code should continue to remain under GPL license and free, and as you correctly identified, everyone benefits from that. It helps build a collaborative process in the open that anyone can contribute to and it makes sure it helps everyone. I would say it's more altruistic, instead of trying to classify it on a spectrum of selfish/selfless.

    15 votes

  4. Comment on Smart home automation - tip, tricks, advice? in ~life.home_improvement

    pvik
    Link Parent
    I have frigate running on a separate server (with a ZFS array, with enough storage for storing 24x7 video from all the cameras for 60 days. I retain 24x7 recordings for 15 days, and motion-only...

    I have frigate running on a separate server (with a ZFS array, with enough storage for storing 24x7 video from all the cameras for 60 days. I retain 24x7 recordings for 15 days, and motion-only clips for 30 days. I oversized the storage pool, in case I added additional cameras down the line. I have additional data backup strategy/setup across multiple servers as well, cause I selfhost a bunch of things :)
    I also have a Coral TPU on that server that helps with frigate quite a bit.

    ETA: HomeAssistant runs inside a VM on a proxmox cluster, which also hosts a bunch of other things (Nextcloud, bitwarden, jellyfin, mqqt, bunch of DBs, grafana, etc) . Frigate gets a separate server.

  5. Comment on Smart home automation - tip, tricks, advice? in ~life.home_improvement

    pvik
    Link Parent
    That's good to hear! Their new mmWave presence detection switch looks interesting, might pre-order that to play with. I've been playing around with the DFRobot mmWave sensor the last couple of...

    That's good to hear!

    Their new mmWave presence detection switch looks interesting, might pre-order that to play with. I've been playing around with the DFRobot mmWave sensor the last couple of months, so was excited to see Inovelli had a finalized product shipping soon with mmWave presence detection.

  6. Comment on Smart home automation - tip, tricks, advice? in ~life.home_improvement

    pvik
    Link Parent
    Has Inovelli sorted out all the supply chain issues they were having? It also looks like they're pivoting hard to Zigbee instead of ZWave devices. I have one of their Red-Series (ZWave) switch and...

    I'm extremely partial to Inovelli

    Has Inovelli sorted out all the supply chain issues they were having?

    It also looks like they're pivoting hard to Zigbee instead of ZWave devices.
    I have one of their Red-Series (ZWave) switch and it is excellent, but I was not been able to get my hands on more for over 2years, which was a frustrating experience. I kinda gave up and have not really looked into them since. (ended up going to Lutron Caseta for Dimmer switches, which have been excellent as well)

    I feel like they're a small company (which I want to support) with a lot of growing pains and the pandemic was not kind to them with a lot of supply issues. They had a really good lead in terms of features and quality, 3-4 years ago, but I feel like the HA space is filling up pretty quick with competition.

  7. Comment on Smart home automation - tip, tricks, advice? in ~life.home_improvement

    pvik
    Link Parent
    Sorry, I am not sure what you mean by central station monitoring! We have SimpliSafe (my wife wants to have a backup to all the critical stuff I have in HomeAssistant already), which is also tied...

    Sorry, I am not sure what you mean by central station monitoring!

    We have SimpliSafe (my wife wants to have a backup to all the critical stuff I have in HomeAssistant already), which is also tied into my HomeAssistant (the only automation I have on it is to automatically arm the system when we are away from Home). All our CO/Smoke monitors, Door/Window entry sensors are tied into it. I also have SimpliSafe flood sensors (as a backup to my Z-Wave sensors). After having a basement flooded in a previous house, I like to err more on the side of caution :)

    If you're referring to weather monitoring, I just use the local NWS station to pull in weather forecasting into HomeAssistant (to control automations on my garden watering system, or set Thermostat temperature, also notify me if it's going to rain)

    If you're referring to server monitoring. I have a zabbix server that monitors all my servers, network gear (router, switches, APs), UPS, etc. I have alerts configured to email me on warnings and send me a message/email me on critical issues. I also have all of HomeAssistant data fed into influxDB, and have a grafana dashboard, with data from there to quickly get a glance of stuff (energy usage, temp, humidity, water usage, etc), if I need to.

  8. Comment on Smart home automation - tip, tricks, advice? in ~life.home_improvement

    pvik
    (edited )
    Link
    HomeAssistant is great! It's a framework that lets you handle a plethora of situations when it comes to automations and making your home smarter. The tough problem when it comes to making your...

    HomeAssistant is great!
    It's a framework that lets you handle a plethora of situations when it comes to automations and making your home smarter.

