Latest entries from petermolnar.net

05 April, 2026

2026-04-05T08:42:53+00:00

This post is a reply to: https://ohhelloana.blog/new-forest/

It really is the stupid phone ruining everything isn’t it? The stupid screens of doom and the stupidity of the world isn’t it?

Yes.

However, it's not the device itself, and not the base functionalities of the device. I remember a series from my youth - "Den korsikanske biskopen"¹ - where the kids had these fantastic gadgets with video calls and other features, and I always marvelled at it.

I think the major difference was that those gizmos were something of a closed circuit, an semi-offline-ish thing: knowledge in your pocket, communication with friends. The utopistic gadgets never have the option to browse the news - an important feature to use them only when needed.

What they also didn't do is broadcasting.

The "free" broadcasting the wider internet brought is dismal. Most can't make sense of it, and it turns into vanity, into narcissism. Blogs were open diaries, were a way to, with an alter ego, share what we may not have been brave enough, or didn't have the stage to share within out normie life. Instagram, TikTok, and the rest, on the other hand, are bringing the worst out of people: not for the sake of being themselves, but to be something people can follow.

Some of the modern internet is incredible, but look at the times from before the iphone: there was less vanity, no instagram and tiktok brainrot - albeit Ren and Stimpy and Happy Tree Friends were hardcore.

These should not be in our pockets; it's a weigh that is dragging everyone down into a swamp.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140316/↩︎

We're murdering the night

2025-12-19T22:22:44+00:00

Dark, winter-y, eXistenZial questions

Death to varying temperature! Death to day and night! Death to shorter and longer days! Death to all cycles natural! ~~Death to the demoness Allegra Geller! Death to Pilgrimage! Death to transCendenZ!¹~~

Apologies for the bombastic first few lines, I thought I'd try to capture the essence of what is about to follow, but I got carried away.

Yesterday I was walking back home and noticed how, before reaching the roundabout, the lights are still sodium-vapour (natrium for the sensible world) lamp, whereas after it the lights are white LEDs. For a moment an ISS photo of the East/West Berlin line came to my mind²:

This undated photo provided by the European Space Agency and captured by ESA astronaut Andre Kuipers, shows the German capital Berlin from the International Space Station, ISS. Seen from above, street lights in the former East Berlin appear slightly more orange; those in the western part of the city are a harsher yellow. ESA / AP

I'm from Hungary, and night always meant the deep yellow of the sodium lamps. As more and more research went into it it turned out sodium lamps are absolutely ideal for nights: our human eyes are quite sensitive it's very narrow light spectrum (it's yellow, and only yellow, if you think you see any other colours with it, look again), they are elegantly energy efficient, and night life is barely disturbed by them.

But lately it's all cheap, badly designed, shitty LEDs everywhere, which aren't even saving considerable money, as those sodium lamps are nearly as efficient. The retail park in Cambridge now has some purple street lamps, because they are so cheap LEDs that their coating disintegrated, allowing the purple/UV spectrum to burst through³.

One of my life hacks was that I kept using a halogen bulb in my desk lamp. It just feels more natural, and the excess heat from it literally warms me up, which is not something to dismiss in the glorious UK winter.

Unfortunately I got curious, and the promise of better angles and less desk space sounded wonderful, so I bought a second hand BenQ ScreenBar. It took me months to realise that it was sucking the life, the creativity, and the will out of me.

I don't have a scientific explanation, but once I put my trusty IKEA desk lamp back with that halogen bulb I finally regained some of my stubbornness to do things. Is it CRI? Is it the colour temperature? Is it the infrared emissions? I don't know, and neither do others, but LED lighting is lifeless⁴. You can get away with it as some places, and it makes decent Christmas tree lights, for me, it's horrible as desk lighting.

Those LED street lights could also be better. Philips installed red, bat-friendly night-time lighting⁵ in 2018 in the Netherlands, and there are promising amber LED street light projects⁶ ⁷ - but we'll still light the night up. Because safety, convenience, and... because we're afraid of the dark? Even my desk lamp and it's halogen bulb contributes to this sinister light pollution, which disturbs or vaporises natural sleep and relaxation cycles.

Nowadays, thanks to the pandemic, I work from home. There are social implications and I'm extremely unhappy that my employer got rid of the yearly department and company level gatherings, leaving us with sad, online only events. However, the health benefits are incredible: I don't have to use an AC⁸.

I know people who go mad in the scourging heat of the British summer, which might even reach 30°C, so they set the AC to 18°C. And then in winter, usually the same people set the AC to 24°C.

The human temperature tolerance is meagre compared to a lot of animals. I have to wear thick wool jumpers (thanks to the universe, Aran knits exist⁹) below 20°C and shorts above ~26-27°C. I do get uncomfortable working when my room temperature is above 29°C - because it's not meant for working, we should be resting, like people in the mediterraneum used to at midday. I also put the heating on to keep my home above 18°C - which makes me question where us, humans, would be truly comfortable in the world, if we didn't have heating.

So you see: with the pandemic and with working from home I re-gained one, albeit small natural cycle: that winter is colder and summer is warmer.

But what about the other cycles?

What about seasonal eating, about what food should and shouldn't we eat at different times of the day? What about the cycles of shorter and longer day? Shouldn't we align our working and sleeping hours instead of going 9-5 like machines? What about night and day cycles, shouldn't we have actual darkness at some point? About body meridian cycles, one's natural sleep patterns, and so on? Why are we trying to eliminate cycles?

Words from the greatest ever film monologue might be apt here:

Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!

Charlie Chaplin - The Final Speech from The Great Dictator¹⁰

But what if that's the goal, machine men, with machine hearts?

What if all these small cycles are hidden reminders of the one cycle nobody can bypass: that our life begins and ends. That everything decays. Is that why we're trying to murder the nights, the yearly, the seasonal, the daily cycles, so that our own cycle will also stop?

I wouldn't be surprised if the nation leaders recently caught on tape discussing living up to 150¹¹ would think this way. I'm really hoping that Chaplin wasn't wrong, and

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

still stands.

But to return a bit from the disturbed thoughts maybe the secret is to slowly but steadily embrace what we can.

Working from home opens the door not just for the temperature cycles to creep in, but to have a nap when needed. Blackouts are available to make our rooms truly dark throughout the night. We can email our city councillors to embrace wildlife friendly, more natural street lights. And we can put halogen bulbs into our desk lamps - that is as long as we can buy and stockpile halogen and incandescent bulbs.

eXistenZ (1999) is a dividing film, but I believe it's genius and disturbing..
SPOILER
During the movie, Allegra, at one point, at the trout farm, repeats her sentence exactly the same way, which she previously described to be a tell-tale of NPCs. In the end both Ted and Allegra behave very much like NPC, with their expressions, the way of talking, limited reactions, etc. So the real question is: who is the player? I'm not alone trying to figure it out: https://moviechat.org/tt0120907/eXistenZ/58c764d26b51e905f682e9ad/The-dog-is-the-proof?reply=58c764d26b51e905f682e9df
↩︎
https://www.businessinsider.com/divide-between-west-east-berlin-from-space-today-2019-11 ↩︎
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/white-led-turning-purple-analyzing-a-phosphor-failure/↩︎
https://nymag.com/strategist/article/led-light-bulbs-investigation.html ↩︎
https://images.philips.com/is/content/PhilipsConsumer/PDFDownloads/Global/Case-studies/CSLI20180612_001-UPD-en_AA-Nieuwkoop-bat-friendly-lighting-case-study-philips-light-recipe-June-18.pdf ↩︎
https://www.optic-gaggione.com/materials/amber-optics-for-street-lighting/↩︎
https://www.mic-led.com/news/why-cities-are-vying-for-amber-led-street-light-the-futures-orange ↩︎
https://cubari.moe/read/gist/JYHJU/011/3/↩︎
https://www.aran.com/↩︎
https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/synopsis/articles/29-The-Great-Dictator-s-Speech ↩︎
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko ↩︎

The tiny office, the compact cassettes, and the speaker upgrades

2025-12-16T14:39:30+00:00

Thanks to a vintage receiver that came with the cassette deck, which I got because I had to deal with my box of cassettes from my childhood days, I upgraded my office desk speakers.

My tiny home office desk

At the end of 2019 we moved into THE average UK house: the mythical semi-detached, as a friend referred to it. He was brought up in Bath, which, apparently, lacks these omnipresent dwellings, so when he moved out from there and was presented with them - as these were often mentioned as the national average - he greeted them as a beast of myths and legends.

It's a mid 50s Laing Easiform, one of the non traditional constructions - concrete in the UK is non-traditional, given a meagre 100 years of these being built doesn't add up to tradition yet - that was not deemed faulty in the '85 incursion into prefab houses. Possibly because it's not prefab¹.

Saying that this house is 3 bedroom is overselling it a bit: there are two large-ish bedrooms, and one ~2.4x2.4m, which became my office and our guest room. Because of this, my desk is rather cramped: it's whole 25 + 80 cm wide, 80cm deep, a now discontinued IKEA Ivar drop down desk, so it can be closed when the room acts as a guest bedroom. I'd definitely love a stereotypical hacker basement² but I'll work with what I have.

It looks better now, this was in between the first and second lockdowns, in 2020

In 2020, when the world was told to stay at home, we bought floorstanding speakers to bring a bit more of the world home. The Panasonic micro bookshelf speakers, SB-PM500 that I got for about £20 when we moved to the UK in 2012 moved up with me. I tried to play with their placement, but you can see, there aren't many good options. I was driving them with a £15 class-D micro amp, a ZK-502T.

Budget, yes. Audiophile, no. Panasonic SB-PM500 speakers with a ZK-502T amplifier PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/20 sec, ISO 1600 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Sidenote: for me, it seems like that with cheap class-D amps one needs a lot of luck with speaker pairing. As I wrote before³ moving from a Topping MX3 to a NAD C 316BEE V2, which is still a budget amp, for the Dali Oberon 5 pair we have was an insane difference. Maybe higher end class-D is good, but in my very limited experience, the cheap ones are prone to speaker pairing, so consider getting a used AB class amplifier instead.

Another sidenote: some years ago I had the chance to bring my beloved-as-teen speakers from home - just the speakers, as the CD player of the base unit was dead already (SA-AK18). Since then I learnt the phrase "black plastic crap⁴" - and once I heard those old, space-grey, futuristic speakers against the small ones, I understood why the term. The smaller ones were better in every possible way, and I ended up donating the old ones. The lesson here: looks are deceiving for an untrained eye, especially for young, untrained eyes.

I don't have photos of my own old system, I snatched this from eBay. It played a lot of trance and metal. I was a teen around 2000.

Ever since the Oberons I've been after better speakers for this small, limited, super near field listening space (LOL) for years. I think what was holding me back was knowing that the amp not up to driving real speakers so I kept putting the topic off.

I was very close to buying and AudioEngine A1, tiny, active pair, that's discontinued now. Not the A2 - the A1 still had the power supply in the box, as I'm getting very tired of external power bricks. It turned out: the A1 doesn't have grills, which is a must with a 3.5 year old in the house. The longer he doesn't know there's something behind the cover, the better. I also started reading up on the Adam Audio D3V, but the inner voice was telling me I wouldn't like them. And it also has a power brick.

Recently, however, things got shaken up a bit because of a box of cassettes.

The Revenge of the Box of Compact Cassettes

We were back at home in Hungary recently, where my father keeps giving me my own boxes filled with my own things that I still have at their place.

It's entirely valid, but it's not always simple to move my things via commercial airplanes: to make it worth it I need to pack an extra, exactly 20kg luggage. This time I managed, and I ended up with a large set of cassettes - which are apparently making a comeback to mainstream media?!

Music was different 30+ years ago PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/20 sec, ISO 100 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

To at least have some vague idea what's on them I also brought my Panasonic walkman and my Aiwa dictaphone - both dead.

The Panasonic needed new belts: they were just crumbles at this point. It was playing too slow, but this was a relatively easy fix, though not measured yet, as I don't have an oscilloscope.

