I don’t have anything automated for our cats (and dog).

For the cats, we use the flea and tick treatment that goes on the back of their necks every thirty days, so I have a timer set up to remind me to do that (along with giving the dog his heart worm and his own flea and tick treatment).

There a timer to remind me to clean their recirculating water bowl.

For their dry food, I have a system that tracks how many bags I’ve opened since the start date, then divides that out to get an average of how long a bag lasts. This is helpful when figuring out the length of time between autoship orders of food. Bags are sold by weight, but we give them food measured by volume, so it doesn’t easily convert. It takes a few bags for the measurement to settle down to a rough estimate of the number of days, but it did work after that. Just have to remember to hit the new bag button.

One of our cats uses an inhaler with a counter on it, so I use a helper to track when I last administered it and what the counter was at. The great thing about that is that I can detect easily if I missed the treatment or if I did it and just failed to hit the button in HA. Another of the same cat’s treatments (he’s old) requires ordering medicine roughly once a month, so I track when I start a new one, then add a to-do when it’s time to reorder.

We have four litter boxes for the three cats, and I change two of them each week, and scoop the other two (well, I scoop all four each evening, but two are changed once a week, while the other two get scooped at that time). I track what dates each one was changed last so I know the following week which ones are due. I tried remembering, and it didn’t go well. The helpers remind me.

I would like a way to detect where the cats are in the house. Two of them do not wear collars. In particular I’d like to be able to determine whether our skittish cat (no collar) is hiding under the bed in our bedroom or not (I just want to know where he is when it’s feeding time). Would a presence sensor under there do that?

He was in the TV movie Get Smart, Again! too. He looks even taller next to Don Adams.

Isn’t that what target does? They wait until you’ve stolen a good bit, then drop the hammer.

The Motion Picture?

Bit Riker, Geordi, and the Crushers were already at this Farpoint Station. How did they get there? At the very least, they preceded the humans on the Enterprise!

I’ll have to look at this more closely, but it sounds like you’ve addressed some issues I’ve had in my own house. We have an ecobee, and while I do like it, I’m also frustrated with its limits. For example, I use different sensors in summer versus winter to keep the house relatively even, so I have to change it up each time. I’ve had the same thing where it kicks on the AC in winter (not often, but it can happen).

I also dislike how difficult it is to change the schedule for just one day. I have a very variable schedule, and reprogramming the thermostat each week would be tedious. And the “away for now” functionality is limited.

I’ve been considering turning control of the thermostat over to HA. It has been running extremely reliably for some time now, so I feel safe trusting it. There was a long time when that wasn’t true. But I guess I could leave the program in the ecobee, so if the HA goes down, it’ll just default back to its own program.

Red green or gold… Red green or gold…

Did you see that he’s fighting the new law in Wisconsin that makes it illegal for AI create nudes of children? And everyone else, of course, but as far as I can tell, there wasn’t even a hint of “Oh, yeah, that ability probably isn’t a good thing” from Musk. Nope, just wants the law removed.

Walz called him a creep.

Republicans, of course, are suddenly very quiet about “states rights”, something they usually claim to vigorously support. Instead, they want Trump to issue an order preventing such state-level laws against AI.

Because the people he supported won.

And could be taking into battle soon. Yeah let’s disrupt everyone on the ship then get mad when they aren’t at peak efficiency in a few hours. Because my way is always better.

No interest in learning how the flagship currently operates and has survived so much so far.

These are growing on me. They’re still shouting, but this one and the previous one both made me laugh.

Should be the next national holiday. Close everything and go piss on your local copy of Donald’s grave.

That they left on an alien planet…

That’s the part that blows me away. Let’s introduce this quite unnatural species to this planet and abandon them there. What could go wrong?

We had a kids bike in the shop last year that had control for only the rear brake. Then there was a mechanism that activated the front brake proportionally to how hard the rear brake was engaged.

I get the idea, prevent kids from overdoing the front brake, but… When are they going to learn how to ride a bicycle correctly? When they get a larger bicycle and have farther to fall? It didn’t seem like a great idea to me, something marketed for over protective parents.

I’m not hearing no…

Wasn’t there an article a few weeks ago about how AI is basically designed to keep you talking to it? It constantly provides positive reinforcement.

It’s not hard to imagine someone would fall into it. And I don’t blame the people using it as much, because the software is literally designed to rope you in like this.

I mean, I’m a bike person, and I don’t have one, too much money for a fan.

They also sell a desk that’s $250 or something crazy like that. It is kind of an odd design that leans over the handlebars, though.

But I work in a shop that regularly sells >$10K bikes, too. My bike is sub-$3K, though.

There actually is a fan that does that already. It connects to the game and adjusts flow based on your speed.

Similarly, there’s also a device that adjusts the angle of the bike based on the angle of the hill you’re on at the moment.

The fan is $320. The other device is $700.

I just use a box fan and ride flat.

I work out of my car several days each week. My wife drives her car back and forth from home to her office.

Guess which one has more trash all over inside?! I don’t know how anyone can stand it. I don’t need it pristine, but… Geez grab your trash on the way out of the car…

I found a light in our house that had been wired so the neutral was turned off by the switch, not the hot. I forget why I was even checking, maybe the fixture was bad, so I was checking power before turning off the breaker.

I assume that light was wired up by the previous owner, but I don’t know for sure. The wiring in the house that he didn’t do is pretty good, but the stuff he did is… Questionable.