Yeah, I didn’t think about this before but I guess you need to be careful if you have water from a bore hole. I didn’t realise that safe distance was only 30m! But I’m also under the impression that septic systems are quite carefully designed, not just a big hole soaking blackwater into the ground.
Everyone I know on septic systems gets their water from rainwater (something we get a lot of here) so contamination isn’t a problem.
Interesting! They make a good point that you normally have most of the infrastructure needed because you’re already treating wastewater. They mention a couple of additional things thatmight happen before reintroducing into the drinking water system but all in all it does sound pretty feasible!
Now I know what to search for, I found this. It seems it’s not that common yet but there is growing interest in it. Interestingly Oregon isn’t mentioned.
I guess the difference is that it’s presumably quite diluted by the river, rather than directly feeding waste water back to the drinking water pipe.
Well I was thinking there’s a big difference between what is safe to release into the environment (solids removed, UV treated to kill germs, maybe some other stuff) vs safe drinking water. But I guess waste water is mostly just water - not mostly urine. So maybe it’s not as big of a gap as I assumed. After all, they pump water in from rivers and lakes for filtering and treatment before putting it in the pipes, maybe it isn’t that big of a difference after all?
We are, but even simply desalinating water is very expensive last I heard. To turn sewage into drinking water sounds like it would be even more expensive. I know they drink recycled pee on the ISS but that’s cheaper than launching water up all the time.
Woah, they take wastewater and turn it into drinking water? Is that common? I would have thought it would be cost prohibitive.
People get paid in the US either monthly or biweekly.
Ah, this is different than the other comment implied. They said:
I tend to forget that salaries are paid weekly in the US. Then this makes at least somewhat sense.
You said it makes sense that in the US people get paid weekly (and pay rent monthly) so having a service that lets you pay rent off each week makes sense.
I’m asking why in the US people don’t pay rent weekly. Where I live it’s the most common way of doing it.
But then why isn’t rent paid weekly?
Where I live, weekly or fortnightly pay is more common than monthly, and rent is almost always paid weekly.
I think it’s a pretty cool toy to play with. It mostly gets used for setting timers and playing music, but you can add Home Assistant automations that trigger when you say certain things. Lot’s to play with if that’s your idea of fun!
Home Assistant sells units with duel microphones that aren’t too expensive and work relatively well. But the local voice recognition wasn’t great last I tried.
Similar to the other user’s response, I use the calendar integration, then add the things on the calendar (say, putting the recycling out to be collected). Then I have an automation that will read out a reminder at the time it is scheduled for in the calendar.
So the evening before recycling pickup every fortnight, it pipes up and says “Reminder: Recycling” or whatever.
Works pretty well for these regular reoccurring things. I haven’t tried using it for one off reminders, and you can’t say “ok nabu, remind me to wish Steve a happy birthday on the 27th of February” or anything like that. Still, I’m pretty happy.
I seem to remember needing a bit of playing to get the notification working, I’m happy to look up and post what I have in my automation if needed.
In Home Assistant, in the settings, if you go to Voice Assistants then click the … on your assistant and click Debug, you can see what it thought you said (and what it did).
Setting a timer on an up to date Home Assistant will repeat back what it set. E.g. If I say “Set a timer for 2 minutes” it will say “Timer set for 2 minutes”. It says “Done” when running some Home Assistant task/automation, so it’s probably not understanding you correctly (hence what the debug option is good for). I use the cloud voice recognition as I couldn’t get the local version to understand my accent when I tried it (a year ago). It’s through Azure but is proxied by Home Assistant so they don’t know it’s you.
The wake word responds to me, but not my girlfriend’s voice.
My wife swears it’s sexist, she has a bit of trouble too. In the integration options you can set the sensitivity to make it more sensitive, but it does increase false activations. I have it on the most sensitive and she can activate it first time most of the time.
I agree that it’s not production ready and they know that too, hence the name. But in relation to your points, I plugged in some speaker as it’s not really that great of a speaker at all.
For the wake word, at some point they did an update to add a sensitivity setting so you can make it more sensitive. You could also ty donating your voice to the training: https://ohf-voice.github.io/wake-word-collective/
But all in all you’re spot on with the challenges. I’d add a couple more.
With OpenAI I find it can outperform other voice assistants in certain areas. Without it, you come up across weird issues, like my wife always says “set timer 2 minutes” and it runs off to OpenAI to work out what that means. If you says “set a timer for 2 minutes” it understands immediately.
What I wish for is the ability to rewrite requests. Local voice recognition can’t understand my accent so I use the proxied Azure speech to text via Home Assistant Clound, and it regularly thinks I’m saying “Cortana” (I’m NEVER saying Cortana!)
Oh and I wish it could do streaming voice recognition instead of waiting for you to finish talking then waiting for a pause before trying anything. My in-laws have a google home and if you say something like “set a timer for 2 minutes” it immediately responds because it was converting to text as it went, and knew that nothing more was coming after a command like that. HAVP has perhaps a 1 second delay between finishing speaking and replying, assuming it doesn’t need another 5 seconds to go to open AI. And you have to be quiet in that 1 second otherwise it thinks you’re still talking (a problem in a busy room).
Nah someone else linked the original image: https://www.reddit.com/r/Goatparkour/comments/bto7j1/from_this_angle_mountain_goats_are_even_more/
It’s like some weird AI regeneration of it or something?
The same in NZ. Is this that you never ever wear shoes on inside?
Is it acceptable to walk into your own house and walk around with shoes on? Sure.
Do most people do that most of the time? In my experience, people will be shoes off in their own home most of the time, but it’s not some big taboo to keep them on if you’re popping in to grab something.
Maybe but hardly anyone had 32GB of RAM 5 years ago so that’s unlikely to feed into the average. My original thought was that I don’t think the average will go down, because people will keep their current hardware for longer. Maybe we will see mobos with modern sockets and DDR4 support if this drags on, but hopefully the bubble will burst by Christmas and we’ll all be picking up refurbished DDR5 for pennies from the decommissioned data centres.
Well the last couple of years is pretty restrictive. If you’re upgrading every few years you’ll probably just bite the bullet and pay for the RAM.
My last comment was basically saying you can upgrade to the top of the line CPU that fits your mobo, giving you an upgrade for not too much cash. Better than forking out for DDR5.
Not necessarily, most people will be able to upgrade their CPU to a better model with the same socket. Sockets aren’t updated every time a CPU is released, and most people won’t be buying the top of the top even if they were, meaning there’s room to grow as prices drop.
Well I don’t know if dependent is the right word. I’m fully aware that Home Assistant is something I play with for fun.
I can check the app and see how much power my solar has generated today, how hot my water heater is, or see what temperature it is inside or outside. None of that is helpful for anything other than for fun.
Though it can do thinks like automaticaly bump up the target temperature of my hot water when the solar is making too much power in order to store that energy as heat, which is pretty cool (and might save me money).
What can I say, this is some people’s idea of fun. I got security cameras (that I can view through home assistant) and put them not pointed at entryways or windows because I don’t care about security, I pointed them at areas where the dog is and the kids play so I can play with object and facial recognition, all locally processed.
It’s ok to not think it’s your idea of fun, but if anyone uses home assistant in a way that they rely on rather than just for the fun of playing with the technology then I’d love to hear what that use is!