I really should buy an oscilloscope.

Regardless, it's left channel is partially dead, possibly a head alignment problem, and I couldn't yet get to it.

The Aiwa looks full on dead, and it's not the belts. One day I'll start working on it. Hopefully.

So I bought a cassette deck

To overcome the problem of not having something to play the cassettes with, and because I never had a proper one, I started I looking on eBay for a cassette deck. I ended up bidding on a whole stack of JVC: receiver, phono, tape deck, and ITT speakers, and I won them - for £13.38 the whole, with a 20 minutes driving. And with the promise of "it worked when I put it away".

When people tell you to be really aware of thing sold as "it worked when I put it away" you should listen - unless you know how to or want to learn how to fix things, like me.

The cigarette home smell from the equipment was ruthless. I let them air for some days, didn't work. I bought some Neutradol spray, sprayed them let them air many more days, that finally did the job, but they still puff occasionally. This is despite the fact that they are basically spotless: barely any dust or anything. Way too many people smoked in their back in the 'olden days, and it just soaked into everything.

The JVC KD-A11⁵ Stereo Cassette Deck is gorgeous. It has VU meters, large, physical buttons. It's not high end, as it's a 2 head system, but it's already much more complicated mechanically, than I was expecting it to be.

Looks like fun, doesn't it?

Nearly everything works, except fast forward. Unfortunately it doesn't seems to be a belt issue, so my desire to learn how to repair these things will soon come true - once I find the time. Does anyone have time for sale?

It sounds absolutely amazing compared to what I remembered about the sound of cassettes. Not my old recordings from VIVA through the TV, recorded by another black plastic crap system; those are miserable compared to streaming, or even against low quality mp3-s. But the genuine, store bought ones, those are actually quite nice, so I'm not entirely stunned about their comeback. I could even do a decent recording on a Type IV (metal) tape as a test.

the front of JVC KD-A11 PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/30 sec, ISO 800 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

the front profile of JVC KD-A11 PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/30 sec, ISO 800 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

the back of JVC KD-A11 PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/30 sec, ISO 800 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

But I also bought a turntable?

Because it was the full stack from 1980, it had turntable. I was told that the JVC L-A11⁶ got a new belt, and that it's fixed now. Well... no.

The belt was indeed replaced, but that was far from the only problem:

completely, rock solid stuck spindle
warped and twisted stylus
misaligned cartridge

Now the rest is also fixed - thanks to @12voltvids on youtube⁷ for the idea to heat the spindle to pull it apart, though it did take a frightening amount of heating from a heat gun. Unfortunately I scratched it with the pliers despite the layers of cloth between them, but I was able to polish it out in the end.

I bought a new stylus that fits the original cartridge⁸, aligned the cartridge, configured the counterweight. I now have a working phono - without vinyls, because I bought the stack for the cassette deck.

So in order to be able to at least test it bought a Vivaldi: Four Seasons for a whole £1 in a charity shop - and I was overjoyed with the sound. Seems like there's definitely a lot of truth about old mastering quality, because that Vivaldi recording from the 70s packs some unbelievable detail compared to super-duper hi-res quality whatever in the streaming services.

For anyone wondering, it's connected to the NAD, it has a phono preamp. No, I'm not going to go down the cartridge rabbit hole, it's too deep, and it's for people with vinyl, which I still don't have, and I don't really intend to have - it's too expensive.

JVC L-A11 LP PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.0, 1/60 sec, ISO 400 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

And I now have a vintage receiver?

The receiver, JVC R-S11⁹, is mint. Apart from two dead bugs that were inside the display - cleaned now -, it's in perfect condition. No dead capacitors, barely any dust inside.

There were spots I thought are leaking capacitors, only to learn that some capacitors are glued down.

The pots and meters needed cleaning, those made a lot of cracking sound, isopropyl alcohol was my friend here. All the contact sprays contain terrible things, I'll try to stay away from them.

Anyhow, the receiver is a beauty, and it sounds amazing for it's age.

JVC R-S11L Stereo Receiver front PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.0, 1/30 sec, ISO 800 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

JVC R-S11L Stereo Receiver back PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.0, 1/30 sec, ISO 800 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

JVC R-S11L Stereo Receiver front, turned off PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.0, 1/30 sec, ISO 800 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

JVC R-S11L Stereo Receiver inside opened up PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/5.6, 1/20 sec, ISO 800 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

And late '60s speakers?!

I ended up selling the ITT KS 665 speakers on eBay already - I don't have the space for them. I hope someone is going to be extremely happy, given they got it for £0.99 plus delivery.

I need to be realistic about restoring something that I need to learn how to do from scratch, considering my free time scarcity. It would be a waste to store these in the shed for a decade, only to let them rot away. Considering their age, they sounded surprisingly nice in vocal and high range, so they'd probably made acceptable studio monitors, given they are sealed cabinets, but they are hard to drive.

The front of ITT KS 665 speakers PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/60 sec, ISO 400 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The side of ITT KS 665 speakers PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/5.6, 1/60 sec, ISO 800 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The back of ITT KS 665 speakers PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/60 sec, ISO 800 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Different, small speakers, however...

As told in the beginning, I have been eye-ing upgrades for the Panasonics for quite a while now, but various things kept holding me back.

During the summer I went to a bar, Flakon¹⁰, in Budapest, with friends - only to be greeted with 4, very Dali-looking speakers inside. People, please, PLEASE put audiophile speakers at more venues, bars, cafés. They can deliver music at much lower volume, so people can hear each other. It's a wonderful experience. It kept bothering me because I couldn't find them in the lineup, but their appearance and sound was telling me they can't be old, and that they are for sure Dali. After some luck I found them: they were Zensor 3-s.

It's very hard to find information on discontinued lines, even if they are from 2015, when the internet was already omnipresent and in everyone's pocket, which is quite annoying. It'd be great to have a dedicated sections, corners, on manufacturer websites, that act like museums for old products. I'm also looking at you, IKEA.

When looking at Zensor 1-s, Oberon 1-s, coughing at the price of Menuet, I came across a surprise: the Dali Zensor Pico. This thing is the same size as my Panasonics!

	Width	Height	Depth	Frequency range	Sensitivity	Nominal Impedance	Weight
Panasonic SB-PM500	145mm	224mm	197mm	74 - 27000 Hz -10 dB	80.5 dB/W	6Ω	1.9 kg
Dali Oberon 1	162mm	274mm	234mm	51 - 26000 Hz +/- 3 dB	86 dB/W	6Ω	4.2 kg
Dali Zensor 1	162mm	274mm	220mm	53 - 26500 Hz +/- 3 dB	86.5 dB/W	6Ω	4.2 kg
Dali Zensor Pico	145mm	232mm	196mm	62 - 26500 Hz +/- 3 dB	84 dB/W	6Ω	3.08 kg

Giving specs at -10 dB, Panasonic, sure, not cheating at all. No wonder it sounded so boxy.

I found 3 of them on eBay, and won the bid at £83 + £20 delivery - they were probably satellites in surround system. I love them, and they fit the unforgivably small space.

With the covers on it's only the brand that could give the quality difference away PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/20 sec, ISO 1600 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The backs start to tell the story better: the unfinished MDF and the terminals that I added - they were bare wires - compared to the neat banana plug terminals and the finished surfaces PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/20 sec, ISO 1600 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

With the covers off the differences are immediately more stark - if you know what to look for. PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/20 sec, ISO 1600 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Speaker positioning makes a frightening difference. I put them on two, currently unused cork yoga blocks, and it would be better to get them even higher, but due to the options available, that's not yet possible (the monitor arm on the left is in the way).

Yoga blocks as desktop speaker stands PENTAX K-5 II s, 18.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/10 sec, ISO 1600 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 ED AL [IF] DC WR ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Some closing thoughts

Music has been important for me as long as I can remember, much more, then equipment, but once I stopped going to loud music parties I started missing them. I tried playing guitar, but it's not for me, so I'm thankful to those who can and do play anything.

I always thought live music or at least from speakers is a whole level of different experience, then music from headphones, and a recent study¹¹ ¹² seem to finally back it up that resonance, music, etc reaches our cells. Obviously not limited to musical frequencies, which is probably why Chinese medicine says the food for the Pericardium Meridian is sunlight.

All of those healing with sounds things that many people think is bogus might finally be proved. Cats know this, their purr heals them, and possibly us as well. I dislike how people think of senses: one for seeing, one for hearing, etc, when, for example, our whole body feels heat, yet it's all different wavelength energy. Experiencing with our whole body should be important.

If you're like me, and can't go to parties any more, treat yourselves with some music that reaches your whole body¹³, not just your ears. It's important.

Simplifying music playback

2025-11-04T09:41:51+00:00

I decided to throw complications away and use a tablet, and a tablet alone via it's headphone jack to the amplifier. Blasphemy, sacrilege - no separate DAC, no dedicated streamer, no NAS, no nothing.

In 2023, I wrote another entry: The quest for simple, high quality music and video playback in 2023¹ My plan was to turn that entry into a digital garden² entity, but I came to realise it'd be an overgrown garden if I only ever just add to it. So: new post it is.

No capes snowflakes!

In my previous entry I established the following:

things need to be able to run on their own, long term
they need to be simple enough so any family members can use it, children included
someone with a baseline IT knowledge can learn how to maintain it

But that second point... just because it's not snowflake, it can still be too complex.

The 2025 Chromecast Audio Troubles

When 2025 started I had the setup of:

a streamer or renderer, in form of:
- a TV
- a Chromecast with Google TV
- a Chromecast Audio
tablet, phone, etc as controller and as data source
amplifier
speakers

So at this point I already got rid of the separate NAS.

Early March in 2025 however, brought something unexpected: The Chromecast Apocalypse - Reddit will tell you a lot about it³. To keep it simple, the on-device certificates expired after 10 years and Google took a week to fix it, but I wasn't sure there will be a fix at all.

I have been having troubles with the Chromecast Audio connectivity before, I decided to dust off the Rasbperry Pi approach once again.

It was a pleasant surprise that Raspotify, MPD, and upmpdcli works perfectly, just as I left them 2 years ago. I bought a Hifiberry DAC+⁴ off ebay to boost the quality a bit, and it's so far pretty nice, and sold the CCA.

And it was fun... until a Spotify API update, at which point it broke, again. Or when it randomly stopped playing and refused to do anything until a reboot.

Source! Controller! Renderer! ... But... why?

After the both the Chromecast Audio and the Raspberry Pi failures I decided to revisit the whole source - controller - renderer idea. Is it possible to merge them?

There are fanastic all-in-one solutions now, but I'm sceptical how long they'll last. Given how the CCA failed in 10 years, unless I go for something extendable, like a NAD C 3050⁵, chances are it'll go bust as well in no time. The WiiM Ultra looks like a fantastic option though⁶.

So I decided to run an experiment: to use a Samsung SM-T545, better known as Galaxy Tab Active Pro⁷ tablet, with a 2TB microSD card, as the center of it all. It's 10.1" tablet aimed at enterprise and light industrial use, as comes with a protective case by default, IP65 rating, so it's somewhat child-proof. Has a replaceable battery (sic!) so there's a bit of longevity, and still has a 3.5mm headphone jack.

A single table as music/media center PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/20 sec, ISO 800 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

After some troubles I eventually got that microSD card - the envelope arrived dirty, weeks later, after I kept chasing DHL, but at least it got here. It can hold my whole media collection - yes, it fits on 2TB. An easy feat when they are ripped CDs and DVDs, or flacs from bandcamp.

Loaded with local data, and official apps for streaming, this setup is much closer to a physical media collection, then having a NAS, a renderer/streamer, and a controller separately.

DAC? I already have one...

There's a lot of information out there. And a lot of opinions. And, in many cases, people confuse those two. One forum claims to be scientific, but limits their measurement by not taking the human ear and perceived hearing into account. Other base everything on human hearing, without relable scientific approach. There are good attempts, but they are rare⁸.

