August 1999. The last total solar eclipse visible from the UK was 72 years ago, and the next one would be 91 years later. Young Ted woke up to a gloriously sunny day. This would be it!

An hour before the event we drove out to a nice remote viewing spot with minimal obstructions for miles around. 30 minutes to go, the clouds rolled in. Thick, blanket cloud from horizon to horizon. The eclipse happened. From under the cloud it got a bit darker and the birds had a bit of a freak out but it was otherwise a non-event. We drove back home, disappointed.

30 minutes later the clouds cleared and the rest of the day was as glorious as the morning had been. 27 years later I’m still bitter about it. Seattle’s got nothing on us!

“2”

Holy shit this has been a long time coming and it’s about bloody time!

I’ve been getting proper fed up of seeing new builds with a token one or two panels, presumably a requirement for getting an A rating, only for them to be put slap-bang in the middle of the roof so that the owner is unable to add capacity without ripping the whole thing out and starting again. It reeks of malicious compliance and they’ve been allowed to get away with it for far too long.

Yeah this. I think the classic tikka masala was invented in Glasgow.

That first line is what CGPT helped me with. I wanted something that I don’t need to modify when I add or remove lights, so this just gets everything. Ideally I’d just get the lights that don’t have the power restore feature but most of my lights go via Hue and that doesn’t expose the feature to HA at all.

The input_boolean is a thing I already had setup. The UPS fires a webhook event when it goes in and out of battery mode and there’s a separate automation that switches the helper based on those.

Got a little help from CGPT so it might not be perfect, but this seems to work from my limited testing:

triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - input_boolean.ups_power
conditions: []
actions:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: state
            entity_id: input_boolean.ups_power
            state:
              - "on"
        sequence:
          - action: scene.create
            data:
              scene_id: light_states_backup
              snapshot_entities: |
                {{ states.light | map(attribute='entity_id') | list }}
      - conditions:
          - condition: state
            entity_id: input_boolean.ups_power
            state:
              - "off"
        sequence:
          - action: scene.turn_on
            target:
              entity_id: scene.light_states_backup
            data: {}
          - delay:
              hours: 0
              minutes: 0
              seconds: 10
              milliseconds: 0
          - action: scene.delete
            data:
              entity_id: scene.light_states_backup
mode: single

I’ve only tested it by toggling the UPS boolean manually and not actually cutting the power, so I’m probably going to need to add a delay, or a retry loop or something to make sure the scene applies consistently but so far so good! Thanks for the inspiration.

Thank you. I’ve also never used scenes beyond what comes built-in with Hue! This is all good stuff.

Thank you, that’s food for thought at least.

Can I ask about your light script? I have a bunch of smart bulbs that either don’t support or don’t expose the ‘power-on behaviour’ option, so in a power cut they come on full bright when power is restored, often in the middle of the night.

My HA is on a UPS so I’ve been trying to have it store the states of lights when the UPS switches to battery power (before they go to unavailable) and then restore those states when power comes back, but it’s apparently way beyond my skill set. Curious as to how your “input list of lights” works and whether it could help me…

Curious as to what you’re using scripts for? I have 88 automations and have so far found no need for a single script and I feel like I’m missing a trick somewhere.

Yes, I do have some automations that share functionality but it’s one or two actions and it seems redundant to call a separate script.

Laziest eh? Probably the one that deletes completed items from my shopping list when I leave the supermarket, because I got sick of doing it manually.

Most ridiculous would be the NFC tag I have on the lid of my cold brew coffee jug. I make a batch so rarely that I can never remember how much coffee to add, so scanning the tag makes my Google Home say; “You want 80g of coffee per litre, or 6 scoops.”

Thanks, yeah, as much as it feels like an overly complicated way of doing things, I think I’m erring towards just biting the bullet and making contacts. Appreciate your detailed reply!

Exactly this. We used to run Mattermost (essentially Slack but hosted on-prem) and Zoom, and everybody loved the combination. Then the bean counters got involved, saw that we were paying extra for something that was already included with our 365 subscription, and that was that.

Now we’re stuck with shitty Teams and its shitty Electron app that seems to come up with new ways to not work on a near daily basis. So much so that “Teams be Teamsing” has become a defacto phrase for when something janky happens.

Dammit, I was looking forward to SoT seeing as it plays pretty janky now compared to modern standards and I was hoping they’d fix up the combat a bit. That said, I only have the Xbox version to go off of. Is the PC version any good? Maybe someone will do a Black Mesa on it.

Tell that to Michel Lotito who, allegedly, ate an entire Cessna 150.

Yeah I was wondering the same thing. Didn’t Abort just cancel trying to read that sector, while Fail would cancel the entire operation?

Nope, I looked it up. Abort would completely abort the whole thing, while Fail was supposed to return an error code to the program so that it could decide what to do next. Like Ignore but less crashy.

(A)bort, ®etry, (F)ail?

They taste that way on purpose to stop little kids from putting them in their mouths and potentially choking.

Remember how sometimes you’d put the disk in and you could hear the floppy part spinning for a fraction of a second to line up with, I guess the motor head, before it fully clunked in? That shit was peak.

Replying to a year old post? That’s commitment! You’re welcome, glad you’re enjoying it.

Meanwhile, things have changed somewhat since my post and there are more “small” options available now. The Abarth 500e looks wicked fun and the incoming VW Polo is previewing well.

That said, my buddy swears by his Civic, you’ve made a good choice.

Synology walked back their requirement of using their own branded drives.

First I’ve heard of this but you’re right.

It’s really interesting how far I had to scroll down the search results to find it, as the top page or so of hits are from April when they added the restriction in the first place.