    The tough problem when it comes to making your home smarter is picking which eco-system you want to invest in.

    I try to avoid cloud-based IoT devices, which require some company's cloud and a working internet connection to function (things like Lifx or Kasa[1], especially given the recent change with Phillips Hue)

    Local network based IoT devices are ok, like Shelly devices, but I try to avoid these as well, cause most of these devices still use 2.4GHz Wifi and you can very quickly have a ton of these devices straining your wifi router

    (If you do go the IoT device route, I would suggest putting these devices on a separate VLAN, and only allow routes which will be needed for them to talk to HomeAssistant. Also, try to assign static IPs to your IoT devices in a specific range, which will be useful if you are logging traffic)

    Zigbee is not bad but it uses 2.4GHz bandwidth as well, so there could be some interference with your 2.4GHz Wifi network

    Z-Wave is a commercial protocol (so devices are a little more expensive as they need to pay extra for licensing and certification). It uses a bandwidth in the 900MHz range (i think).

    Both ZWave and Zigbee also need a separate controller you need to get, and the devices build out a mesh network. This also stays totally local. HomeAssistant has good support for both of these.

    At my home, I have:

    • all wall switches are smart Z-Wave switches.
    • a few Shelly smart bulbs, primarily where I want to be able to control the color temperature, like the dining room chandelier.
    • a few ESPHome devices (Kauf bulbs and a few Sonoff iFan04 to control Ceiling Fan/Lights)
    • Several Multi-Sensors (Motion, Humidity,Temp, etc, I have the Zooz sensors, the battery lasts a little over a year) in places like bathrooms, laundry-room etc, which allow me to have automations that turn on the lights on motion, turn on the extractor fan on humidity, etc
    • Z-Wave Relay switches connected to garage doors (along with Z-Wave tilt sensors on the garage doors to know if they are open or closed)
    • Z-Wave Water sensors in the laundry room, under kitchen cabinets, bathrooms (saved me several times already)
    • Z-Wave front door lock (This one)
    • Nest Thermostat (but trying to find an alternative ,so I can ditch Nest completely)
    • IoTaWatt hooked into my main electric panel to have an idea of energy usage

    I also have PoE cameras hooked into Frigate and that feeds into HomeAssistant.

    Make sure your junction boxes have a neutral wire, if not make sure you get smart switches capable of working without a neutral wire (this is most likely going to restrict you to getting dimmer switches)

    (Worthy mention, is the Lutron Caseta system (which uses a proprietary protocol) as well, this works well with HomeAssistant and does not need cloud access, you can control these devices locally. I use their dimmer switches in the few junctions boxes that do not have a neutral wire. They have been the most reliable dimmer switches in those junction boxes)

    [1] I have a few older Kasa devices which I can control locally, via Rest API calls, but I am not sure if newer devices still allow this. I had heard Kasa was forcing all new devices to have to be controlled via the cloud. I could be wrong with that.

    9 votes

  9. Comment on What are some of your favorite cheap, easy and healthy recipes? in ~food

    pvik
    Link Parent
    This is extremely late, but here goes: The day before: marinate the chicken (preferable dark meat, like thighs and legs) with turmeric, ginger paste, garlic paste, yogurt, cumin, coriander powder,...

    This is extremely late, but here goes:

    The day before: marinate the chicken (preferable dark meat, like thighs and legs) with turmeric, ginger paste, garlic paste, yogurt, cumin, coriander powder, red chili powder, kashmiri chili powder and optionally: powdered cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon powder

    For a pound of meat, start with about 2tbl sp of yogurt and add about 1-2 tsps of the above spices (1/2tsp of optional spices) and mix well with the yogurt and then add to chicken and mix well. I typically eyeball the spices so, I am not great with exact measurements.
    (You could also use a ready made biriyani spice blend instead)

    Let the chicken marinate overnight in the fridge.

    Start with a heavy bottomed pot with a tight fitting lid. I use this

    In a separate pot, rinse out some basmati rice (or a mix of half basmati and a short grained rice) and soak it (for atleast 45 mins).

