November 9 2021 Review, Home Assistant, SMARTY, TV websites

Darren reported that his DVD drive door opens whenever the machine is returning from sleep; a couple of suggestions were made: that he checks the BIOS firmware and that he checks the boot order to see if the DVD is selected prior to the hard drive.

He is continuing to explore Picroft.

He showed a Bluetooth multi-channel microphone he had acquired.

John presented the much delayed thirteenth birthday review.

David noted that BCB has started taking studio bookings but he is not sure how long the building is open.

Brian demonstrated how he had set up Node-RED to control the central heating in Home Assistant, creating a place in which to store the desired temperature. However, he was puzzled as to what the Ovo fuel consumption readings were intended to convey and why the location was not correct. After some discussion the conclusion appeared to be that Home Assistant was getting its location from Brian’s mobile and that he needed to adjust the permissions on his mobile in order to get Home Assistant to reflect his location.

Brian also mentioned that he had had problems logging in to his bank until he started going through a UK VPN.

David mentioned that he had obtained a flashable USB Zigbee dongle and also showed off his USB fan — which he added could be used in reverse to generate electricity. Responding to Brian’s mention of SMARTY mobile, he said that he and his mother had been using SMARTY mobile for years.

He also said that he had used AliExpress to obtain some servos to operate model railway points but did not promise to demonstrate more than a single point working at the next meeting. There is a TV series, Hornby: a model world, currently available.

He noted that there is a bug in the Ubuntu 21.10 release for the Raspberry Pi for which a replacement kernel is coming out.

Bernard mentioned the release of Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W while Brian confessed that he had fried a Raspberry Pi.

Brian and David shared a number of websites which make TV programmes available: Reddit, Attacker, IMDB and Amazon Prime along with Tubi which is not available in countries which have signed up to the GDPR.

Brian noted that you can cast from Vivaldi with Alt-FT.

Past Meetings