Among the many things these two camps can't agree on is if there's a difference between DACs - as in the chips and devices that convert bits to sound. I was curious, so I bought a second hand Cambridge Audio DACmagic XS - a micro, portable DAC. It did sound nice, but I couldn't shake the feeling that (a) it's louder, than any other output I have and

it colours the sound.

Mainly though it's utter pain to have it with a tablet that has a single USB-C connection: I need to connect a hub that can do PD charging; it's micro USB, and the last time I tried a USB-C to microUSB cable, it overheated the DACmagic.

The tablet already has a jack output. At the level I can afford to listen to music, which isn't only limited by wealth, but by space, time, a young child, hearing, and so on, the built in jack of that tablet is already crystal clear, and it's convenience is inquestionable.

I checked my hearing. With good headphones I seem to hear up to 18kHz at the volume I'd listen music; 19kHz if I push the volume up, but basically nothing abouve that. This is less, than the people who can hear the differences between DACs⁹. I'm 40 years old, so it's most likely downhill from here.

So at this point the stack has reduced to:

a 32" gaming monitor with built-in speakers¹⁰ - my previous TV died, and I didn't like a single one of the new TVs picture, hence the IPS gaming monitor that actually lets me see the dark parts in movies, unlike UltraSuperMegaHDR OLEDs
a Chromecast with Google TV
a tablet
an amplifier
speakers

And it lets me focus on the music without worrying about stuff breaking every week.

About shoes, discipline, comfort zone, and maintenance

2025-05-18T21:00:13+00:00

I bought a surprising amount of shoes in the past 2 years, but this journey of the feet highlighted important observations in maintaining ourselves.

A while ago I was sitting with a morning coffee and found myself pondering over other's shoes. Casual, light shoes, sneakers, trainers, running shoes everywhere. Barely ever a well-made leather boot, which, considering winter, is my first choice. Studies say over-cushioned footwear is really not good for us in the long term. For me, certainly not: I need a decent arc support, which is a rarity in the UK, so I resort to aftermarket insoles - or so I thought.

Once every half year now I show myself at work, for our all-hands. Since I work in IT, I'm used to wearing and seeing people in hoodies, t-shirts, and all that jazz, but for that twice a year gathering I try to show up nicer, in some level of business casual. And I'm slowly finding myself alone with this, as I've seen people come in shorts.

When I was a kid - mind you, we're talking 30+ years now - it was considered minimum etiquette to dress up for theatre, opera, ballet, etc. As time progressed I saw people go business casual first, then complete casual. I still, to this very day, believe that showing up in decent apparel is a way of expressing respect, so with live performances of such, I consider it a must - obviously not for a metal concert or an industrial party though.

I practice martial arts that has their own uniforms. I was never keen on the idea that practising anything needs a specific type of clothing but for sturdiness, but I also never actively went against it. After discussions with various people it became clear how it can signal both belonging from the group perspective, and dedication from the student. It also helps to be mentally present: a small ritual of changing into the right clothes for the coming class.

Somewhere I read that a little while ago being able to hold a job and raising a family were things to be proud of, and how it got distorted by now. To me, the utter lack of discipline in clothing feels part of this trend. Whatever doesn't feel comfortable can't be good for you, right?

Well, that is quite untrue. Overly comfortable, cloudy-soft sofas will wreck your body, so will the lack of exercise. Even if it looks OK, it can be deceiving. About a decade ago I ended up having an MRI on my lower back, because whenever I lifted my right thighs I felt a lightning-like pain, starting from the lower back, down to my ankles. I went to physio, and eventually got rid of it - until 2020. During the pandemic I ordered an IKEA Markus chair, and within a few months, the same pain came back out of nowhere - allowing me to realise I was using the same chair at work when it first manifested! I ended up buying a second hand Herman Miller Aeron fairly cheap - no issues since then.

So the solution is to "get out of your comfort zone"?

The "comfort zone" is this ideal place where you can be as lazy as you want to be, and live happily ever after. If you "feel like you need to get out of your comfort zone", you're not in your comfort zone. However: that "happily ever after" doesn't go hand in hand with complete laziness. You must work on your body, otherwise it'll go bad, go off, like old milk. If you really don't care of yourself, you'll smell like old milk as well, which is certainly not nice for anyone, including you. Remember: If you feel like you hate yourself, have a shower¹.

This is why I believe that "comfort zone" is often misunderstood or misused. It's the nice place, the one where things work, your equipment doesn't break down, where you have enough money to not worry, or at least not much, where food is fine, your home is warm, where you have people around you, where you feel good, and where your body is in a good condition. But it's not lazy, it can't be. With too much comfort, too much laziness, your body will not be in a nice condition at all, which means that in order to maintain that "comfort zone" you need to work quite a lot on it. This also applies to the rest: you need to maintain friendships, maintain the influx of money, maintain your equipment, so they don't break down.

Some of it can be done near invisibly, though. You can get a hard, high quality mattress² ³, which will require your body to shift in sleep, which you do for 1/3rd of you life. You can take regular hot baths; go to a spa do to the same, or maybe go further, and find an accupressure specialist⁴ to maintain your chi flow.

You can also make conscious choices on footwear.

In the past 2 years I bought 5 shoes/boots, and kept 3 in the end. This is an absolute extreme for me so far, a record for my live, given I tend to wear my boots for at minimum 5 years if not more.

One I sold. I found it at half price in a TK Maxx: an AKU Grizzly 907/3 10 7 country boot⁵ which was absurdly comfortable, but overly warm. After wearing it twice on the coldest possible days in Cambridge, and ending up sweating, but someone bought it from me on eBay is is very happy with it.

AKU Grizzly moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/100 sec, ISO 75 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The other was an expensive choice in a disappointed moment: a Cheaney & Sons Hurricane Boot⁶ The story behind it is that I've been looking to get a replacement for my now 9 year old Martens Samuel boots, and I did so for 2 years. In one bitter moment of yet again being unable to find anything decent for my feet, I walked into their Cambridge store, told them what I'm after, and they gave me a surprisingly well fitting, astonishing boot. I was not expecting that it'll need a month to break in. By the way, if I managed to keep this shoe worn for 7+ years, which I intend to, it's not that expensive when realised for the time frame.

Joseph Cheaney & Sons Hurricane II C Derby Boot in Black Kudu Leather moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/721 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

What I was also not expecting is that once I put in an arc-supporting insole, like I do with all my boots, it'll start to show the same, rather extreme wear pattern when I only wear out the sole at the outer edge of the heel. And it got me thinking - do I still need that support I thought I do? Were the custom made insoles in Hungary different, because back then, this kind of wear pattern was never an issue, only since I started wearing the ones I got in the UK? Had my body changed?

The concerning heel wear of the Cheaney that was so far worn with 3rd party arc support insoles moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/643 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The extreme wearout of the re-soled, much loved, old, Lowa Mountain Boots that I now only use for gardening moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/142 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Our bodies change, I shouldn't even question that. They need different kinds of maintenance throughout or lives: sometimes to develop muscle, coordination, other times to strengthen the core, the joints, tendons, ligaments; yet times to soften up stiffness, and all the time: stretching. My body, while it's hard to accept, has changed a lot over it's 4 decades course, so there's every chance that my feet need different support now, than it did 20 or 30 years ago.

Some while ago I was reading the r/onebag/⁷ subreddit and came across the Xero Prio⁸. I usually don't like running shoes, but I was looking for a lightweight backup shoes for decades (I'm not joking), and this caught my eyes - especially their claim on being "foot shaped". When it was finally back in stock, I ordered one. My feet is approximately 275mm in light socks, so I ordered a UK 9.5 - and it was the perfect size. Too bad the first pair had a manufacturing fault (the lining had a bump at the front, which pushed my right large toe to the side, which was utterly uncomfortable), but after a weird return process, where they asked me to mark the bad shoes with bright paint and send the photo of it, I got a replacement pair, and I'm surprisingly happy with it.

What's different with them is their absurd lightness, like not wearing anything, which is also because of the shape, and indeed, it's unusual. Also much more comfortable, as there's no pressure on the toes from either side. The barefoot feeling it gives with the thin but tough soles and the 3mm insole is also different to what I'm used to but I think it's part of the whole experience. These are really good shoes, and though it's supposed to be a fitness/running shoe, it's performing quite well for my everyday tasks so far, but it's going to be quite strange at first.

Xero Prio shoes moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/606 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

However, Xero also has nicer looking shoes, so I ordered a leather lined Denver boot from them. I ended up returning it within minutes from receiving - the relatively strong boot with the thin sole was weird, but the tongue was pressing on my ankles bones at a painful position was a deal breaker.

The last one I got was an Altberg Blueline Aqua⁹ (UK 9.5 as well, a tiny bit airy in light socks, but perfect with normal weight socks). I got these to replace my second, now ~8 years old Lowa Mountain Boots. Those (the Lowa) originally arrived with a wrinkle in the lining that took months to get used to, had a partial resoling done about 2 years ago, and had already worn out that re-sole at the extreme of the outside of both heels. It also didn't feel good to walk in them any more, and decided, with a heavy heart, to throw them out - which was the plan when I got the AKU above, which didn't work.

About a decade ago I already tried ordering from Altberg, and I found the boot extremely well made - but not for the shape of my feet, as I have slightly upwards angled large toes, which doesn't allow me to wear anything that has a sloping toe box. However, in the years since, Altberg started a new last which they call Aforme¹⁰, an addition to their traditional lasts¹¹. Surprise: it's also more foot shaped and fits much, much better! However, I'm still in the process of getting a hang of this boot - the foot part is spot on, but I need to get happy with the stitching line of the collar.

Altberg Blueline Aqua Boots moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/768 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

So there: now I have 3, relatively new shoes. I removed the non-original arc supporting insoles from the Cheaney, and I will not put one back in.The Xero and the Altberg came with their own insoles, so I will focus more on walking with my core - essentially my dan tien - activated. I'm hoping to have a better wearing pattern, and thus, to maintain a healthy joint and support system.

Update 2025-05-18: I tried the famed Northsole zero-drop 3mm insole. I seriously don't like it, it feels stuffy and unnatural; the stock Altberg and Xero insoles feel nicer.

Sole shape comparison between the Xero Prio, the Cheaney Hurricane, and the Altberg Blueline Aqua moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/891 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Toe box shape comparison between the Xero Prio, the Cheaney Hurricane, and the Altberg Blueline Aqua moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/814 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

This all ties back to those strange interrelation between discipline, comfort, posture, and all. If I buy cushioned, cloudy shoes, my body will go lazy, so I need to get shoes with less or different kind of support, and serious concentration on re-training my gait.

If I show up at work gathering in full casual, people will react and expect accordingly: maybe not giving me opportunities or not having the right effect when needed, which can eventually lead to a drop in my comfort by a stagnating income.

I don't think any of these are "getting out of the comfort zone", but efforts to stay in the comfort zone as long as possible. The lazy zone - that's the real problem, when we don't do the maintenance, and when we forget to question if we're doing it right. Not out of routine, but out of what is actually needed, revisited, revised, when required - especially for the body, which constantly changes.

How to block and confuse AI crawlers with nepenthes and fail2ban

2025-08-30T05:12:07+00:00

A quick guide on combining an anti-AI tarpit with automatic blocking

GenAI is a disgusting, festering thing that keeps getting worse by the day. And night. And minute. They relentlessly ignore rules, copyright, established practices and standards¹ - and that's just the technical perspective, let alone the morally implicating ones².

People came up with proof-of-work JS solutions to block the attacks off³, and while it's the proper solution against the issue, I wanted something different.

A little while ago I came across with AI "poisoning" tarpits⁴. While it's a wonderful idea, it turned out that there are many, many, MANY bots that would gladly get lost 5-6 levels deep in the link maze it generates, happily heating my meager server CPU (I use a passively cooled thin client as my server), so I decided to add a fail2ban blocking on top.