    1. Make some fried onions: You can skip this step, if you want, but I like the flavor the fried onions bring to this disk. Some folks also add some fried onions to the chicken marinade, so if you want to do this, you will have to do this step the previous day as well.
    • Add some ghee or neutral oil to the dutch oven and add some thinly sliced onions (preferable sliced thin with a mandolin). Stir them around till they are deep brown and well fried.
    • Use a colander and lift the fried onions and lay them on some paper towels.
    1. Cook the chicken:
    • Add the marinated chicken to the remaining oil/ghee in the pot (if the oil is too little add some more)
    • Don't stir the chick too much, let it sear well on the bottom, by the time that is done, the chicken should be mostly cooked
    • turn of the heat,
    1. Parboil the rice
    • In a empty tea bag add: some bay leaves, cloves, green and black cardamom, star anise, cinnamon sticks, mace and pippli/long pepper (skip whatever you don't have)
    • bring water to a rolling boil in a pot
    • add the teabag of spices and the soaked rice
    • bring the flame to low
    • cook the rice till it's partway cooked (take a grain of rice and it should split easily in between your fingers, but not become mush)
    • strain the par-boiled rice
    1. Layering
    • in the pot you cooked the chicken, remove half the chicken
    • layer in half the rice
    • sprinkle some fried onions
    • add back the half of the chicken
    • layer in the remaining rice
    • sprinkle with fried onions
    • you can make multiple layers if you want, i just typically make 2 layers
    • you can sprinkle some rose water if you have
    • you can also soak some saffron in some milk and sprinkle that at the top, if you want (i typically skip this)
    1. Final cook
    • Add some aluminum foil on the top of the pot and close with the pot's lid for a decent seal
    • put the pot in the middle rack of a 375 oven and cook for 30 minutes

    This is not traditional biriyani by any means, but it's a close approximation and easy to make (at least for me :).
    I have this is my weekend meal-prep routine and make it once a month typically, which lasts for 6-8 meals for me and my wife.

    Typing this, I realized I suck at typing recopies. Ping me if you have any question and I can try to clarify

  10. Comment on Text editing on mobile isn’t ok. It’s actually much worse than you think, an invisible problem no one appreciates. in ~comp

    pvik
    Link Parent
    You can also swipe across the spacebar to move the cursor left/right.

    You can also swipe across the spacebar to move the cursor left/right.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Emacs 29.1 released in ~comp

    pvik
    Link Parent
    Updated to it yesterday! My config worked without any issue. Feels snappy, but again that might just be because I know it's a major release :) I haven't looked into tree-sitter that much yet, will...

    Updated to it yesterday! My config worked without any issue. Feels snappy, but again that might just be because I know it's a major release :)

    I haven't looked into tree-sitter that much yet, will look into which major modes I frequently use, I can switch to *-ts-mode this weekend.

    Also considering migrating to eglot from lsp-server this weekend and see if there are any features I miss. If anyone has done this before, appreciate tips for migrating to eglot!

    1 vote

  12. Comment on How do I use up all this mint? in ~food

    pvik
    Link Parent
    Mint syrup mixed with a freshly squeezed lemon and some ice cold water makes for a refreshing drink on a hot day!

    but I lime it.

    Mint syrup mixed with a freshly squeezed lemon and some ice cold water makes for a refreshing drink on a hot day!

    3 votes

  13. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    pvik
    (edited )
    Link
    I've been working on simple-file-server. Github and Binaries I built this to easily transfer files from a desktop/laptop to any other device which has a browser like phone/steam deck etc, without...

    I've been working on simple-file-server.

    Github and Binaries

    I built this to easily transfer files from a desktop/laptop to any other device which has a browser like phone/steam deck etc, without having to plug in/out USB drives and mess with OTG adapters and for folks who don't have a NAS on their local network.

    This was inspired by the simple-http-server project written in Rust, but this does not have a GUI that comes along with it and folks I have suggested this to who primarily use windows had a tough time using this from the shell.

    I am going to add features for uploading files to the server, password protection and TLS support in the next release of simple-file-server, but if you can think of any other features I can implement that would be great!

    I also don't have access to a windows or mac machine and have not tested the windows and macos binaries (they were generated from the github CI actions, which you can review in github). I would appreciate it if folks here could test it on those platforms!

    2 votes

  14. Comment on Smartwatch primarily for notifications and battery life? in ~tech

    pvik
    Link Parent
    I just checked and there is no way for me to control spotify (at least in a straight-forward way that I could find). I always have my headphones on when listening to spotify or am in my car and...

    I just checked and there is no way for me to control spotify (at least in a straight-forward way that I could find).

    I always have my headphones on when listening to spotify or am in my car and control it thru that, so have never noticed that I couldn't control spotify from my watch, but that is a feature deficiency with the Withings watches.

