Heading to Sydney for the weekend to catch a Devin Townsend concert. Looking forward to a change in scenery even if it's only brief!
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Lucky! I was so keen to go to that, but schedules conflicted
Last day in old team at work, from Monday I'm on a secondment. Looking forward to getting into it but also hoping the new govt doesn't asplode the project I'm gonna be part of. On the other hand, I have a substantive to fall back on and recruiters pinging me on the regular on Linkdn so that's something.
Good luck in your new role....and with the new govt.
Exciting, enjoy!
Projects come and go, if you got the opportunity to have a secondment in a project then it's something for your CV, it will help you find another when yours inevitably ends. Just make sure you make the most of the opportunity.
Thought for the day
One of my work mates got annoyed about an email from the health and safety team, it about being sun smart outside of work. It was obviously not the specific message they were annoyed about, but the perceived intrusion into the outside of work life.
Do you feel like your work life should be fully separate from your personal life?
I'm not too fussed about work/personal life separation, especially after hybrid working has become the norm, and since my role hasn't been "mission critical" for a while now, which means I normally don't get after-hours calls or emails.
But on the rare occasion I do get a work mail after-hours, I might read it if I'm free. Or even action it, if it can help me prepare for the next day (like say I need to do some research on a new product/topic). The way I look at this is, if I spend x minutes doing work stuff outside of work, then I'm gonna spend x minutes on personal stuff during work hours. Overall, I try to maintain a flexible "8hrs of work in a 24hr period" policy, instead of a "my work is strictly between 9-5" type thinking.
What I do mind however, is spam. And that means receiving unwanted, non-work, or even non-role related emails in my mailbox. I like to run a tight mailbox (an "inbox zero" policy), so if I were the recipient of that sunscreen email, I'd be mildly annoyed. Then I'd immediately look for an unsubscribe link, and/or create a rule to delete such emails email the future, and/or move it into the junk folder.
I have heard of people setting a timer for 7 hours 30 mins in the morning (that's 30 min of paid breaks), then just pause it when you aren't working and restart it when you start work again.
I'm not quite that dedicated and I do some longer and some shorter days, so doesn't really work for me, but some people love that strategy.
I keep it entirely separate, though my job does make it quite easy to do so. They're quite good about ensuring people only work their set hours, and don't try to encroach at all, so I'm lucky there. I don't even go to social stuff or the christmas party though - it always feels like work still to me.
100% agree with your colleague here, work considerations end as soon as my personal time starts.
ACC are running their "have a hmmm" campaign which originally about "if something bad happens, here are all the things in my life which will be negatively effected" and it was a decent campaign.
Now the messaging has changed to "Hey if you hurt yourself, your workmates might have to work extra shifts" which is a decent consideration but seems really tone deaf without all the other life impacts. Like "Hey if you hurt yourself, you are hurting the company you work for" and tbh idgaf about the company I work for outside our contractual agreements.
I might be overthinking it but this new angle has really put me off their messaging, and I'm not even someone who actually likes my job.
I try to keep the actual work side apart as much as possible - I refuse to give my mobile number out to any client, no matter how important. Somehow an expectation evolved of being always available and it's always been a really offensive idea to me, so although *technically *I can get work emails remotely, I don't. The only time I've done it since lockdowns ended has been when the power was knocked out and we all went home.
I think with the email I would have been more irritated that the company is pretending they care, since I tend to take things like that with a decidedly patronising tone.
I was a contract engineer for years, so everyone and their dog has my mobile number. When I started this job I was offered a mobile phone which I refused, because I am not going to carry two phones.
But especially over the last 3 years, I am very specific about when I will answer my phone. I don't generally get calls outside of work because I have made it clear to the team, if they are calling me it means that there is really some problem that they cannot solve. I tend to get angry if I get called when the problem is solvable by the people who are on call.
I have not put my work email on my phone; the reasoning is that email in by definition non-urgent information, if it is urgent then call. Therefore the email can wait at work until I get there.
The pretending to care is kind of silly, there is no way for the company to communicate these types of messages that doesn't rely on the attitude of the recipient; the people sending the messages probably genuinely don't want you to get hurt. If you are the type of person that see these things as the company being cynical then they are cynical. If you are the type of person to read these messages on the surface level then that is how you will see them.
