During the COVID-19 pandemic, I somehow managed to build a PC, followed by a minor refresh in 2021. Along the way, my GPU and motherboard died and had to be replaced at some point, hence the listing of 2 GPUs and motherboards below.
Recently, I couldn’t turn it on anymore, and it wasn’t the power supply, so it might have been the motherboard again. I got fed up, sold most of my parts.
Xiaomi Miio is an integration for Home Assistant, an open-source home automation software. It is the link between Home Assistant itself, and your Xiaomi smart devices.
Except I don’t want my network traffic routed to some server up in China or wherever when I’m at home, and the device itself is at home, as it makes for a meaningfully longer turnaround time, and is probably a privacy hole too. (The next step is cutting off “phone home” traffic from these devices, but story for another day.
Today I opened the MariBank app to discover this notification:
That’s on their savings account product, and so an increase of 0.38% given the existing rate (2.5% per annum).
Interest is credited daily; e.g., a 75K deposit earns ~$5.92 instead of ~$5.14 per day, and so a 15.2% increase.
It’s unclear how long this will last, but hey, make your money work harder for you while it can. (This campaign should be brief, given that GXS Bank’s 3.
YouTube video: Link
“Happy birthday” video. [That “thank you” song, real catchy.]
Today is all about Apple Watch and iPhone.
Recap about the new Macs (the Studio, the Pro, and the 15" MacBook Air).
Much flexing about the 15, I feel like.
Vision Pro, ships “early next year”. [I’d forgotten, got excited all over again!]
Watch Series 9 “Most popular watch”. [How did you know?]
Apple silicon (S9 SiP) in the Series 9.
Today I launched Apollo, a 3rd-party client for Reddit, and saw, to my dismay, an update from Apollo’s developer.
The following is an excerpt from his post on the Apollo App subreddit:
… 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.
Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year.
The browser history tells me I’ve visted this FFmpeg HOWTO page many times as I get handy with the tool:
My brain works on absolute, not relative, time so I’d much rather be able to directly indicate when to start cutting -ss, and when to stop -to; I also want to only copy the original video/audio, without any re-encoding, hence the -c:v copy -c:a copy part. Putting it all together: we take some input file foo.