    3 votes

  15. Comment on Smartwatch primarily for notifications and battery life? in ~tech

    pvik
    Link Parent
    I don't really baby it and it's held up pretty well (no scratches on it after a years use). For daily use I use the plastic strap which I can wash easily after a run or workout or after working in...

    I don't really baby it and it's held up pretty well (no scratches on it after a years use).

    For daily use I use the plastic strap which I can wash easily after a run or workout or after working in the garden and it gets grimy/sweaty.

    I also work in my wood shop on the weekends and have banged it up against some tools and I can't really find any blemishes or scratches on it.

    I also have the metal strap, that I switch on if I am dressing up.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Smartwatch primarily for notifications and battery life? in ~tech

    pvik
    Link
    I have been using the Withings ScanWatch for about a year now. I charge it once a week or 10 days. It handles notifications well (can be customized what apps can send notifications to your watch)...

    I have been using the Withings ScanWatch for about a year now.

    I charge it once a week or 10 days.

    It handles notifications well (can be customized what apps can send notifications to your watch) and does a good job with fitness and sleep tracking as well (which I don't really use that much, to be honest). It does remind me to take a walk if I've been sitting in front of my computer for too long, which is nice.

    I really like that it looks like a regular watch, which was it's major selling point for me, and the fact that I only have to charge it once a week or so is great!

    7 votes

  17. Comment on SUSE announces RHEL fork and 10+ million dollar funding in ~comp

    pvik
    Link Parent
    From my perspective: SUSE seems to be recruiting folks with experience in Enterprise Linux Dirk-Peter had been GM for NA in RedHat SUSE generally has a larger market share in EU and this hiring...

    From my perspective:

    • SUSE seems to be recruiting folks with experience in Enterprise Linux
    • Dirk-Peter had been GM for NA in RedHat
      • SUSE generally has a larger market share in EU and this hiring decision should help SUSE expand their market share in NA

    The moves SUSE seems to be making are to easily convert companies to their support structure. With the controversial moves RedHat is making SUSE is capitalizing on the chaos.
    By offering a RHEL clone, they can show on paper to the decision makers, they will not have to en masse replace all their systems from RHEL to SUSE. They can continue using RHEL but with support from SUSE, and when time comes for major upgrades, they can nudge them to move over to SUSE flavored RHEL. Eventually they will offer an easy upgrade path to SUSE itself, or several major versions of SUSE down the line, they may have some way to switch between yum or zypper and seamlessly make the distro behave as SUSE or RHEL depending on some vitualenv, maybe? (ofc this is all speculation on my part).

    The larger point I am making is that SUSE is making decisions that will allow them to gain a larger market share in the Enterprise Linux market, which I perceive as a good thing, more competition is better at the end of the day!

    5 votes

  18. Comment on SUSE announces RHEL fork and 10+ million dollar funding in ~comp

    pvik
    Link
    I did not know Dirk-Peter had taken over the helm as CEO at SUSE. He has been with RedHat for quite a while (google says from 2010) in senior positions. Good for SUSE!

    Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, said

    I did not know Dirk-Peter had taken over the helm as CEO at SUSE. He has been with RedHat for quite a while (google says from 2010) in senior positions. Good for SUSE!

    12 votes

  19. Comment on Can chess, with hexagons? in ~games.tabletop

    pvik
    Link Parent
    Great video! Bees actually create circular wax cells that get compacted into hexagons (as the cells get smushed together, constraining towards min wax usage :) [1] Hexagons are the bestagons!

    Great video!

    Bees actually create circular wax cells that get compacted into hexagons (as the cells get smushed together, constraining towards min wax usage :) [1]

    Hexagons are the bestagons!

    5 votes

  20. Comment on RPG Maker and learning game design in ~games

    pvik
    Link Parent
    That is awesome! It's great that we have so many opensource and freely available frameworks and resources now, but also oftentimes it is easy to get lost in what language/framework/engine to use...

    I've been able to publish four tiny games (more like prototypes) on itch.io

    That is awesome!

    It's great that we have so many opensource and freely available frameworks and resources now, but also oftentimes it is easy to get lost in what language/framework/engine to use and stall out or lose interest in building the games you want to make!

    I haven't tried other game engines yet. I've gotten comfortable with Godot and will continue using it for now.

    Use whatever works as long as you're able to make things you want to make (and are having fun)!

    However, breaking out of your comfort zone and imposing hurdles of a different framework or engine can also help you gain new perspectives, which can help you in your default comfort zone :)

    3 votes