Ok #homeautomation friends. I have a new wood burning fireplace. One of its features is a thermocouple thermometer in the catalytic converter. I’m supposed to use that temperature to help know when to engage the damper. It has hard-wired leads that plug into the bottom of this device (that came with the stove). Fitting a new/additional thermometer to the fireplace is not realistic (I don’t think). But is there a device that can take these leads and can read the temperature? I want to add something to #homeassistant so I don’t have to look at the device and so I don’t have to keep replacing batteries in it. I could hook up an ESP32 or similar with something going to a GPIO or whatever. But I don’t know where to start. Any thoughts? Feel free to boost.

New Peanuts movie dropped this holiday season. #monsterdon

Like any normal #homeautomation enthusiast I just happened to have an ESP32 and a 4 amp 5V power supply laying around. So I bought a couple more strands of WS2811 lights, flashed #WLED on it,and poof! second holiday tree is lit. Here’s a hot tip from a pro like me to any of you amateurs out there. These ESP32s perform much better when you plug the +5V wire into the 5V pin and the ground into the GND pin. If you put the ground wire on one of the communication pins, they don’t work as well. 😛 Don’t get discouraged. One day you’ll be as smart as me. Now to add it to #homeassistant …

Hey gang, @npub1knhw...vhnp and I want to help make #MonsterdonSavesChristmas a big success this year. We are matching your donations to these 3 charities up to a total of $3000. Send your redacted data to @npub1lna2...jxna as usual, and we'll get the total at the end and double your impact. We're supporting: The Trevor Project Rainbow Railroad Trans Lifeline Spread the word. Let's do some good in the world!

This week I am trying to move my #video library from #Plex running on #TrueNAS to #Jellyfin running on TrueNAS. First impression is that Swiftfin (the AppleTV app) is not good enough. I have 500-600 films in a hierarchy of dozens of directories. Both Jellyfin and Swiftfin dump all that into a pile called #Movies. So my screen has all 500+ films in alphabetical order. Things like Monsterdon schlocky films are right next to comedies and drama and action. I want to see my top level folders like Comedy, Action, Kung-Fu, etc. Then I want to descend into them. I can kinda get this in the web UI, but the TV UI is determined by the app. Other than that, I’m really enjoying it. I love the collections and the automatic figuring-stuff-out. It’s been good. I love the lack of shoving stuff in my face. Plex of course wants to shove things into my face. I’m downloading Infuse for #AppleTV to see if it works better.

I just learned that one of the administrators who used to help run carecure (a 20-year-old forum for spinal cord injury patients and their families) has died. I never knew him, but I knew his work. If you want to think about sysadmin on hard mode, I inherited a reasonably built set of containers that he built typing with a mouth stick. I can’t imagine the kind of determination and strength that takes.