I do have to note that if you run a web application that is JS dependent anyway, you're probably best off setting up Anubis. This solution is more fitting for websites that don't need or use JS. There's a promised no-JS version of Anubis, but it's not there yet.

1: add a rule to your robots.txt to disallow any visits to a certain path url on your site

User-agent: *
Disallow: /ohwowyoushouldntbehere

2: add an invisible url pointing to the disallowed path on your site, ideally on every page

<a href="/ohwowyoushouldntbehere" title="Please do not visit this link, if, somehow, you can see it. It's not meant to be visited." ></a>

3: set up Nepenthes⁵ on the disallowed path

templates/toplevel.lustache

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" >
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
</head>
<body>
    <p>You shouldn't be on this page. Please leave.</p>
    <article>
        {{ content }}
    </article>
</body>
</html>

templates/list.lustache

<h3>{{ header }}</h3>
{{# content }}
<p>
        {{ content }}
</p>
{{/ content }}
<ul>
{{# links }}
        <li><a href="{{{ prefix }}}/{{{ link }}}">{{ description }}</a></li>
{{/ links }}
</ul>

config.yml

http_host: '127.0.0.1'
http_port: 8893
templates: './templates'
words: '/usr/share/dict/words'

forget_time: 86400
forget_hits: 10

persist_stats: './statsfile.json'
seed_file: './seed.txt'

markov: './corpus.sqlite.db'
markov_min: 200
markov_max: 1200

min_wait: 5
max_wait: 30

You can find the rest of setting up Nepenthes on the project site at https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

I ended up training it on Ulysses by James Joyce, obtained from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4300/pg4300.txt

4: block anything that visits it more, than X times with fail2ban

Note: I'm using ncsa log format in nginx as:

access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log ncsa;

filter.d/nginx-nepenthes.conf

before = common.conf

[Definition]
failregex = ^[a-zA-Z\.]+ <HOST> [^\s]+ [^\s]+ \[[^\]]+\] \"[A-Z]+ \/ohwowyoushouldntbehere.*$
datepattern = %%d/%%b/%%Y:%%H:%%M:%%S
journalmatch = _SYSTEMD_UNIT=nginx.service + _COMM=nginx
ignoreregex =

Relevant lines in jail.local:

[nginx-nepenthes]
enabled = true
port = 80,443
filter = nginx-nepenthes
logpath = /var/log/nginx/access.log
maxretry = 3
bantime = 84600
searchtime = 86400

The outdoor socket and the monster that is the Skoda Mode 2 cable

2025-05-04T20:59:00+00:00

We got a new (to us) car because a truck liberated us from the one we bought a year ago. Since this one is a plug-in hybrid, I wanted to charge it from an outdoor socket using the official 3 pin cable. Apparently it's not this simple.

tl;dr

Do not buy super expensive EV rated socket plates, they are a rip-off, cheap, safe ones exist.

For outdoor charging your car with a Mode 2 cable, buy the BG WP21¹, outdoor, EV rated socket. B&Q sells it at £10.60². If your car charger cable has a normal size cable (like a hair dryer) and a normal size plug, you're done.

If not, get a Wessex Electrical SFG06 outdoor box as well. Toolstation sells it at £11.49³ . Then move the EV rated plate from the WP21 into the SFG06.

The longer version

Last year we bought a 2019 Skoda Octavia and we were happy with it. Then mid March 2025, a lorry decided to make it a Cat-S write-off. Thankfully nobody got hurt, and we even received a dashcam footage to prove it was not our fault, but we still lost our car.

Our old, 2004 Toyota is not in a good shape at all, so couldn't afford to wait for the perfect car to come up, and ended up buying an Octavia plug-in hybrid, aka IV.

When we moved to our house in 2019 we had to have the whole house re-wired. At that time I had a 32A cable on it's own breaker (the whole house is on RCD at this point) installed at the front, but so far, it was just a socket, with the circuit breaker off, never used.

Given everything is ready, I started looking at type 2 chargers. Wow.

Apparently I'd be paying well into £700+ despite having the RCD, cabling, everything ready. Then there's the interoperability question, because why, oh why, would there be a single system for this - chargers are either OVO, Octopus, or nothing smart compatible. So I decided to sit this one out for a while.

Looking at a few forum posts, and given the battery in the car is a meager - in EV terms - 13kWh , 3 pin charging overnight is a viable option. I learned a lot refers to this a "granny" charging, but I think this is quite rude, so I prefer not to use it.

Since our car came with a 3 pin plug, I gave it a try. But... that 3 pin socket and the cable diameter is monstrous.

Skoda Mode 2 3 pin charging cable - image from Skoda website

At first I tried replacing the switched socket with an unswitched one so the cable would be at the middle. It didn't help much, and if it would have, I would have made it dangerous, see later.

Notice how the tail of the plug already doesn't fit in the grey plastic at the bottom, and this is with an unswitched socket - with the switched, which is the one you must use, it's even worse moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/306 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

This is the max it can be closed - not quite IP66. moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/288 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

On the SpeakEV forum, someone mentioned a Wessex ⁴ box which was large enough for their cable, so I gave it a go. The problem is: this is not EV rated.

I've learned that 13A rated sockets can't actually maintain even 10A load for many hours for many months. Many overheat and burn, which is not really what you want with your electrical socket, your expensive charging cable, and your expensive car.

The BS1363 standard was updated, and now there's a BS1363/EV or BS1363-2 that actually can do what you one would expect by specification from any socket made in the past few decades.

unswitched socket - normal BS1363 moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/399 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

switched socket - BS1363/EV moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/242 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

I looked around and found a BG WP21, which is EV rated - but it was the same size of that I already hat. I had to also buy the Wessex and the replace the plates.

Well... nearly. Because the socket is not in the middle I did have to chip away a small, black, quite sharp, and barely visible piece of plastic.

Get rid of these. There's 4 all together: top and bottom, on the top and bottom of the rubber. moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/376 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

There's the size comparison:

BG WP21 on the left with an unswitched plate and Wessex Electrical SFG06 moto g(6) plus, 4.2 mm, f/1.7, 1/306 sec, ISO 50 ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

There: a large enough, EV rated, outdoor socket.

Cost of electric charging at home

The car can do about 30miles on electric, and it takes 13.5kWh to charge. My current electricity is locked at £0.24, so it's ~£3.24 to charge the car - £0.1 per mile.

On petrol, I'll assume it does around 40mpg. With petrol prices at the moment at ~£1.5/l that would give me £0.33 per mile, meaning the electrical charging is at least half, if not one third of the petrol price.

FreeBSD "kiosk" for home automation dashboard

2024-12-26T09:34:46+00:00

My current, FreeBSD based server for self-hosting and home automation - now with a touchscreen!

Background

For quite a few years now I have been looking for a small touchscreen, because I wanted a local (no network involved) interface for my home automation server. I tried the following which didn't work:

A Raspberry Pi (3b) with the official touchscreen. The official screen is 800*600, which is sad in 2024 (it was sad in the early 2000s already), and I ended up with severe realibility issues due to the horrors of the Pi's USB architecture and the Sonoff Zigbee adapter I'm using.
Cheap, Chinese, HDMI display: 1024*600, without any decent feature of a display, like power management: it just kept telling me there's no signal without going to sleep.
Mimo displays - driver horrors on linux, I haven't had that for decades. They are not useful as a general displays at all becase they need the OS to boot first, so no picture until the OS boots.
ELO POS terminal (1215L) which, apart from being way too large and heavy, also needs it's own, picky, horribly drivers for the touch part to work. It's also ancient, with a foil based touch solution, that feels rather horrible.

I nearly gave up: the machine I choose, the Lenovo M600 tiny (I have an unneeded on I'm currently selling, if anyone wants a fanless mini pc¹) only has 2 DisplayPort connectors, and DP -> HDMI adapters are not great. Then suddenly, I found the HP L7010t 10.1-inch Retail Touch Monitor²: Displayport + touch, no special drivers, and even FreeBSD's kernel can use the touch features out of the box.

Update: well, nothing is perfect. The HP's mounting space is about 2mm smaller, than the standard stands, so I ended up making a DIY stand by drilling a 10cm by 10cm square in the four corners into a steel bookend and bending it backwards.

Minimal X to run a single browser session on FreeBSD

On FreeBSD 14.1, the base system needed the following:

pkg install xorg xorg-server drm-kmod xf86-video-intel gsed surf-browser openbox

xf86-video-intel is not in the official documentation, but it's needed³.

Update: on FreeBSD 14.2, as long as 14.1 is supported, drm-kmod is broken⁴ because it's still built for 14.1 Instead use drm-515-kmod:

pkg install xorg xorg-server drm-515-kmod xf86-video-intel gsed surf-browser openbox

Tried twm, tinywm: they had issues with window size. Tried dwm but the menubar is annoying. Settled with openbox.

Tried midori, but wasn't working smooth, firefox-esr, but it consumed too much CPU and touch scrolling wasn't working fine, chromium which worked perfectly but had too much Google in it for this scenario, ~~surf-browser which didn't work at all. settled with epiphany~~. Update: I realized I wasn't starting surf-browser⁵ they way I should have, and it's much lighter, then epiphany, so surf it is. Note: it's not NetSurf⁶ - I'd love to use NetSurf, but it lacks the JavaScript support needed for Domoticz and Zigbee2MQTT.

These are needed to enable graphics and auto-power off the screen:

sysrc kld_list+=i915kms
sysrc blanktime=300

Create a user that will be logged in automaticaly:

pw adduser -n kioskuser -d /home/kioskuser -s /bin/sh

Set up auto login for this user:

cp /etc/gettytab /etc/gettytab.backup
gsed -ri 's/root/kioskuser/g' /etc/gettytab

In /etc/ttys change

ttyv0 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc"   xterm onifexists secure

ttyv0 "/usr/libexec/getty autologin"   xterm onifexists secure

Then create:

/home/kioskuser/.profile

ENV=$HOME/.shrc; export ENV

if [ "$PWD" != "$HOME" ] && [ "$PWD" -ef "$HOME" ] ; then cd ; fi

XPID=`pgrep xinit`
if [ -z "$XPID" ] && [ `tty` == "/dev/ttyv0" ]; then
  startx
fi

And:

/home/kioskuser/.xinitrc

#!/bin/sh

userresources=$HOME/.Xresources
usermodmap=$HOME/.Xmodmap
sysresources=/usr/local/etc/X11/xinit/.Xresources
sysmodmap=/usr/local/etc/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap

# merge in defaults and keymaps
if [ -f $sysresources ]; then
  xrdb -merge $sysresources
fi

if [ -f $sysmodmap ]; then
  xmodmap $sysmodmap
fi

if [ -f "$userresources" ]; then
  xrdb -merge "$userresources"
fi

if [ -f "$usermodmap" ]; then
  xmodmap "$usermodmap"
fi

xset +dpms
xset s on
xset s blank
openbox &
exec /usr/local/bin/epiphany

Which should auto-start X with epiphany.

Note: this is not hardened, if the browser is closed, the user will be in the shell, X and epiphany will not auto-restart.

Extra: home automation jail on `lo0` with PF firewall routing

I moved my services onto a single machine which now runs 3 jail: one for web and exposed to the world services, one for home automation, and one for minidlna. The first two listen on an extra 127.0.0.x on lo0, while the last has it's own IP. This also makes it quite simple to create a backup of them: I found zrepl⁷ and I can sync the jails onto a virtual machine on my laptop. Backup problem solved without needing to run yet another computer at home.

I ended up with this setup because my router - a FRITZ!Box 7530 AX - is surprisingly dumb, and can't comprehend the idea of multiple IPs on the same node, so to overcome any possible routing issue I decided to use a single IP initially and route everything with pf locally.

I mostly works, except for DLNA. I can't make the DLNA broascast packets work with this setup, so that jail is the exception, but I won't get into details with that now.

