asjmcguire

Been the victim of fraud. Unfortunately - yes.
When I was younger and Chip ‘n’ PIN was becoming popular, many smaller shops had a Paypoint machine that would print the entire card number and CCV on the receipt. I was so paranoid about fraud, especially given that there was sufficient information printed on the receipt that anyone could do an Amazon order with those details. I used to get a black permanent marker and scribble the details out before putting the receipt in the bin.

Imagine my horror when a decade later, I learn that I have been the victim of fraud, and a type of fraud it was entirely impossible for me to prevent. In the UK fraudsters watch for new companies popping up on Companies House and then use the details to go on a shopping spree. The way it works is like this:

They see my name, address and date of birth on the website. They are looking for a name that matches their surname and first initial. So for me that could be Alexander Jones for example. They go to a retail park and pop into Argos. They order several thousand pounds of stuff. When they go to pay, the person at the counter helpfully asks “Do you have an Argos credit card? If you apply for one today, we’ll transfer the balance of today’s purchases to the card” and armed with my address, date of birth and name, and a card that already has the same surname and first initial as me - they are accepted for an Argos credit card. Post nothing for the goods they just bought and leave the store. They go next door to JJB sports, and then whole process repeats. “Do you have a JJB sports card? If you get one today…”

They visited 6 stores in an hour and repeated this process at all of them. And a week later I start receiving credit cards…

It’s a surprisingly common scam (or it was), brought on entirely by the shops bring pushed to get people to sign up for credit cards…

I had to be on a register for several years, so if anyone tried to open an account or take out credit in my name, I would get a phone call to check if it was actually me.

Create Home Assistant automation

Choose Homeassistant as the trigger
and Start as the event.

I tried to upload a photo showing this, but that doesn’t seem to be working right now.

My automations include:

• Setting the lighting mode to “night mode” based on a threshold of the outside lux level, which is changed dynamically based on the reported weather condition.

• Setting a master brightness input_number based on a threshold of the outside lux level, which is dynamically changed based on the reported weather condition. Every room then has it’s own input_number which is automatically set every time the master brightness changes, and either has additional brightness added relative to the master, or brightness subtracted.

• At 7:30am some Jinja code starts setting a daylight temperature input_number which starts adjusting the Kelvin temperature of supported lights in the house. I’m aware that there are various integrations to do this, but they all appear to be based on the actual sun, and as a SAD sufferer I don’t understand why people would want that, especially in the winter. My solution guarantees me at least 8 hours of “daylight” regardless of what the time of year is. - The code is ridiculously simple too:

    {% set k_end = 5500 %} {% set k_start = 2000 %} {% set t_start =
    today_at('07:30') %} {% set t_end = today_at('10:30') %} {% set cv =
    ((now()|as_timestamp) - t_start|as_timestamp)|int %} {{ k_start +
    (cv/3.0857)|int }}

Then the reverse happens starting at 6pm:

    {% set k_start = 5500 %} {% set k_end = 2000 %} {% set t_start =
    today_at('18:00') %} {% set t_end = today_at('21:00') %} {% set cv =
    ((now()|as_timestamp) - t_start|as_timestamp)|int %} {{ k_start -
    (cv/3.0857)|int }}

My other favourite automation, is something I call Music Walk, essentially when I play music on a group of speakers, as I move about the house when the occupancy of a room changes (camera through frigate, and Zigbee motion) a script is triggered which increases the volume in that room, and starts a timer for 01:30:00 and then after occupancy has been cleared, the timer is reset to 00:05:00 and when the timer finishes - it will run the script that changed the volume originally and set it to 0.1 So it feels like as I walk into rooms the music follows me there, but really it was already playing there - just quieter.

Huh… because they are all describing a particularly shitty work environment, there is a good bet that there are other employees who feel that way. It might indeed not be the protests that kill Reddit - but Reddit itself that kills Reddit…

I don’t see that a reversal at this point would be any different to Twitter suddenly becoming usable again. The damage has already been done, it can’t be reversed. Even with a pinky swear that Reddit will never pull this shit again, the trust is gone. Just like with Twitter - Elon could f*** off to Mars tomorrow, but the next person to step in and run Twitter could be just as bad, or worse. And both companies can implement any changes they like at any time with zero worry about what happens to the users. Thus - it’s the wake-up call we all needed, that someone else’s platform is really someone else’s platform - regardless of how long we have had a home there. It’s time for own platform, a community run platform.