The new robot in the house didn’t make a very positive first impression. Sad to say that second impressions are not much more favorable either. Let’s start with the good things though.
The hardware feels good. The machine is sturdy and its navigation seems solid. It doesn’t bump into everything like the Roomba and doesn’t get stuck on the flat legs of my Poang or my standing desk (which the Roomba regularly did).
I’ve been renting robot vacuums for the past few years. In my previous place I used to have a Roomba Combo j7+. This was a pretty pleasant experience. It could handle the shaggy rug in my living room. It didn’t fall off the stairs. It mopped the floor. It didn’t require me to babysit it through everything, it just worked.
But its box was quite big, so when I moved I didn’t want to carry it around, instead returned and replaced it with a cheaper not-combo j7+. This obviously didn’t have a mopping feature anymore, but that was the least of its problems. It would sometimes stop in the middle of the room requiring rescue because it somehow sensed it was “stuck”. Then when it managed to somehow break its side brush thing on I don’t even know what (probably the edge of a rug), I decided to return it and find something better.
引っ越してから電気料金がおかしい。確かに一人だったものが二人になっているが、それは別に電気を２倍使うわけではない。３倍おろか。なのに報告されている使用量はそうなっている。参考までに去年の該当期間は346kWhで、今年の同期間はまさかの956。いくらなんでも増えすぎ。
結局二人暮らしと言っても、在宅で働いているという一日のほとんどの時間を占める消費は変わっていない。それに使っている機材も変わっていない。エアコンは２台から３台に増えてはいるが、それもずっと全部起動しているわけではない。冷蔵庫は変わったが、逆に省エネ基準が高いやつになった。
I ran into a really weird problem today. I noticed some strange config drift on one of my nodes (shit happens when I manually experiment in “production”), so I decided to reinstall/upgrade the k3s agent. For a while now I’ve been connecting my nodes through tailscale, so that I can have my homelab machine join the cluster from my home network as well. k3s has a(n experimental) feature for “natively” integrating with tailscale and it’s been working just fine so far.
よくある話でしょう。金は儲けてるはずなのに、貯金（投資）が貯まらない。大した買い物はしてないはずなのに、クレカの引き落とし額が面白くない数値になっている。
さすがに歳も歳なので大人らしく口座の残高を気にしようと思った。まぁ学生の頃は金欠に大人らしいとは言い難い、口座を気にせざるを得ない状態だったけど、今は違う。と思いたい。
Usually there was no problem. Stuff worked just fine. Certificates were generated and renewed automatically. https:// links opened without ugly browser warnings about how you’re about to get hacked and it’s the end of the known universe.
But when it wasn’t “usually”, when Traefik just happened to restart for whatever reason, then all of that was obliterated. Since Traefik was running on ephemeral storage, eg nothing was really persisted, innocently tweaking some configuration (that resulted in a restart) could be catastrophic. You know, self-signed certificates and ugly browser warnings.
I’ve been using Argo CD for GitOps automation for a very long time. I have it manage itself too! The other day I noticed that there was a new major version of Argo CD, so I decided to upgrade my stuff too. It did not go smoothly, though it wasn’t an issue with Argo CD itself.
It was the usual problem of Helm charts renaming and moving around stuff in their values.yaml, which results in significant breakage for (from an user perspective) no good reason. I summed up what I learned so others don’t have to play around with it so much.
I’ve been playing around with smart lights for a while now. I have four Edison Smart filament bulbs, two Philips Hue white bulbs and some Switchbot bulb. I had a terrible experience with Switchbot bulbs (which is why I got the Hues in the first place), disconnecting and needing to be re-paired all the time, suddenly factory resetting themselves to max brightness in the middle of the night and such. So the one I kept is just a reading light now with a manual switch on my bedside table.
For the others though, I’ve wanted to have some manual switches for them too in addition to being able to control them through my smartphone. When I get home it’s still quicker to tap a physical switch than to whip up my phone, wait until the respective proprietary app connects to the bulbs and then I get some light.
What I ended up with: a Home Assistant Green with the external USB Zigbee dongle, three IKEA RODRET switches and this blog post. I got those Home Assistant devices because that’s what I could get shipping to Japan, but I believe the Yellow version has Zigbee built in, which should make it a little less clumsy.
今年初めてスーパーアリーナのVIVA LA ROCKの3-4日め行ってきた。目当てのバンドも楽しかったバンドもいっぱいあったが、最終的にもっとも印象に残ったのは花冷え。だった。