Zigbee2MQTT needs access to raw sockets, so that has to be reflected in the jail setup:

/etc/jail.conf

domoticz {
  exec.start = "/bin/sh /etc/rc";
  exec.poststart = "/bin/sh /usr/local/jails/domoticz/usr/local/etc/jail_dev_symlinks.sh";
  exec.poststart += "/usr/sbin/service pf reload";
  exec.stop = "/bin/sh /etc/rc.shutdown";
  exec.consolelog = "/var/log/jail_console_${name}.log";

  # PERMISSIONS
  allow.raw_sockets;
  allow.read_msgbuf;
  exec.clean;
  mount.devfs;
  devfs_ruleset = 3;
  allow.reserved_ports;

  # HOSTNAME/PATH
  host.hostname = "${name}";
  path = "/usr/local/jails/${name}";

  # NETWORK
  ip4.addr = 127.0.0.2;
  interface = lo0;
}

And to avoid issues with tty namings, I run a script to create the symlinks. I tried doing this properly with devd, but it's virtually impossible inside the jails to do it right.

/usr/local/jails/domoticz/usr/local/etc/jail_dev_symlinks.sh

#!/bin/sh

rootdir="/usr/local/jails/domoticz"
vendor="0x10c4"
product="0xea60"
ttyname=`sysctl dev.uslcom | grep "vendor=$vendor product=$product" | sed -r 's/.*ttyname=([^\s]+) .*/\1/'`
chgrp dialer $rootdir/dev/tty$ttyname
chown zigbee2mqtt $rootdir/dev/tty$ttyname 
chmod g+rw $rootdir/dev/tty$ttyname 
/bin/ln -s /dev/tty$ttyname $rootdir/dev/ttyUzigbee

As I mentioned, the two main jails listen on lo0 so they don't have issues of not having 127.0.0.1 resolved and so only what PF allows will be exposed this way.

/usr/local/etc/pf.conf

# vim: set ft=pf
# /usr/local/etc/pf.conf
 
lan="re0"
lo="lo0"
localnet = $lan:network
jail_domoticz="127.0.0.2"
local_ip="192.168.1.2"

# 8800: node-red
# 8880: zigbee2mqtt
# 8088: domoticz
# 1883: mqtt
rdr on $lan inet proto {tcp, udp} from any to $lan port {8800, 8880, 8088, 1883} -> $jail_domoticz
nat on $lan from { $jail_domoticz } to any -> $local_ip

block in all
block return

pass inet proto icmp icmp-type echoreq
pass quick proto pfsync
pass proto carp

# for jail
pass proto tcp from any to $jail_domoticz port { 8800, 8880, 8088, 1883 } keep state

# ssh - you probably want this
pass proto tcp from any to $lan port { 22 } keep state

pass from {$lan, $lo} to any keep state

pass out all keep state

Thoughts on Home Assistant

I gave Home Assistant yet another go. Every once in a while I try it out to see if it got simpler, but no: it's not even slowly becoming a bloated monster. It started as heaviweight, but it's just ridiculous now.

First and foremost their idea of supporting the last 2 versions of Python is already not true: I wasn't able to install the current version on 3.11, which FreeBSD 14.1 comes with. Not supporting stable Debian Python⁸ is a shitty decision.

In the end I wasn't able to install it at all. It's one thing that pip install needs to compile half the universe because it's not actually Python but C or Rust and it's not distributed for FreeBSD, but once it all looked good and I started hass is started to install even more Python modules.

This thing is badly designed, going entirely against ideas of simplicity and robustness, and I'm genuinely losing my belief in anything Python these days. So many projects out there will tell you "just use docker" thinking you want one more layer of complexity, or that it's available for you at all.

Dated or not, Domoticz is staying true to it's simle philosophy of it just works, and I'm going to stay loyal to it in the foreseable future.

Other notes

Don't try to run anything DLNA, like minidlna behind a firewall. It doesn't work.

When you have an evening and a morning in Granada

2024-06-24T09:00:08+00:00

A brief visit to the a wonderful old town and an unbelievably serene Generalife

The Pa-Kua¹ Open Classes 2024 Europe (a yearly gathering for the martial studies school I'm learning from) were held in Malága this year. Considering how close it is to Granada, where the legendary Alhambra is located at, it would have been a shame not to visit the place.

My way there was not without tiny bumps, the first being the glorious 12°C I left at 04:30 from Cambridge (to get the 05:17 train for the 8:30? flight to Malága, because there were no flights for the day to Granada from Stansted). When I got to Malága, it was hot for trousers with boots, but not intolerable. Buy bus tickets from ALSA² online, because the spanish seem to be very relaxed about opening the only booth for bus tickets...

The bus way to Granada is beautiful, passing the Sierra Nevada, countless olive farms - but there were so many clouds, and, escaping the monstrous weather from the UK I was getting disappointed. That was until I got off the bus, and the heat hit me. Eventually I stopped on the street and changed to sandals and a shirt, only to see a pharmacy sign showing 35°C. That's with full cloud cover. Once I changed, it was nice.

A week before I realized I messed up tickets are for the Alhambra admission: the official website is kind enough not to link the non-guided tours, so it's a bit funny to find those tickets. I left buying too late, at which point even the Generalife (gardens) and Alcazaba (fortress) only were out for that Thursday evening planned to go, leaving me with no option, but to visit in the morning. (If you're after the tickets: https://tickets.alhambra-patronato.es/en/ ; Google Maps actually lists the official tickets as well, so that is quite helpful, and I rarely praise Google these days.)

Anyhow, this turned out to be an excellent decision, as Granada is most lively in the evening and at night. I took long strolls on the streets of the Albaicín, and the area of the Alhambra combined with this far exceeded any of my expectations, this place is simply lovely.

It would have been nicer without the car, but this way the steepness shows a bit PENTAX K-5 II s, 100.0 mm, f/6.3, 1/250 sec, ISO 80 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 ED AL [IF] DC WR ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Jesus is watching you PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/8.0, 1/640 sec, ISO 100 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

I absolutely love the black and white pebbles for the street, and the size of whatever flower this is was incredible PENTAX K-5 II s, 18.0 mm, f/8.0, 1/125 sec, ISO 100 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 ED AL [IF] DC WR ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

I found a spot where nobody came at all at the foot of the Alhambra with excellent view and scorging heat PENTAX K-5 II s, ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Funny how pictures taken at late afternoon doesn't really show the impressive beauty of the complex K-5 II s, 48.0 mm, f/4.5, 1/1600 sec, ISO 100 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 ED AL [IF] DC WR ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

It's a bit better in the evening, but something is still missing. PENTAX K-5 II s, 53.0 mm, f/5.6, 1/10 sec, ISO 1600 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 ED AL [IF] DC WR ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

I was planning to only see Generalife and Alcazaba, because according to photos, the Nasrid Palaces is overwhelming and would need it's own day. The Generalife, despite having been rebuild countless times, is one of the most serene, gentle places I've visited in my life, and has absolutely incredible, equable energies - especially in the morning, when one has the chance to be alone in some of the spots.

Careful with the morning sprinklers PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/4.0, 1/200 sec, ISO 80 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

These lined the path that lead to the main entrance PENTAX K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/2.4, 1/20 sec, ISO 80 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Just another view on the morning sun K-5 II s, 35.0 mm, f/8.0, 1/250 sec, ISO 80 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.4 AL ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

While the fountains are modern addition, they do feel like they'd always been part of the buildings PENTAX K-5 II s, 18.0 mm, f/8.0, 1/125 sec, ISO 80 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 ED AL [IF] DC WR ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

There's an incredible peacefullness and welcoming feel in the Generalife PENTAX K-5 II s, 18.0 mm, f/8.0, 1/80 sec, ISO 80 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 ED AL [IF] DC WR ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Throughout my sort time I was wondering where the cats are, because I didn't see any. Apparently they exist. PENTAX K-5 II s, 88.0 mm, f/5.6, 1/160 sec, ISO 80 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 ED AL [IF] DC WR ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The birds and the sprinklers change the view a lot. K-5 II s, 135.0 mm, f/5.6, 1/320 sec, ISO 80 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 ED AL [IF] DC WR ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

One of the classic tourist shots. K-5 II s, 18.0 mm, f/8.0, 1/125 sec, ISO 80 ⋅ smc PENTAX-DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 ED AL [IF] DC WR ⋅ CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

I'm sure the real Alhambra is incredibly, and one day, when I have the time to stretch the visit into a bit more days, I want to see it. In a single Friday morning, even the Generalife was wonderful and was certainly worth the extra bus from Malága.

PS: In 2007, Loreena McKennit gave a surreal, wonderful concert in the Alhambra. It's on Youtube, and it's worth watching.

How to change DPI when docking with XFCE and systemd

2024-05-06T14:15:17+00:00

DPI change on docking with XFCE and systemd on Manjaro

A little while ago I got a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 7th gen¹ from my father that replaced my aging X250. I've been resisting the thinner and thinner trends, but I have to admit, it's a lovely machine, with an incredible keyboard, and a wonderful display. The 8GB fixed RAM sounds is limiting, but for me, it's all right. It stays significantly colder, than the X250, and after upgrading the SSD to 2TB, now that they are available and don't cost an arm and a leg, I don't need the secondary HDD like I used to.

The display, however, poses a problem: it's WQHD, 2560 * 1440 pixels. I know that these days people go for 4k with insane refresh rates, but on a 14" display, I have no need for either: full HD, 1920 * 1080 would be perfectly fine. To achive something like this I set the DPI of the system to 120, all good.

Until I dock it, because the 23" monitor is, indeed, 1920 * 1080, and with 120 DPI, it takes me back in time to much smaller resolutions. Note: I only use a single monitor either way. If I have more, I tend to put up too many distractions: I used to use 2 monitors, one for the tasks, the other for communication, but it's not nearly as productive as many people believe it to be.

It was easy to fix this by hand: every time I docked, I ran a script, but it was hard to believe there's no way to automate this. Well, there's no built in way, but there is certainly a way.

I use XFCE as my desktop, which provides me with xfconf-query. It has a monitor mode to display changes. I set up a profile for the docked display layout:

XFCE display dialogue with the Advanced tab open, showing a save profile

Once that was done, xfconf-query --monitor --channel displays --verbose had the following outputs on docking:

set: /Default/DP-2/Active (false)
set: /ActiveProfile (554a6d9a9dfdb915105b05437cdcf1a73ac5badd)
set: /Default/eDP-1/Active (false)
set: /Default/DP-2/Active (true)

and the following on un-docking

set: /ActiveProfile (Default)
set: /Default/eDP-1/Active (true)
set: /Default/eDP-1/Position/X (0)

So I wrote a bash script to monitor it, following a tip that I wasn't aware with while and tail²:

~/.local/bin/dpi-daemon.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

xfconf-query --monitor --channel displays --verbose | while read -r line; do
    if grep 'set: /ActiveProfile (554a6d9a9dfdb915105b05437cdcf1a73ac5badd)' <<< "${line}"; then
        xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/DPI -s -1
    elif grep 'set: /ActiveProfile (Default)' <<< "${line}"; then
        xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/DPI -s 120
    fi
done

Initially I tried to start this from Session and Startup but that wasn't happy, so I tried with a systemd user unit file:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/systemd/user/

~/.local/share/systemd/user/dpi-daemon.service

[Unit]
Desription=DPI changer

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=~/.local/bin/dpi-daemon.sh
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable dpi-daemon

Which made everything and every happy: automated DPI change on display change.

The quest for simple, high quality music and video playback in 2023

2025-11-04T18:54:00+00:00

The year 2023 reminded me of my mortality quite a bit, so I took a good, deep look at my home setups in case someone else ever needs to be able to understand it, use it, maintain it. I decided to start with something that we use day to day - music and video playing.

