limelight79

What is he?

I came across this a few weeks ago but didn't save it and couldn't remember what strip it was. I searched many times for it, but it wasn't until this morning that I finally got the right search term for it to turn up again.

Hi, all. Finally migrated from Kubuntu to Debian 12 over the weekend. It's working great, as I figured it would, with one exception: The system isn't turning the monitors off after 10 minutes. It's blanking them, but they're clearly still on.

One monitor is on an AMD graphics card, the other is on the motherboard Intel adapter.

Debian 12 with KDE Plasma running on Wayland with sddm login. It previously worked fine on Kubuntu (which I believe was running X11). It's a fresh Debian install on a different drive; I didn't overwrite the Kubuntu installation.

In the Energy Saving settings, I have "Screen energy saving" checked with a delay of 10 minutes. (I have "suspend session" turned off - one, because I don't want the computer to sleep or suspend, and two, because when I woke it up again, the graphics were garbled and I had to reboot.) As I said, it does blank the screens, but they're still clearly on. I want them to go into power save mode.

I've tried running dpkg-reconfigure and selecting sddm, no change. In KDE's background services, I tried turning off KScreen 2, but that didn't help (though I'm not sure if I rebooted after turning it off, now that I think about it).

I found advice somewhere that suggested deleting .config/powermanagementprofilesrc and rebooting; I did that, no change.

I did notice yesterday that the monitors had shut off...after a very long time of being idle. I'm not sure how long, but more than overnight, for certain.

Any advice or suggestions? Unfortunately, searching is difficult, because I get a lot of results where the screen blanks when it shouldn't. I haven't found much for this problem.

I used the same installer on my laptop to do the same migration (also with KDE Plasma and sddm) and it works fine there.

No major question here, just thought you might find this interesting. It's an example of the kind of (off-the-wall) things you can do with HA that aren't immediately obvious. When I was starting out with HA, I enjoyed reading these examples, because it gave me ideas for my own setup. And, I wrote many automations that should really be scripts, so hopefully this will help someone avoid that and recognize the power of scripts early.

At home, my laptop from work sits (closed) on a stand under the monitors. I have a docking station for it, but the docking station doesn't have a power button to start the laptop (the official Dell docking stations have a power button, but other brand of docking stations don't). So, since I got that stand a few weeks ago, I've been pulling the laptop out and opening juuuuuuust enough that I could reach the power button, then closing it and sliding it back into the stand. There had to be a better way that didn't involve buying an expensive Dell docking station.

The docking station power is on a Sonoff S31 outlet (flashed with Tasmota, not that that's important here) that is remotely controllable. Long ago, I set up HA automations that turned on the S31 when the laptop was detected on the network, and shut off the S31 after the laptop dropped off the network at the end of the day (leaving in a time delay so it didn't shut off if there was a momentary network glitch). So, I'd boot the laptop, and a moment later the docking station would kick on and connect the mouse and monitors to it. And the end of the day, I shut down the laptop, and a few minutes later the docking station shuts off automatically.

I recently discovered the Wake on LAN integration. So, after setting that up, I wrote a script that turns on the S31, waits a while*, then triggers the Wake-on-LAN for the laptop...and it boots up! With HA, I can start the boot process while I'm still relaxing in the living room before starting work; in theory I'll go into the office and it'll be ready for me to log in.

Heck, if HA knew for certain it was a workday, it could boot the laptop for me.....hmmm. Maybe something to think about for the future.

*How long? Well, 30 seconds seems to be too short; the laptop doesn't respond to the WoL command after just 30 seconds with power applied. It did work this morning when I waited several minutes to try it again. I just changed the delay to 1 minute and will see how that works tomorrow.

I also added a repeat loop (starting after that 1 minute timer) with three components:

• A condition that looks for the laptop being "Away" on the network. (If it is "Home" on the network, the condition will end the script.)
• If it is, then it tries the WoL command again.
• Then waits 30 seconds and repeat.

The repeat loop counter is set to 3, for a total of 4 attempts to start the laptop. I'll check the traces and see when it starts working, and set the initial delay accordingly, so that in general it shouldn't need the repeat loop.

If people want, I can post (sanitized) YAML. But I do like explaining the process rather than just posting code.

Hi, all. My wife and I recently got new phones, and it got me thinking again about how notifications work.

Currently I have several automations (maybe 10) that send notifications to my phone, her phone, both, and possibly other devices.

But when we get a new phone, or replace a tablet, etc., I have to update every single one of those automations. And I inevitably forget some or introduce errors.

Is there a better way to do this? For example, it'd be nice if I could abstract the concept of "my phone" out in those automations, then I'd only have to change the device "my phone" in one place, rather than a bunch of places.

Any thoughts on this? Maybe I'm missing a way to do it. Thanks.

This is a long one, but I'm done with Shelly. Too bad, I like that they support HA, but the treatment on this last order is outrageous. The good news is I'm only out $24.

On November 25, I placed an order for a H&T and a Plus 1 Mini as part of their sale, and I received a confirmation for the order.

On December 8, I received an email stating they were overwhelmed with orders and it would be some time before filling them. Okay, that's annoying, but I didn't need them right away - but the H&T I did want fairly quickly because I was hoping to replace an unreliable Zigbee sensor.

Then I heard nothing for several weeks, and the order never arrived. Finally, on January 4, I created a ticket in their support system about it.

They completely ignored that, too. I started seeing ads on Facebook for the Plus 1 Minis, one of the things I ordered, which irritated me.

After about two weeks, I made a comment on one of the ads that my order and the ticket were both being ignored. A few days later, on January 24, I got an email from them saying:

Excuse us for the delayed reply. We are extremely overloaded.

For unknown reason, the order is not visible in the US admin system. That's why it is not dispatched yet. Maybe there is a bug in the system about this order.

However, we informed the US team that the order must be dispatched asap. They will dispatch it soon and you will receive an email with your tracking code.

​Please be patient.

We want to apologize for the delay and for the inconvenience caused.

I've heard nothing more, almost a week later. I just logged into the ticketing system to discover that they CLOSED THE TICKET. So they can't see the order, and they closed the ticket that refers to it. The problem is NOT resolved - there's no tracking number, no estimated ship date, and no products at my door. I'll be surprised if I ever get the stuff at this point. (I checked my spam folder, and it's not in there.)

Terrible service. I will never order from them again.

I can still file a Paypal dispute, apparently until May. I'll give it a few more days, and if I haven't heard anything, I'll do that.

So, let this be a warning to you about ordering from Shelly...it went okay the first time a few years back, but this time has been a disaster.

https://lemmy.world/post/10554910

Running on a Lenovo Yoga Tab 13, Android 13, version 1.0.4 of Boost.

I use Samba backup and it runs nightly, fortunately.

I tried to update to the latest HA core the other day, and it failed. Reboot and weird things stop working all over the place. The log showed the recorder and a bunch of other things failed to start. When I looked at the command line, I found that files had apparently been corrupted. My configuration.yaml, all 791 lines of it, was gone, in favor of the stock configuration.yaml file.

I restored from the most recent backup before the trouble began, which was taken Saturday morning (I assume the corruption is why it didn't run after that). No dice. Friday's backup got me up and running again, fortunately. I had to re-do a few things I'd changed Friday, but what a relief.

I made the changes again and made a new full backup. I also increased the number of backups to keep from 7 to 10.

Do regular backups, people. Save yourself a lot of headache. I use the Samba option, but there are options to upload to things like cloud storage as well.