Home Assistant's Xiaomi Miio integration

Xiaomi Miio is an integration for Home Assistant, an open-source home automation software. It is the link between Home Assistant itself, and your Xiaomi smart devices. Except I don’t want my network traffic routed to some server up in China or wherever when I’m at home, and the device itself is at home, as it makes for a meaningfully longer turnaround time, and is probably a privacy hole too. (The next step is cutting off “phone home” traffic from these devices, but story for another day.

MariBank 2.88% per annum from September 18

Today I opened the MariBank app to discover this notification: That’s on their savings account product, and so an increase of 0.38% given the existing rate (2.5% per annum). Interest is credited daily; e.g., a 75K deposit earns ~$5.92 instead of ~$5.14 per day, and so a 15.2% increase. It’s unclear how long this will last, but hey, make your money work harder for you while it can. (This campaign should be brief, given that GXS Bank’s 3.

Apple Event - September 12

YouTube video: Link “Happy birthday” video. [That “thank you” song, real catchy.] Today is all about Apple Watch and iPhone. Recap about the new Macs (the Studio, the Pro, and the 15" MacBook Air). Much flexing about the 15, I feel like. Vision Pro, ships “early next year”. [I’d forgotten, got excited all over again!] Watch Series 9 “Most popular watch”. [How did you know?] Apple silicon (S9 SiP) in the Series 9.

Reddit API update

Today I launched Apollo, a 3rd-party client for Reddit, and saw, to my dismay, an update from Apollo’s developer. The following is an excerpt from his post on the Apollo App subreddit: … 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined. Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year.

How to cut (or trim) video with FFmpeg

The browser history tells me I’ve visted this FFmpeg HOWTO page many times as I get handy with the tool: My brain works on absolute, not relative, time so I’d much rather be able to directly indicate when to start cutting -ss, and when to stop -to; I also want to only copy the original video/audio, without any re-encoding, hence the -c:v copy -c:a copy part. Putting it all together: we take some input file foo.

Updated Build a PC

Last year, around the start of the pandemic, I built a PC for myself. Over time, my setup grew to encompass an ultrawide monitor, and a bunch of USB peripherals, so here’s everything appended to the original table. The total cost went up, now it’s exactly SGD 2297 (previously: 1297.10): Part Price GPU MSI GTX 1650 SUPER VENTUS XS OC 4GB 259 CPU AMD Ryzen 3 3300X 181 HSF Stock 0 MotherBoard MSI B450M MORTAR MAX 180 RAM Corsair VENGEANCE PRO 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-3200MHZ 252 HDD None 0 SSD Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus (500 GB) 199 Power Supply Corsair VS650 80 PLUS 92 Case Cooler Master Silencio S600 134.