middle-aged entity yells at computers

[azurelunatic]

Tuesday was Not A Great Day. I had forgotten to take my bedtime pills, including my daily anti-anxiety, and that manifested in some miscellaneous Unhappiness (see also the Dad Situation) and when Belovedest got home and mentioned that the corner of the kitchen where Stuff tends to Collect was making them Unhappy, I turned into my best impression of a popsicle left out in the rain but managed to yell about a lot of things that were bothering me and then we started tackling the corner together and they ordered a new tub of Quick Blue because my hair isn't the proper color and hasn't been since like July and that's a convenient physical manifestation of my attention span.

Plus I think there was a discussion on recreational priorities and how we handle them differently: I don't have the energy/attention/endurance/prep space/raw materials to cook like I'd like to eat, so I think of takeout as a viable alternative to cooking in some circumstances. I need to eat anyway, and it's different and often tastier. Whereas personal adornment is entirely a luxury. And it was interesting to hear a perspective of "but, I'm a dragon and my Entities also need to have sparklies!" with takeout as the luxury.


So in the vein of mentioning things that were getting to me a bit, I pointed Belovedest back at the Home Assistant, because it had lost its ability to use the microphone for some unfathomable reason. (huh, I wonder if it's one of those things where it's expecting to use Driver A for Item A but it's dealing with Item B now? or maybe not.) So Belovedest said, slowly, that there was one computer-device in the living room that they hadn't tried to get it working on (they've been poking at it now and then) and that was the Linux box that usually drives Screen B, as a background process.

They were up half the night but the snake-shaped microphone is working to take Home Assistant input now. "Porcupine" is the current wake-up word, but it can be set to a number of things including the commands for other assistants. (Likely so you can swap out the assistant that your non-technical relative is using without them having to re-learn all the commands.)

I'm still waiting for Sengled to expose their rainbow setting outside the app.

Comments

[vass]

There must be something going around. My Tuesday was very Not Great too.

I'm glad you and your Belovedest were able to do some load-balancing and associated troubleshooting.

[azurelunatic]

They were slightly surprised today when I asked them to hold my cup of ice and hefted the box of cola syrup up to the shelf we'd cleared off. They had considered that I might wish for them to lift the Heavy Thing, but as we know from years of me being a man of my family of origin, I will sometimes Lift Heavy Thing as an exercise in machismo.

It helped to have my electronics and physics knowledge taken seriously today by the guys with the air conditioner/heat pump consult. The one guy, who used to work at Honeywell, said he's never heard a customer describe a thermostat as "single pole single throw" before. (This in my Bad Climate Control Systems We Have Known story, about that fucking apartment where the kitchen cabinets fell out of the sheetrock upon being loaded.)

But I am so close to the end of my cope rope, and Belovedest is the nice large knot with the leather guard in the gym class rope that you can sit on when using the rope as a swing. (for whatever reason, my elementary school gym teacher was strict but not actually harsh, and we had crossover events between music and gym classes that were generally enjoyed at least for being different.)

[pauamma]

Porcupine. I'm somehow reminded of that SF novel in which the protagonist addresses her voice-control computer access as (IIRC) "hey, jerkface!" and set it up to act very grumpy at her in return, commenting that most people in her time seem to have a God complex and want to order it around rudely and get back fawning or bootlicking answers. Both options strike me as equally bad, and your household's choice sounds like a nice middle ground.

[azurelunatic]

Practically, it's also the name of the specific voice control package and therefore the default. There was a short list of options, including Grapefruit.

We do have it configured with a karma file, and it will accept a list of curses and kudos, and grab a response from its apology file when it gets a curse. Karma usually hovers ±1 unless there's been a really bad voice recognition day and it's added several dozen bananas to the shopping list. (A usual failure mode for a misunderstood command.)

[pauamma]

*nod* Thanks.