About snowflake setups

Many things in my setups work for me, it is not always user, let alone child friendly. Because I want to ensure I'm not the singular bus factor for the setup, I need to think of the following:

things need to be able to run on their own, long term
they need to be simple enough so any family members can use it, children included
someone with a baseline IT knowledge can learn how to maintain it
can't be a super-snowflake setup that's impossible to replace with something paid for, hosted, or bought

This is not easy, and with the ongoing enshittification of everything¹ it'll only get harder: new devices are cloud connected, they rely on streaming platforms which will, eventually, go bust, and in the meanwhile support for local media gets forgotten. Did you know Chromecast doesn't support DivX and old AVI formats natively², so you can't cast these without transcoding?

My journey with audio and video

Over 10 years ago we moved to England and I left my "hifi" - a Panasonic SA-AK18 which had a better service manual³ than any device I ever owned, despite falling into Black Plastic Crap category - in Hungary as it was too large to fit first in a shared accommodation, then in a one bedroom rented flat. I had a jack - RCA cable connected to it which went in from my computer, and if I wanted to play music, I used either that connection, or CDs.

Once we got here I still wanted music so I got two small Panasonic speakers for ~£20 and a cheap but hyped car amplifier, a Lepai LP-2020A, for a similar price from eBay, and continues the same connection to the laptop. When I finally brought the old speakers to the UK I realised they sounded much better in my memories, then they actually did, and I wasted quite a lot of valuable space in the car boot with them. They ended up being donated to a charity.

Later I bought a Topping MX3⁴ all-in-one (DAC, headphone- and power amplifier) as an upgrade to overcome the issues with the Lepai (eg. terrible balance). The Topping, in it's category, is a marvel, and sounded incredible with those absurdly cheap speakers. At this point I had my home server connected to it, running MPD on the local music, but I was listening more and more to Spotify over headphones at work. Eventually I had a Raspberry Pi (see the addendums) running MPD⁵, and raspotify⁶ for Spotify Connect.

Turn a few years: the pandemic and the lockdowns happened, we missed out on concerts and fun, and ended up buying a decent set of speakers, namely a pair of Dali Oberon 5⁷s. I kept the Topping, because on paper, it had just enough power for the floorstanders, and foolishly didn't listen to the people in Richer Sounds that it won't. I adore these speakers, the bring out so many extras in songs I never noticed before, and I can only recommend them.

Videos, in my childhoold were VHS tapes, later .avi files on the computer, and for many years, I simply connected the computer to the TV or the largest monitor in the house and watched them that way.

When streaming started to pick up the lack of widevine on linux only allowed 480p on many platforms. This forced me to look into other possibilities: at first our pre-WebOS LG smart TV was adequete, but it soon got abandoned by providers, so we eventually got a Chromecast with Google TV⁸. The TV can still receive DivX DLNA casts natively, and the Chromecast can do the rest, but it's fascinating to see how short lived a full era of early computer video had become due to licencing issues.

When music quality kicks you in the teeth

A little while ago we attended to a birthday celebration where the owner had a nicely sounding HiFi setup (B&W speakers, some way too expensive, class A amplifier, etc), playing some tunes in the background. One of those songs stood out with the clarity of the guitar⁹, so when I got home I decided to hear it on my setup.

It wasn't entirely disappointing - knowing it costed minimum an order of magnitude less, it was pretty good -, but it was certainly lacking: those guitar strings lacked the same tingling in certain ranges. I did try if re-arranging would help: a tiny bit, but I can't afford that kind of repositioning with a whirlwind toddler around.

And so I started searching how I could improve upon it. I marched upon audiophile forums, and my dear, there be dragons of insanity¹⁰, but not everything audiophiles say is nonsense.

Over 20 years ago, in the high school studio, there was a patch board with printed circuit boards. I have witnesses, including musicians, that plain those circuit boards with nothing but jack sockets on them can emit music if driven hard enough, for example the pre-amp output of an ancient Sound Blaster card. We didn't want to believe our eyes and ears, but there it was, so when amplifier engineers say things like "circuit board: bad" because "sound always moves", they are not incorrect.

Another thing I can stand behind is some description of speakers: analytical vs musical. When we went to test some speakers we were shown a set of them first, and once finished listening, all I could say is that I hear every instrument, every detail - just not the music. That's when we were shown the Dali Oberon 5, which sounded much closer to our preference.

Experienced audio engineers can provide valuable insights, like why listening to music on a lot of audio bricks¹¹ gets tiring after a while¹². Also thanks to comparison videos from E Project¹³ because they made the choice much easier.

A detour: among the videos I came across a few which lead me down another rabbit hole: "Combination Tones"¹⁴ - the effect of how 2 higher pitched sound can generate a 3rd phantom low pitch sound in our ears, due to biology. Apparently an avantgarde artist, Maryanne Amacher, exploited this with her music¹⁵, but I'm not ready to listen to a piece to which people referred to "it had ghosts in it" just yet.

After much time spent on reading opinions, forums, listening to tests and comparisons between brands like Cambridge Audio, NAD, Audiolab, Rega, Yamaha, Marantz, etc. we decided that the sound we preferred, based on recordings, is NAD.

The cheapest, simplest, and still AB class amplifier NAD sales is the C 316BEE v2¹⁶: analogue line-ins, no digital boards - nothing that gets obsolete in a year when the next shiny-shiny comes out, so this is what we got. Amplifier class doesn't matter; my reason for AB was that I wanted oldschool and simple.

Sidenote: apparently, in Europe it's a law that banana plug sockets need to be plugged in when the appliance is sold, so one needs to remove the plugs first. That is because the EU power adapter fits the banana sockets, and vice versa... I wasn't aware of this, so I first removed the banana plugs themselves, only to learn that I could have simply pulled those socket covers out. And no, this is not mentioned in the manual at all.

Once the NAD was plugged in it far superseded my expectations. To keep it as simple as possible, we (my wife an me) both made the following observations:

there's a lot more clarity at low volume - before, we had to turn it up to hear the music and the small things in the music well, especially the bass. Now the music is clearer, even well below conversation level loudness.
the baseline hiss of the Topping is gone
the bass is in another league; compared to the Topping it's thundering, which is a good thing, and was one of the main reasons why we were told to get a decent amplifier with the speakers in the first place
the formerly muffled tones are now just as clear as the rest

However, I want to stop here. "How to stop rewriting your site and write more"¹⁷ is a problem for us with websites, and searching for the perfect audio gear is a very similar problem. It's easy to keep going instead of enjoying the music. I'm joyous with the current setup and have no desire to seek thousands of pounds worth of gear, as after a certain point, one would need to spend orders of magnitude more money only to get a tiny bit better sound.

But the hardware is just in element in the whole chain.

There are many studies out there that most people can't tell the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and CD - and that is true if you're listening to a random song. It is most certainly not true when you're to listening to something you know from CD and the gear you're listening on is good enough.

"The Smell of Rain" from Mortiis¹⁸ had an official "redux" mp3 release, which I listened to for years. One day, out of curiosity, I got a copy of the CD and I was speechless: there are sounds on the CD release I never heard before, it essentially introduced a new layer to me in the music. The lossy compression was hiding it all.

We all got used to the limitations of our setups (cassettes copied from a copy of a copy of a cassette recorded from FM radio... the good old days) then later, to lossy music, and many of us have no idea what a decent, not even silly expensive setup (read: below £1000, newly bought), that's playing from CD is truly capable of.

Coming to this realisation I decided to try Tidal, which does offer CD streaming quality, unlike Spotify - and yes, it sounds much nicer. And it also sucks, because the hacks that used to enable Tidal Connect on a Raspberry are now dead¹⁹ and the available hack to use it, like the upmpdcli plugin for Tidal is significantly less user friendly, like librespot²⁰, which just exposes itself as a Spotify Connect speaker.

Following the usability credo I needed something that allows us to use either Tidal or Spotify, and it came down to some sort of Chromecast.

I soon learnt that Google used to sell a device called Chromecast audio²¹, but discontinued some years ago. It costs more used, than when it was new, yet it's still 1/3rd of the price of a WiiM Pro²² which seems to be the cheapest, audio oriented, Chromecast capable device currently on the market.

When I plugged the second hand Chromecast audio in I thought I got played: there was a rhytmic noise, like a train. Turned out the device is fine: it was the low quality power supply I plugged it into. Apparently this little thing is cheap because it lacks a lot of filters and extras the more expensive devices have, so it really needs a nice, high quality power supply, preferable it's original.

Nonetheless: it's sound quality is amazing. To me, it sounds better, than the Topping as DAC.

Update (2023-12-03): for now, I went back to Spotify. Tidal has weird issues, and it regularly had buffering problems.

Controlling and browsing

I miss the physicality of CDs, casettes, VHS tapes, but I admire how accessible endless collections of music had become. To keep my ripped CD collection usable I used to run MPD on some sort of capable device, because MPD clients had great interfaces to browse what's available.

With this Chromecast oriented setup I had to find an alternative, which could do the same, and the answer was an Android app called BubbleUPnP²³. I don't like having to pay for software, but ever since I can afford donating or tipping, I'm happy to do that. Sometimes there are exceptions, and BubbleUPnP is one of them, because it's worth it.

It's an immensely useful little app for Android that can act both as UPnP/DLNA control point and a UPnP media renderer. This means that it can play network media - or it can send it to something to play it. It can even transcode (!) if it needs to, so no need for the source to support transcoding.

To me, this is important, because the backend is a minidlna²⁴ server. It's as simple as it gets, and even some routers have it installed. No setup needed, it's all through zeroconf, and it just works.

Less of a plus is the lack of catalogue, covers for video files, or the ability to set age limits (Jellyfin has that). However: looking back at my childhood I could have watched movies recorded in VHS that were definitely not for me - I didn't want to. I wanted to see Star Wars for the 6000th time instead, so this may not pose as much of a threat as I think it could. Time will tell, I'll come back to this problem when the now <2 years old has a phone and wants to watch Alien.

This was local audio and video can be browsed from any Android device in the family, casted or viewed locally, with no issues at all.

Conclusions

I have access to millions of hours of audio and video today, but that access' usability is definitely not on par with the simplicity of inserting a disc, a casette, or a VHS tape and simply pressing "play". Then there's also the loss of nice, physical album art, but that is another topic.

If I was Windows or Mac oriented, my life would be simpler, and I could have simply dedicated a machine as media center, because on those systems, the streaming services are willing to show decent quality. If you're on Win/Mac, keep it simple, and use an older machine to do this, it'll make your life much, much simpler.

MPD is a brilliant system for local music playback, and once set up, it'll probably run forever.

Every and all hobby has rabbit holes, though some might be more expensive, than others - audio is dangerous, because there's always something nicer, more special, newer.

Some audiophiles are simply mad, others have the curse of exceptional hearing. Audio is subjective. If you like it, it's OK. More expensive won't always or won't necessary make it better for you. The class of the amplifier will also not determine how much you like the sound.

I always try to buy things that last, but with technology I tend to go cheap and tinker. Part of it is wanting to be in control, another is wanting to understand my stack. For local things where updating is not an issue and which don't need to connect to ever changing APIs this approach works, and it's even usable, but when it comes to streaming services where everyone tries to protect their turf the tinkered solutions will eventually break. If I want to avoid that I need to buy in to some of the solutions. Chromecast works as DLNA was meant to work, but it's closed, and it plays nasty with anything that's not android or Google based. It probably also syphons a stupid amount of semi-private data to Google, but regardless of this, I couldn't find anything that works overall better.

I'm starting to dislike Rasbperry Pi based solutions. It's cheap board which is used for a lot of things it was never really meant to be used for, hacks on top of hacks. Sometimes getting the right tool for the right job is worth it instead of trying to apply a swiss army knife.

The same goes for the lottery of wonders-of-the-internet products. The current Chinese audio brick rage is around Fosi and S.M.S.L. audio, like it was some years ago for Topping. Don't get me wrong: some of these products are absurdly good, but if not, you're out of your money. The price of an S.M.S.L. AL200 is more or less the price of the NAD C316BEE and the latter will be better made and will outlive the Chinese brick for sure. My Topping has already developed weird quirks, like it's flaky volume button, the rubbish from start remote control, and occasional freezing at which point it needs to powered off and on.