I don't know that I'd get upset about a reminder to be sunsmart, but I do try to keep work separate. I don't use work devices for personal things, and I don't use personal devices for work things. I will not put Teams or work email on my personal phone, and I don't share my personal phone number.
After work time I do check for messages at night before bed in case of any last minute meeting requests or anything like that. However, if work expected me to do it, I'd refuse to 😄.
In summary, I don't think work and personal life need to be fully separate, but I think it needs to be at the discretion of the employee not the employer. But even so, I'm not gonna get upset at an email suggesting to wear sunscreen.
Question for the Home Assistant gurus: I'm considering setting up HA, mostly for some temperature sensors which currently have a (more or less) DIY setup for handling/displaying the data. The sensor data gets sent via MQTT, which I imagine is all good for HA.
I have a Raspberry PI 4, which is our media centre (running OSMC). Does HA run pretty well installed alongside everything else, i.e. not on a dedicated machine? It seems like you can install it via pip (or Docker) rather than its dedicated OS... does that seem like a reasonable approach, since I don't really want to have another Raspberry PI?
Between yourself and Dave, I'm getting constant reminders to stop procrastinating and get my HA setup. Bought all the kit, but it's just been sitting for a few months now 😂
I haven't even finished mine. I got 2 IR blasters that I haven't set up because they didn't immedietly work and so I told myself I'd give it another go later (a couple of months ago).
I'm not familiar with OSMC, but my only concern would be with transcoding video using up resources, but I'm guessing it doesn't as the rPI4 wouldn't be very powerful for doing that anyway?
Doesn't really hurt to try and see how you get on. HA can be pretty light if you're not running a lot of automations and scripts.
Trascoding video on the Pi is pretty much a no-go 😆
Haha thought so, but I haven't used a Pi in ages!
Lucky you! But one thing that Pi's are is quiet, something you don't get with anything much more powerful.
True! I think I only ever used the Pi 2 or 3? Still too underpowered for what I wanted it for back then.
I bought a Pi 1 as soon as they were announced, then it spent nearly a decade in a cupboard (other than some short-lived projects) before I finally found a good use for it. It's currently running Pi-hole for my home network.
The Pi4 is a lot, lot more powerful. It can run a dozen self hosted services and do just fine, so long as those services are not media-serving. I have found photo or media servers are a bit much for the Pi 4, and I've recently moved things across to an old laptop and started looking at doing media related stuff.
That’s a good use. I think back then I wanted it for media and maybe torrenting? I’m stretching my memory here a little, but possibly it had shared bandwidth between the USB bus and Ethernet?? Which made it unsuitable. Ended up selling it later on.
I've very new to HA but have been running on a RPi4 without issue. There's some differences between running on their dedicated OS and running in docker but largely it doesn't seem to be an issue. No issues with resources.
I've gotten back into HA recently and I'm running it in a docker container. It confuses the hell out of me, like how do you access the files that are in the docker container? I can't work out where they actually are on my system.
I think the main difference between docker and using home assistant OS is that some things, add ons in particular, aren't available in docker unless you install them manually.
Yeah, I am not that experienced with Docker, so I may go with installing it via pip.
Docker is fantastic but there is definitely a learning curve. I use docker compose for everything, which makes it easier (especially blowing away and recreating a container).
Instead of trying to work out where stuff lives, I create bind mounts. Basically, map a directory on your system to a directory within the container. Most self-hosted services these days will provide docker-compose.yml example files with bind mounts specified, and docker now ships with compose baked in.
I create one directory to hold everything, then one directory to hold a service, then put the docker-compose.yml file in there. Then I can back up just that one directory and everything important is backed up (I do things differently for lemmy because I want live backups, but all my personal stuff is done like that).
Just curious, how do you do live backups for Lemmy?
Two parts. The first part is the important part, the database. I run a scheduled database dump for this (the lemmy documentation actually explains how to do a database dump and how to restore it - I just have a bash script triggered by a cron job).
