jae

finally moved my home assistant¹ install over from a raspberry pi to a decommissioned tiny pc (lenovo thinkcentre tiny m700 for those curious) and oh my god it is hilarious how much faster it is. like yeah the pi did fine for basic shit but updates took fucking forever, esphome builds took fucking forever, it ran out of memory constantly, just kind of a mess. meanwhile the low power x86_64 machine updates in like 30 seconds, which makes sense because IT SHOULD NOT TAKE A LONG TIME TO PULL A DOCKER IMAGE AND THEN RESTART THE CONTAINER. and yet.²

there are things that raspberry pis are good for and they do not actually get used for those things.

1. at some point i want to write a longer post about what i use home assistant for. i have found that it's really good for Sicko Shit (i am a sicko so this works perfectly) but less great for what is demeaningly referred to by the community as "wife-approved usage". although they are making great strides in usability there, which is good. but also i have an automation that tracks sun position and adjusts the makeshift blind tilt controller in my room to let in as much light as possible while still angling to block direct sunlight and glare and it feels like fucking magic. it also requires a bunch of totally inscrutable custom yaml and jinja templates to make work. like i said, sicko shit

2. it's also able to do other things AT THE SAME TIME because it's a VM host and not just a single fucking operating system using up all resources. and it cost less than a pi because pi prices are super inflated and corporations shed these things as a natural waste product so you can get them pretty cheap with a little lookin.