Addendum #1: A Raspberry Pi with extras for local source playback

There are ready made images for audio on Raspberry Pi, but Volumio²⁵ , moOde audio player²⁶, or rAudio²⁷ all failed me at some point.

Volumio is closed source, moOde and rAudio are open, but they all have one thing in common: a web based interface, which makes them incredibly slow on the Pi 3B.

They also don't play nice with custom configurations for MPD, and none of them is ready for easy satellite mode config. This means that network shares had to be added on their web config, and it made them crawl- except for moOde, which just died after I added my NFS share.

There are other, fun configuration issues. For example, on Volumio MPD set to hardware volume mixer, but Spotify Connect is still on softvol, so setting the volume on MPD sets a baseline for Spotify, but not the other way around.

However, if the goal is simply local playback:

Raspberry Pi OS Lite
MPD
and either an external DAC (in my case, the Topping MX3) or an I2S hat

gives you a rock-solid playback system, that is once setup, will probably run forever. In case you want to turn MPD into a DLNA client, there's a beautiful little software, called upmpdcli²⁸ that can do that. It worked quite nice.

This was my MPD config with the Topping:

/etc/mpd.conf

music_directory         "/path/to/music"
database                "/var/lib/mpd/database"
playlist_directory      "/var/lib/mpd/playlists"
log_file                "syslog"
pid_file                "/run/mpd/pid"
state_file              "/var/lib/mpd/state"
sticker_file            "/var/lib/mpd/sticker.sql"
user                    "mpd"
group                   "audio"
bind_to_address         "0.0.0.0"
log_level               "error"
input {
        plugin          "curl"
}
decoder {
        plugin          "hybrid_dsd"
        enabled         "no"
}
decoder {
        plugin          "wildmidi"
        enabled         "no"
}
audio_output {
        type            "alsa"
        name            "MX3"
        device          "hw:CARD=MX3,DEV=0"
        mixer_type      "hardware"
        mixer_device    "hw:CARD=MX3"
        mixer_control   "PCM"
}
filesystem_charset      "UTF-8"

Addendum #2: Spotify Connect with raspotify

If you want to stream: raspotify²⁹ works fine for Spotify Connect, but there's no telling, how long, given it's a reverse-engineered, unofficial solution.

/etc/raspotify/conf

LIBRESPOT_AUTOPLAY=
LIBRESPOT_DISABLE_AUDIO_CACHE=
LIBRESPOT_DISABLE_DISCOVERY=
LIBRESPOT_BITRATE="320"
LIBRESPOT_FORMAT="S16"
LIBRESPOT_SAMPLE_RATE="44.1kHz"
LIBRESPOT_DEVICE_TYPE="speaker"
LIBRESPOT_DEVICE="hw:CARD=MX3,DEV=0"
LIBRESPOT_BACKEND="alsa"
LIBRESPOT_MIXER="alsa"
LIBRESPOT_ALSA_MIXER_DEVICE="hw:CARD=MX3"
LIBRESPOT_ALSA_MIXER_CONTROL="PCM"
LIBRESPOT_USERNAME="$SPOTIFY_USER"
LIBRESPOT_PASSWORD="$SPOTIFY_PASSWORD"
LIBRESPOT_INITIAL_VOLUME="50"
LIBRESPOT_VOLUME_CTRL="linear"
LIBRESPOT_ONEVENT=""
TMPDIR=/tmp

Addendum #3: Using the Topping MX3 as DAC or pre-amplifier

Do not believe Reddit experts³⁰: yes, you can use a Topping MX3 both as pre-amp and for line-in level, but keep this in mind:

for line-in you must set the volume to maximum -10dB or 56 because anything higher is above line level³¹ and will overdrive the input
as far as I understand 0 db or 76 it meant for when one connects it directly to a power amplifier

To change between level and dB display, press Mute then Mode on the remote.

Addendum #4: failed attempts

Kodi³² on Raspberry Pi 3

I have two Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 -s. These things supposed to have both h264 and h265 hardware decoders, but as it turns out, this got messed up because some the decoders are closed source. This means no Kodi beyond 18 if hardware acceleration is needed for HEVC (aka x265).³³.

This wasn't my only problem: Kodi turned out to be utterly unusable with my music collection, mainly because there is no folders/file view. It was slow and miserable to use with Kore, on the web, on the TV, basically in any way.

There is a Spotify Connect addon that worked though, but nothing for Tidal.

Jellyfin server³⁴ with Jellyfin app on Chromecast

Everyone loves raving about Jellyfin, but they all forget one thing: it loves to transcode. My ~~low powered~~ energy efficient server(s) don't, and because of the aforementioned lack of DivX support in Google TV³⁵ no native playback is possible for those kind of files without transcoding, meaning this setup is a no-go.

Chromecast with Google TV with USB-C hub and the Topping MX3 as external DAC

One of the hacks I tried was to connect the Chromecast with Google TV to a USB-C hub that had PD passthrough charging and an external DAC. Unfortunately Android 12 doesn't want you to do that³⁶ ³⁷ and so it sometimes breaks rather randomly.

While there's MPD server³⁸ app for the Google TV that works flawlessly in satellite mode³⁹, because of HDMI CEC it kept turning the TV when the music started playing.

There's also no working MPD client for the TV, so while it was playing music, there was no way of stopping it from the Chromecast.

An Android tablet with USB-C hub and an external DAC

I learned it the fun way that Spotify Connect only works for the very account you log in with on the tablet - it's not like the Chromecast or librespot, where anyone on the network could do it, so this was dropped as well.

Addendum #5 (update added in 2025): bluetooth receiver

I found a small github repository⁴⁰ which installs more or less what I set up by hand, except the fine tunes to use the same alsa devices, so if one source changes the volume, all does. However, it adds a bluetooth receiver option, which is great, except that apparently, the Pi 3B's bluetooth and wifi stack collides, and if the wifi is in use, the bluetooth will start to cut out. To overcome this, the script had an optional disable/enable wifi on bluetooth connect/disconnect, but it wasn't working with newer distros (and it's regex was overly strict). So here's adding a bluetooth receiver to the Raspberry Pi setups. Note: if you're on DietPi⁴¹ you need to enable bluetooth in dietpi-config under Advanced options first.

apt install --no-install-recommends bluez-tools bluez-alsa-utils rfkill

Create/edit /etc/bluetooth/main.conf:

[General]
Class = 0x200414
DiscoverableTimeout = 0

[Policy]
AutoEnable=true

Create/edit /etc/systemd/system/bt-agent@.service:

[Unit]
Description=Bluetooth Agent
Requires=bluetooth.service
After=bluetooth.service

[Service]
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/bluetoothctl discoverable on
ExecStartPre=/bin/hciconfig %I piscan
ExecStartPre=/bin/hciconfig %I sspmode 1
ExecStart=/usr/bin/bt-agent --capability=NoInputNoOutput
RestartSec=5
Restart=always
KillSignal=SIGUSR1

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Run:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable bt-agent@hci0.service

Create/edit /usr/local/bin/bluetooth-udev:

#!/bin/bash

logger -s -t bluetooth-udev "device $NAME $ACTION"

action=$(expr "$ACTION" : "\([a-zA-Z]\+\).*")

if [ "$action" = "add" ]; then
    bluetoothctl discoverable off

    # disconnect wifi to prevent dropouts
    rfkill block wifi
fi

if [ "$action" = "remove" ]; then
    # reenable wifi
    rfkill unblock wifi
    
    bluetoothctl discoverable on
fi

Et voilà!

I ended up with a Zigbee smart home because the alternative was hurting my ears

2023-09-23T20:57:45+00:00

I've been eyeing with FIR (far infrared) heating for years, long before we got to buy our current house. Now we have it, and while it's certainly not a cheap way to heat, it feels lovely; getting here, however, had some unforeseen problems.

2022/2023 warning: FIR is not cheaper to run, than gas or heat pumps

It might be strange to start an article titled "I love my FIR panels" with a "why not" immediately, but this is important.

Electricity in the UK at the moment around 35p/kWh, gas is close to 10p/kWh. The FIR heating will probably need a bit less energy (as in kWh) due to the way it heats objects as well, so the room feels friendlier at a slightly lower temperature, but the required energy is not that much less. Even if it was 75% of the gas energy the cost is still 2.6x compared to gas.

If the most important factor for you is running cost, you should probably look at heat pumps. Even Herschel themselves admit this¹, however, there are factors beyond running cost which you might want to consider, such as installation, maintenance, space and plumbing requirements, lack of existing insulation, and so on.

Background

In 2018 we were about to buy a house: we won the bidding and were waiting on surveys to come back. They did came back and unfortunately we walked away from the deal - the house was surrounded by old, decaying asbestos cement roofed garages that were part of freeholds, so absolutely no way to make people replace them - but during the waiting time I started making plans on renovating it.

It had old, electric storage heaters, no gas at all, so I started looking at modern electrical heating options, and came across the idea of FIR - far infrared - heating.

There's disturbingly little about these on the net, though there are two² ³ articles which cover practically every aspect. I fell in love with the idea, but when the house deal fell through it was put on hold.

After some time I grew curious to see how and if the FIR heating actually works. To check it at a reasonable price I decided to buy a small, under desk heater⁴. Having used it in our bedroom during the night to avoid making turning the full house heating on during last winter it became clear that it's a lovely thing, but a ~200W one is definitely not suitable as the only heating system.

In 2019 we finally bought a house. It was a long journey and there was quite a bit of work that had to be done on it, starting with a full house re-wiring. This gave us an opportunity to prepare the cabling for the heating - and I should have prepared cabling for an electric water heater, which I completely forgot about.

Why not a heat pump?

The house had (still has) a gas central heating, but with quite old plumbing (and a few, occasional leaks), heavily dated panels (some not even radiators, type 10 only), and a (now, due to it's age and how the previous owners neglecting it) a somewhat loud and waning gas boiler. We didn't want to invest into renovating it, given how the world is moving to renewable energy⁵, and lowest common denominator for that is electricity.

Underfloor or wall heating is not an option in this house, so if we were to install a heat pump we would have needed MUCH bigger radiators, along with a complete redoing of the pipework. Given the available space is ~85m2, new double/triple radiators would have taken up even more of the valuable space.

I wanted to embrace the idea of as simple as possible: a heat pump, while mechanically simple, has quite a few moving parts, liquids, and needs servicing - and there's the circulating water, which, if the pipes break, causes a lot of trouble. It would still be central heating, so besides the pump we would have needed smart valves on the radiator, and the pump were to break down all heating and hot water goes with it (as with any central heating to be fair).

On top of this it would create the same "feeling" of heating: stuffy, heated, dusty air. FIR feels like the sun shining on you from the ceiling.

Panels, sizing, cost

The house is a 3 bedroom, semi-detached, cavity insulated Laing Easiform from the 1950s, made of concrete with an acceptable amount of loft insulation - "the" average UK house so to speak. It has category A double glazed windows installed in 2021, which puts it beyond the average a bit. In total it has 9 areas: a living room, dining room, kitchen, corridor, landing, bathroom, 2 bedrooms, and a small bedroom which functions as office. The living room received 2 panels instead of a single large one.

The required/recommended panel size calculation was done on Heschel's calculator, but was verified by their representative. There are lot of other sites out which will give you significantly smaller panel recommendations - please do not believe them.

We choose the more expensive Inspire range: we have been trying very hard to try longer lasting, and possibly made in UK/Europe appliances. The Inspire is made in Germany, and they have 10 years warranty - and they are plain, dead simple panels, without the controller built onto them. This latter turned out to be an important factor if you want smart options without a Chinese cloud provider, see later.

