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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Been the victim of fraud. Unfortunately - yes.
    When I was younger and Chip ‘n’ PIN was becoming popular, many smaller shops had a Paypoint machine that would print the entire card number and CCV on the receipt. I was so paranoid about fraud, especially given that there was sufficient information printed on the receipt that anyone could do an Amazon order with those details. I used to get a black permanent marker and scribble the details out before putting the receipt in the bin.

    Imagine my horror when a decade later, I learn that I have been the victim of fraud, and a type of fraud it was entirely impossible for me to prevent. In the UK fraudsters watch for new companies popping up on Companies House and then use the details to go on a shopping spree. The way it works is like this:

    They see my name, address and date of birth on the website. They are looking for a name that matches their surname and first initial. So for me that could be Alexander Jones for example. They go to a retail park and pop into Argos. They order several thousand pounds of stuff. When they go to pay, the person at the counter helpfully asks “Do you have an Argos credit card? If you apply for one today, we’ll transfer the balance of today’s purchases to the card” and armed with my address, date of birth and name, and a card that already has the same surname and first initial as me - they are accepted for an Argos credit card. Post nothing for the goods they just bought and leave the store. They go next door to JJB sports, and then whole process repeats. “Do you have a JJB sports card? If you get one today…”

    They visited 6 stores in an hour and repeated this process at all of them. And a week later I start receiving credit cards…

    It’s a surprisingly common scam (or it was), brought on entirely by the shops bring pushed to get people to sign up for credit cards…

    I had to be on a register for several years, so if anyone tried to open an account or take out credit in my name, I would get a phone call to check if it was actually me.





  • My automations include:

    • Setting the lighting mode to “night mode” based on a threshold of the outside lux level, which is changed dynamically based on the reported weather condition.

    • Setting a master brightness input_number based on a threshold of the outside lux level, which is dynamically changed based on the reported weather condition. Every room then has it’s own input_number which is automatically set every time the master brightness changes, and either has additional brightness added relative to the master, or brightness subtracted.

    • At 7:30am some Jinja code starts setting a daylight temperature input_number which starts adjusting the Kelvin temperature of supported lights in the house. I’m aware that there are various integrations to do this, but they all appear to be based on the actual sun, and as a SAD sufferer I don’t understand why people would want that, especially in the winter. My solution guarantees me at least 8 hours of “daylight” regardless of what the time of year is. - The code is ridiculously simple too:

        {% set k_end = 5500 %} {% set k_start = 2000 %} {% set t_start =
        today_at('07:30') %} {% set t_end = today_at('10:30') %} {% set cv =
        ((now()|as_timestamp) - t_start|as_timestamp)|int %} {{ k_start +
        (cv/3.0857)|int }}
    
    

    Then the reverse happens starting at 6pm:

        {% set k_start = 5500 %} {% set k_end = 2000 %} {% set t_start =
        today_at('18:00') %} {% set t_end = today_at('21:00') %} {% set cv =
        ((now()|as_timestamp) - t_start|as_timestamp)|int %} {{ k_start -
        (cv/3.0857)|int }}
    
    

    My other favourite automation, is something I call Music Walk, essentially when I play music on a group of speakers, as I move about the house when the occupancy of a room changes (camera through frigate, and Zigbee motion) a script is triggered which increases the volume in that room, and starts a timer for 01:30:00 and then after occupancy has been cleared, the timer is reset to 00:05:00 and when the timer finishes - it will run the script that changed the volume originally and set it to 0.1 So it feels like as I walk into rooms the music follows me there, but really it was already playing there - just quieter.


  • Nah, can’t scroll past this one without commenting - because so many things that have been said matter of factly are just plain wrong.

    1. Dogs just like people have their own personalities, just because SOME dogs can be trained to ignore fireworks, it does not mean ALL dogs can be - some dogs - just like people, suffer from various anxieties, it can’t be helped.

    2. The main point you seem to be missing - yes you can stay in and chill with your pooch on the ACTUAL day that fireworks are expected to be going off, but what you cannot do - is stay in and chill with your pooch for weeks before and weeks after the actual day, because people randomly decide to let them off.

    The fact that you brand everyone a bad dog owner if their dog cannot tolerate fireworks though, is the thing that made me need to comment, what a stupid thing to say. That’s like saying that if your child suffers from anxiety then you are a bad parent.



  • According to my doctor - after diarrhea, it takes about 5 days for the digestive system to start working properly again (because the bacteria has to build back up to enough). So that would be my recommendation. Have diarrhea and then it doesn’t really matter what you eat after that, the poster would be back home again before they had to worry about pooping.

    As someone who has diarrhea anytime I’m going to be in a stressful situation - I can testify that it takes me about a week to “form” poo again.







  • OK, so the first thing we can see there in the comments is that someone found that with that setting turned on, it prevented the phone from being able to roam between access points, so that’s probably the issue with the phone.

    As for the next part login to the router, find the part about configuring the internet connection and in there will be something like WAN DNS or something, if it’s set to get it automatically - then it will be using whatever the ISP set when you receive your WAN IP address from them. I typically use 8.8.8.8 (Google) and 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) which gives me redundancy if Google or Cloudflare fall over, it’s not likely both will fall over at the same time without some major global internet outage.


  • OK lets start with the phone, what app is responsible for the suspicious activity message? Because I’m not aware that is part of Android. The closest symptom is that Android will disconnect from networks that it claims do not have internet connectivity. Which would fit more closely with your intermittent connection issues. We could really also do with knowing what router you are using for the actual internet. It sounds like you are using mesh system for the wireless side of things. Can we also know are you using the ISP DNS server, or have you pointed the router to more reliable DNS servers? You should probably never use the ISP DNS servers - aside from any other reason, because it makes it much easier for the ISP to record what sites you are visiting.