Recent content on John Lian
The Sony α6700’s subject recognition feels magical until the bird is small in frame or the background is busy. Then “Wide + Bird” starts looking like a coin flip. If you’ve been frustrated by this, you’re not alone 1 . The fix: stop asking the camera to find the subject and start telling it where to begin. The problem: Wide AF with Subject Recognition can get confused…
In the Raspberry Pi CEC automation I mentioned that my Samsung TV is on ARC (not eARC) . This is the backstory: eARC wouldn’t stay put, so dropping back to ARC was the only reliable option. Setup Samsung S95B hangs on the wall, its eARC port feeds a Denon AVR-X1700H , and every source runs through the receiver with CEC enabled. With HDMI eARC Mode = Auto , the S95B would sometimes boot to TV…
For years I treated HDMI-CEC like a house spirit: sometimes helpful, mostly temperamental, never fully understood. My living-room stack is straightforward: Samsung TV on ARC (NOT eARC - story for another day), Denon AVR-X1700H hidden in a closet, Apple TV plus a bunch of consoles connected to the receiver, and a Raspberry Pi 4 already doing Homebridge duty. When it comes to CEC, the Apple TV…
Did a quick search and didn’t see anyone else post this. To get 4K 60 FPS output while docked for Hades 2 on the Switch 2, disabling “120 Hz Output” in Switch 2 System Settings > Display is required . Just choosing 4K TV resolution is not enough. IMO, since the 4K seems to be upscaled, it’s not really enough of an image quality improvement to be worth it. But you could test for yourself.
This is a long post. TL;DR: what did Apple do to make Vision Pro’s passthrough not feel like crap despite not being depth-correct? Depth-correct passthrough: what’s the big deal? It’s well documented that it’s critical for video passthrough mixed reality to be “depth-correct” (AKA perspective correct) or you’ll have issues: Unpleasantness that persists…
I need to use NFS with Kubernetes in GitHub codespaces for reasons. k3d 1 already handled my throwaway clusters nicely, so the obvious move was to add an NFS-backed 2 ReadWriteMany volume via nfs-subdir-external-provisioner . I expected it to “just work.” It did not. Pods sat in ContainerCreating until they timed out with mount.nfs: Operation not permitted , the same failure called out in k3d…
(Among cities with population of 100,000 or more) A few weeks ago I was in Rome, where $$$$ on TripAdvisor equates to Ballard prices, I started to wonder how expensive is Seattle for dining ? Is it top 10? I thought it must be but had no data to back it up. Results on Google weren’t too helpful. I wanted to understand the cost in absolute terms (not adjusted to local cost of living or…
A quick google shows that the entire internet says that Everclear 190 is illegal (or “banned”) in Washington state. There’s even an /r/seattle post from 2015 that says the same thing. Open and shut case, right? Not really. You can order it for pickup straight from Total Wine’s website . Right now it says it’s in stock. Curious about this discrepancy, I go to Interbay Total Wine to verify. It’s…
One closet to house all our networking and media equipment. Most of the hard work was done by the previous owner with the CAT6, HDMI, and speaker wires all in wall. Here’s the network panel close up. I’m not super stoked about putting my eero gateway in here to act as the router but currently not sure what to upgrade to. Suggestions welcome.
I rely on TinyPilot to manage a Windows PC that lives in a closet. TinyPilot is a Raspberry Pi-based KVM: it streams HDMI video from the PC and pretends to be a USB keyboard and mouse so I can type over the network. My PC also sleeps aggressively to save power. A real keyboard wakes it. TinyPilot did not, so every remote session began with a trip to the closet. Wake-on-LAN was unreliable on that…
Steps I took Go to the homebridge terminal, you can SSH or I just used the homebridge UI. Install Playactor sudo npm install -g playactor . Run playactor browse and find your PS5, remember its name like “PS5-XXX”, you’ll need it later. Run playactor login --host-name PS5-XXX --no-open-urls to register your device as a remote play controller. The --no-open-urls is important here…
Since moving to Seattle I have been gradually automating an ordinary apartment. The goal is not to build a trade-show demo; it is to make the lights, TV, door, and vacuum respond consistently. Online discussions often highlight the worst connected gadgets, but with some patience (and a few hubs) the living room can anticipate daily routines instead of fighting them. Where we are and how we got…
I made my reservation on presentation day on March 31, 2016 when I used to live in Canada. I moved to the US later that year, so I went to Tesla’s website to update my account info with my new US address. I got the invite to configure my Model 3 last weekend and noticed that everything was in CAD$. I called sales who told me that I need to cancel my old reservation and make a new one with US…
Update June 2021: people felt the methods in this post are too extreme . Fortunately, ASUS has since published a new support article on this topic , and I’ve heard that it works better. I haven’t tried it myself since I changed to eero (which works perfect with HomeKit) more than a year ago. Original post below. I’ve had pretty good experiences with HomeKit with Philips Hue and…
Homebridge is a key part to my home automation setup. I run it on a Raspberry Pi (gen 1, pictured in header) and it allows me to integrate my TV, Apple TV, and robot vacuum into HomeKit. However, it does crash quite a bit. Here are some things I did to make Homebridge easier to deal with.
In our last meeting for the 2014-2015 FRC season, I received this gift from the team. I was pretty speechless. Thanks team.
I used animation to help me visualize some of the work I did for my honours thesis (PDF warning). Prior to MATLAB R2014b’s major graphics changes , it wasn’t exactly easy to create efficient animations with MATLAB, so I spent some time figuring out the best way to do it.
Thanks to the business team, the website can now be found at http://www.frc4955.com