Part No.	Description	Quantity	Where
CL-750L	Herschel Inspire White 820W 1700 x 400	1	corridor
CL-750	Herschel Inspire White 750W	3	dining and living (2x) rooms
CL-900	Herschel Inspire White 900W	3	bedrooms, kitchen
CL-500	Herschel Inspire White 550W	2	study, bathroom
CL-400	Herschel Inspire White 420W	1	landing
T-T2	Herschel IQ T2 Thermostat (Inc R2 Receiver)	9	1x in each area

The total price inc VAT was close to £7500. I'm well aware £7500 is a lot, and that doesn't include the installation cost which added nearly £3000 on top of this. It took 4 days of work for 2 electricians, there were some tricky bits to connect to the wiring, some lights had to be moved, and we worked with Safeswitch, which was the only Herschel approved installer our area.

We also had a whole house voltage optimiser installed (an extra, painful, nearly £900 in material cost). The UK runs on ~242V, whereas these panels - and most electrical appliances to be clear - are optimised more for 230V. The one we bought is from Energy Ace⁶, and the installation cost included adding this as well. It pushed the voltage down to ~232V which is healthier for all the appliances.

If one decides on the more affordable panels the material cost can be nearly halved, and those panels might not need accredited installers - although it is never a bad idea to hire someone who's familiar with the project already.

Post-install problems: coil whine with the Herschel R2

Once the system was installed I happily turned it on - only to be greeted with an omnipresent coil whine from every single R2 unit, and it was wild. I made the recordings with a smartphone and you may need wired headphones to hear them; bluetooth has a compression that seems to cut it out, but in real life, especially during the night, it was intolerable.

Coil whine test #1

I got in touch with Herschel who sent a replacement unit to test if it had the issue as well, because it turned out that a lot of people can't hear the noise in these recordings. Unfortunately it also had it, but this time I made a more complex measurement. When WiFi traffic was applied the noise changed significantly.

Coil whine test #2 with WiFi traffic

I started digging to see what might be making the whine and I had a feeling it's the WiFi module, but in the process I became rather sure these are customised Tuya units⁷. I have a strong itch against WiFi based Tuya because of their Chinese cloud, which these would have had to go through to be smart, so I had one more reason to be unhappy with them. These are also special with their 2 way RF communication, so Tasmota is not an option.

The front of a disassembled Herschel T2 (thermostat) unit

The back of a disassembled Herschel T2 (thermostat) unit

Herschel R2 (switch) installed and opened

Herschel R2 (switch) disassembled

While I got refunded for these units once they were sent back, and Herschel didn't make any problems with the refund process, the rest of the message wasn't ideal:

I am saddened to hear that the replacement receiver from our latest batch is also audible to you. As I mentioned we have sold these receivers in vast numbers, (thousands), and you are only the second person to report the noise, but I fully appreciate it is a problem for you.

I find it mildly offending to sell these with the excellent quality German panels to be honest. Our current battery powered, Z-Wave based boiler controller, (re)branded as "Secure"⁸ is far superior to these units - though they come with their own issues without additional z-ware routers in a house -, but the switch is rated only to 3A. I'm sure that with minor modifications it could take up to 10A and would be a significantly better fit with the Inspire line, particularly from a privacy/security perspective.

My current Z-Wave based, battery powered, 7 day programmable thermostat to control the gas boiler

Looking for alternatives, settling with Zigbee (3.0)

I went through my options: I had some issues with Z-Wave before, learned that KNX would cost more, than the system installed, skipped a lot other things, until I bumped into Zigbee 3.0.

I bought Sonoff ZBMINIs⁹ to be the controllers, which are great, and carelessly went for Aqara temperature and humidity sensors. Don't buy Aqara unless you go all-in with the brand. I had to sell those and buy Sonoff SNZB-02 Temperature and Humidity Sensors¹⁰ because some of the Aqara devices kept stopping sending data no matter what I did. The host controller is a Sonoff ZigBee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus P¹¹, which feeds into Zigbee2MQTT¹² which sends to Mosquitto¹³ which talks to Domoticz¹⁴.

Final setup of a panel in the study, on the ceiling. The fused switch is required by UK standards, the other box contained the R2 switch originally, now it has the Sonoff ZBMINI

There's an alternative firmware for the SNZB-02-s¹⁵ which would turn them into a real thermostat with binding - I've been testing one for a while, and so far, it's surprisingly nice. I haven't had the time to replace the firmware on all of them (it includes some temporary soldering), but there are plans to do so.

I tested the EFEKTA firmware. It worked for a few weeks, and yes, it can be used as a standalone thermo/humidistat, but after some time it started to transmit multiple temperature values simultaneously, making the FIR to stay on all the time, so I decided to drop the experiment and stay with the stock firmware on the SNZB-02s.

One day I might have time to write about this setup in more details, but here's an important bit: for reasons I'm yet to identify why, but the initial setup with a Raspberry Pi 3B was unstable, and the Pi kept rebooting. I bought another fanless Lenovo M600¹⁶ and it's been rock solid since.

I finally found a solution to my interface problem: I bought a used "2-in-1" PC, namely a Dell Venue Pro 7140¹⁷. It's maintainable, has a dock, a nice touchscreen, and can act as the server on it's own, and it has a full sized USB port, so it was possible to add the Zigbee stick. To my surprise, it has a fan, but once it was set into powersave mode, it barely ever came up. The OS is Ubuntu 22.04, because I wanted a full touch-screen support, and this was the simplest way to do so.

The Dell, out of the blue, died so hard that I couldn't boot it. Turned out that if the battery has any issue in it the charger alone can't power the device. Back to the fanless Lenovo M600¹⁸ and, for the time being, a tablet to control it, because proper touchscreens cost an arm and a leg.¹⁹

Domoticz vs thermostats

I tried Home Assistant many times but I find their YAML configurations repulsive: it's practically random and complicated. Yes, there is documentation, and it's OK, but I'll take a programming language any timer over that YAML horror. Once it told me that python 3.9, which is the Python in the current stable Debian, will be deprecated for HA in 2023 I walked away for good.

Domoticz on the other hand is small, simple (maybe sometimes even too simple), and can be scripted with a lot of languages, including it's own dialect of Lua, called dzVents²⁰. So I did the following: I created virtual thermostats for each room, a virtual boost switch for each room, than added a script that connected these to the state changes of the relevant temperature sensors and switches in each room. The "sufni" (shed in Hungarian) is special because that's an oil radiator and it only ever comes up when the shed goes below 4°C - I have some paint there which shouldn't be allowed to freeze.

return {
    on = {
        devices = {
            'Háló', 'Gyerekszoba', 'Kisszoba', 'Fürdő', 'Lépcsőfeljáró',
            'Folyosó', 'Nappali', 'Stúdió', 'Konyha',
            'Sufni',
            'Háló termosztát', 'Gyerekszoba termosztát', 'Kisszoba termosztát', 'Fürdő termosztát', 'Lépcsőfeljáró termosztát',
            'Folyosó termosztát', 'Nappali termosztát', 'Stúdió termosztát', 'Konyha termosztát',
            'Sufni termosztát',
            'Háló boost', 'Gyerekszoba boost', 'Kisszoba boost', 'Fürdő boost', 'Lépcsőfeljáró boost',
            'Folyosó boost', 'Nappali boost', 'Stúdió boost', 'Konyha boost',
        },
    },
    logging = {
        marker = '[thermostat]',
    },
    execute = function(domoticz, device)
        local basename = string.gsub(string.gsub(device.name, ' termosztát', ""), ' boost', "")
        local thermostat = domoticz.devices(basename .. ' termosztát')
        local temperature_sensor = domoticz.devices(basename)
        local boost = domoticz.devices(basename .. ' boost')
        local heater = nil
        local hysteresis = nil

        if (basename == 'Sufni') then
            hysteresis = 1
            heater = domoticz.devices(basename .. ' olajradiátor')
        else
            hysteresis = 0.3
            heater = domoticz.devices(basename .. ' FIR')
        end

        if ((device.id == boost.id) and (boost.active == true)) then
            boost.switchOff().afterSec(900)
            if (heater.active == false) then
                domoticz.log(basename ..  ' ON (boost)', domoticz.LOG_INFO)
                heater.switchOn()
            end
        end

        if ((boost.active == false) and (heater.active == true) and (temperature_sensor.temperature >= (thermostat.setPoint + hysteresis))) then
            domoticz.log(basename ..  ' OFF (thermostat)', domoticz.LOG_INFO)
            heater.switchOff()
        end

        if ((heater.active == false) and (temperature_sensor.temperature <= (thermostat.setPoint - hysteresis))) then
            domoticz.log(basename ..  ' ON (thermostat)', domoticz.LOG_INFO)
            heater.switchOn()
        end

    end
}

The schedule is done with timers on each thermostat:

Current schedule of the living room; between 9:00 and 19:00 the gas central heating takes over until I figure out how not to pay and arm and a leg for electricity :(

It works as expected, without issues.

Energy needs and running cost

The end of 2022 was quite nice in terms of weather at the beginning, but December brought serious colds - in the past 10 years we lived in the UK and I haven't experienced periods in Cambridge where the temperature barely moved above zero for days:

Early December 2022 was COLD in the UK

We decided to run a test and see the cost if we rely solely on the panels to heat. While they were able to handle it and heat up the house, which is good, the cost was brutal. Keep it in mind that we regularly wash, use the dryer, cook, and work from home, so the only thing we used gas for was hot water on 11 Dec. The drop you see later is when we decided to turn the gas heating back on between 09:00 and 17:00 so the clicking and the noise doesn't bother us during the night.

68kWh of electricity costs £24... and that was a single day.

In the meanwhile our garden looked like this - in front of the bench there's a pond which had at least 10cm of solid ice on it. In previous years it barely froze over.

Does far infrared heating work?

In my experience, yes. It's lovely using them, the heat is instant and stays with the house. The heat does eventually get everywhere, it will not be "shaded" by desks and furniture more, than a heating panel or a type 10/20 wet unit would be by furniture.

It is, however, different, and with regular thermostats that have 1-2°C hysteresis, it could be tricky to make them perfect.

I'd seen a video on youtube about someone telling that a 1kW FIR panel barely heats him up sitting next to it. If I sit in front of our 200W portable it already heats me up and the 900W panels in the bedrooms can easily deal with the rooms. It might just be the difference between cheap panels and expensive ones, so be very careful on choosing a brand.

The only thing we had a problem with is the humidity and green mould (like the one on stale bread) in the bathroom on some baskets of ours in the aforementioned December period, but we weren't the only ones, so I can't yet tell if it was due to the new heating, or the mixture of other circumstances.

Conclusions, observations, summary

The way FIR heats feels nicer, than many other heating methods: it's able to heat you up at some deep level very fast, but as the electrician installing them said: it's more "digital" whereas floor heating, for example, is more "analogue".

The panels radiate from their back as well, meaning putting the upstairs ones on the walls instead of the ceiling could result in better use of that heat - that is if the wall is made of material that can "store" heat - solid walls would be ideal - and not from clinker blocks, like ours.

Some of the ceilings developed hairline cracks behind the heaters, but only upstairs, with the loft and the insulation above them. I'm guessing it's where the plasterboards meet, and I'm yet to address them.

SONOFF is reliable, cheap, and generally speaking just works.

Mixing Zigbee 3.0 and 1.2 can result in the 1.2 devices losing their way and stopping sending data.

This type of heating makes more sense when it's combined with solar panels, battery storage, and utilising varying electricity costs throughout the day. On single tariff it will be expensive, just like plain electric heating.

Was it worth it? Even with devastating energy prices I believe that in the long run, it was. When we get to the point to replace the boiler with an electric one as well²¹ we can get rid of the gas, the radiators, which will free up a lot of space. Plus I like how they look on the ceiling, making it less boring and less usual - although this is a subjective thought.

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I ended up with a Zigbee smart home because the alternative was hurting my ears

2022/2023 warning: FIR is not cheaper to run, than gas or heat pumps

Background

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Panels, sizing, cost

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Looking for alternatives, settling with Zigbee (3.0)

Domoticz vs thermostats

Energy needs and running cost

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Kodi³² on Raspberry Pi 3

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