The second part is the images. Uploaded images and the image cache (for thumbnails for posts on other servers, etc) are virtually impossible to tell apart, so it's all backed up (about 150GB just for images). For this, I just do a tarball of the whole directory. Any in-progress changes get skipped by the process but my theory is that since images are only added and deleted, if the process was run 30 seconds earlier then any being added would have been missed anyway, so they can wait until tomorrow's backup. The vast, vast majority are cached images rather than image uploads anyway.
These two things are done overnight NZ time as they can be resource intensive, but I've done daylight hour backups before when needed, and it doesn't cause much of an impact to the site performance anyway.
Thanks, I will probably try to do it that way.
A few days ago I asked about the Weber Q BBQ's, and this time I've been potentially looking at the Broil King Porta Chef series. Wondering if anyone's got any experience with them? 😸😸
Oh my Dad had a Broil King (not sure what series). He cooked the best steak ever, but not sure if that was the BBQ or his skill. I'm pretty sure he was happy with it though.
That's good to hear!
My BBQ'ing skills are non-existent, so hopefully the BBQ can do most of the lifting :)
TBH my Auntie and Uncle have a Weber and swear by it, so I'm pretty sure you'll be happy with either (or unhappy with either, if your skills are that bad 😝).
Sounds good. (Hopefully the skills will level up :))
Anyone got tips on taking black and white photos? I tried converting some of my photos to black and white but they don't look that good. I tried googling and found some stuff about how photos need to be taken with the intent of being black and white because you're needing to focus on different things in the shot and all that, but I don't seem to be able to get anything decent.
IIRC black and white is all about contrast. So you want some deep contrasting colours in your shot. Or using light and shadow to have contrasting areas. Things in well-lit nature shots like plants and foliage don't work well as they all just end up kind of grey or similar.
Aw but nature is all I have to take photos of :(
Might have to get in close on something with a good colour to get it to contrast with the background. Maybe open aperture so you get that nice bokeh background
I'm using a cellphone and I hate that out of focus background style because it reminds me of the super fake background blur that phones like to do to make the subject of the photo stand out. I will try not to forget to have a go this week and post something in the post. I didn't get to it today and things tend to be out of sight, out of mind for me.
Ah yeah the fake bokeh on phones did look terrible. Can’t beat the subtle look of it on a proper camera with a decent lens.
I should probably try do something for the post too. I feel like I have no creativity with photos any more. I’m the same, I forget about the post after a day. Can it be pinned or similar?
Can’t beat the subtle look of it on a proper camera with a decent lens.
Yeah, shame I don't have one 🙁
Can it be pinned or similar?
I forgot that was a thing 😆
The two options for pinning are community and local. Pinning in the community means it's at the top when viewing !newzealand@lemmy.nz, but it doesn't change anything when looking at the subscribed/local/all feeds.
Pinning in local means it's at the top of the feed, but only for lemmy.nz users. A good half of !newzealand@lemmy.nz subscribers have their accounts on other instances. I also think it's annoying having a post pinned to the top of the feeds.
I have pinned it in the community, which I think is the most appropriate. However, it might not be enough to remind me 😆. I actually wrote it on my to-do list now, so maybe I'll remember to do it before next Friday.
Fair compromise. I tend to sort by new a lot and once it falls off the front page, like you said - out of sight, out of mind 😅
I'm off to Rotorua today for another weekend of mountain biking. I can't freakin wait.
Also, anyone know of potential IT roles? I may be out on my ass soon, and will be looking for work. I'm pretty decent at Linux and networking. Probably 'advanced' level but after so many years (almost 2 decades) doing this, I am continually reminded on how much I still don't know. The more you know, the more you don't know.
The tracks in Taupo have just opened back up after months of closure since the cyclone.
Enjoy the tracks in Rotorua.
Gotta try those this summer! Whats the loop around the lake like? Gravel and flat?
I spend most time in the craters mountain bike park.
I have ridden the cycle path near town with the kids, it is wide and paved.
See: Great lake trails; and Bike Taupo for some good tracks. I have done a lot of these over the years, W2K and K2k are nice medium level rides. There is a lot of riding in craters, at various levels....I'll be going this weekend with the kids.
Not really gravel or flat, a lot of pumice and a little mud, some decent climbs on W2K and K2K, but once on the top is flows from up to down nicely.