Oh wow, I had no idea that SL did another language change after migrating LSL to Mono. Surprising considering that happened late '00s/early '10s?
I'd consider LSL to have been foundational in my ultimate interest/career in software engineering. The strict typing, very usable compile/runtime errors, and good documentation/examples made it so easy to pick up as a teen. Not to mention as long as you didn't edit/save a script again it would always run the same regardless of updates.
The food court has always been accessible/usable without a membership. Just depends on how hard the store polices the people coming in through the exit.
The Costco Pharmacy is accessible to anyone who is filling a prescription there. Because of state and federal regulations on this, you do not need to be a member if you are there to fill a valid prescription (not OTC.) You can enjoy Costco's ordinary low prices, but not the member-exclusive discounts. You can inform the person checking IDs and they will admit you to the store.
Now off to my PCP for a Polish Dog with Mustard and Onions Prescription...
It’s been policy that membership is required to eat at the food court, but some stores with outdoor food courts don’t enforce it. It’s absolutely false to say they’ve “always been accessible “.
I got a slice of pizza a couple of weeks ago and they wanted to see my card. I can't remember ever having to show my card for the food. (in southern California)
I'll second the endorsement for the Reolink doorbells. Great quality and build.
I've never been able to get their general security cameras to work reliably. Between poor uptime, frequent need for power cycling, and inconsistent stream quality, I'd choose something else unless you already own them or their particular form factors suit your needs.
Reolink POE cameras and POE doorbells paired to the Reolink NVR are high quality and super reliable. Price wise it is a long break even if the goal is to just save money with no subscription, but you get a much more professional setup. NVR with basic camera bundle will be $450-$800, then another $200 or so for doorbells or some larger cameras with lights. Professional install is around $120 a camera.
If anyone goes this route save yourself a ton of trouble and ignore 95% of the articles and forum posts telling you to use Scrypted and HomeBridge. It is trash and won’t work well.
The best way to link the NVR to the Internet and other smart devices is with HomeAssistant. Everything else is trash.
It actually works, and HomeAssistant exposed motion detection alerts as their own sensors. The vehicle alerts, people alerts, animal alerts, and more generic motion alerts all pipe in as if they are their own device. You can easily combine this with some super cheap smart light switches and a speaker or two to make your own alarm system. The NVR has EXCELLENT person, animal, and vehicle detection and differentiation. Very few false positives, and I have never seen them miss something even under the worst conditions. We had a thunderstorm last night and they picked up vehicles on the road through heavy rain and flashes of lightning.
Do not bother connecting the Reolink mobile app to the the Internet. It is perfectly serviceable for when you are on the same network, it’s just anywhere else. Just pipe video out with HomeAssistant.
I agree that Z-Wave products are top tier. As well as SONOFF, but the particular model you linked has decidedly been one of the worst mmWave sensors in the general options available by any manufacturer. No idea why, but they never report presence or lux properly.
If one doesn't want to invest in Z-Wave I'd say grab some of the Aqara FP1/FP2 sensors. The FP2 gives you full room zone presence detection, so you can put it in your kitchen/dining room and set up predefined areas and it'll expose those as their own presence zones.
If you don't need that level of granularity, the generic Tuya mmWave sensors on Amazon, or elsewhere, are a solid option. Super discrete, plenty of tuning parameters, and good smart home platform integration. I prefer the ZigBee ones because the WiFi ones can be a little noisy on your LAN (traffic not interference).
One of the best ZWave mmWave sensors on the market is the Everything Presence Pro [0]. It has 3 motion sensors on board: DFRobot SEN0609 mmWave, HiLink LD2450 mmWave and Panasonic EKMC1603111 PIR. It has way more than this but the package is truly one of the best combinations of sensors and software. The sensor can do multi-target tracking and the HomeAssistant tuning software to define zones is next level compared to more popular sensors from places like Apollo. And I do like Apollo gear, I own a lot of it, but the quality and execution of the EST products is on a different tier of build quality for the price. Apollo just feels cheap in comparison and the reliability and accuracy of the sensors just isn't quite there, and to their credit they keep getting better. That being said they have a long way to go to catch up to EST. For true pro level installs the Everything Presence Pro is awesome, especially because of the 802.3af support. For battery installs the Everything Presence Lite [1] is also amazing. It only has the LD2450 is still really good and has multi-target tracking as well, but definitely won't support large spaces like the Pro.
I hate to even recommend EST because they're always hard to get based on lack of availability. But, you can't go wrong with those two sensors.
And, yes, most of the options listed in the article are garbage unless you're looking for one off options.
I'm not a fan of the Aqara gear as they've had some funky limitations on the software side and I've not had good results even compared to the Apollo [2] gear.
I've had really great success with the TP-Link Tapo cameras. I have a number of their models, and they're all rock solid. Both in build, and image quality.
What drew me to them is that they have RTSP (and ONVIF for their PTZ models) built in, so you're not beholden to their app. I use them paired with Frigate, but they also all include an SD card slot for local recording.
They have on-camera detection for people, pets, cars, etc. No obligation to use their cloud services (I have them on an IoT VLAN with internet access disabled, and have never had an issue). If you're not using your own NVR then you'll probably have to keep them internet accessible for remote viewing.
Cameras have been in the Texas elements for a few years now and the streams look like they did brand new. I'd say my only complaint about them is that the mounts are oddly designed, but perfectly usable as is. 3D printing largely makes that a non-issue, though.
I don't think anything necessarily happened to OSHPark so much as JLC became the default for a lot of people. I find the defining factor is just consistency mixed with capabilities. Even if one could conceivably get a specific PCB stackup quicker from a US company, being able to order basically any type of PCB (and increasingly more than just PCBs) from a single vendor is a pretty significant value-add.
There are US shops like Advanced Circuits that can turn boards around extremely quickly, but obviously you are paying for that speed. Most people ordering a handful of boards for a hobby project, or prototype are probably optimizing more for cost and consistency than shaving a few days off the lead time.
Once someone finds a vendor where they know the quality will meet whatever their own subjective minimum is, there's not much incentive to shop around. Being able to tack on assembly at JLC with a single checkbox also exponentially increases the desire to just stick with that vendor.
To throw another in the mix, SendCutSend has consistently been a reliable and affordable option for 2D cut parts. They recently added CNC machining offerings, though I can't speak to their affordability on that.
Overseas will almost always win on price (at least in small quantities), but it's hard to beat the turnaround from local manufacturers...
> Overseas will almost always win on price (at least in small quantities), but it's hard to beat the turnaround from local manufacturers...
Overseas can work with crazy turnarounds too. Once I ordered a bunch of stuff from Digikey, and the parcel came around from the tiny village of Thief River Falls MN to rural Bavaria in less than 30 hours, picking/handling included. And free shipping, despite being less than 100€ in volume.
I know it's not a remake, but Endless Sky[0] seems to be a pretty faithful "reimagining" of the EV series. Even has an Android port on F-Droid. I haven't played through much of it, but the first few minutes gave me immediate nostalgia.
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