clokwise

What is wrong with you? Where did I say I wanted to get into politics? I said precisely the opposite - I don't give a sh!t about US politics. Your reaction to my comment says everything I need to know about you. Say whatever you want to me now I won't see it, you're on my morons ignore list.

I stopped being partisan when i realized my vote literally doesn't count - and not just because I live in Thailand. Yes, I know I can register to vote using my old home address, but I don't even bother to register. I'm sick of people personally hating me and arguing that I MUST vote, and why every vote counts blah blah blah. No, actually, that is not true. Explain to me how one more vote (D or R doesn't matter) cast in West Hollywood California is going to change anything - ANYTHING. It won't. Millions of people still living in America sat out the election for the exact same reason. If I had lived in a swing state, that's another story. If they get rid of the EC and made it a straight up vote, I'll be thrilled to vote for the first time ever, but until then, nope. Plus, I have no skin in the game. I escaped the USA when I was 18, have never paid US taxes, have never voted, I don't collect govt benefits, and my US passport expired ages ago. My closest relatives are either dead, nearly dead, or escaped just like I did, long ago. Now that weed is legal here, I have absolutely no reason to return to the US. It's heartbreaking what America is about to go through (and put the entire world through), but their political system is thoroughly corrupt and utterly broken. The only solution would be a revolution and a new constitution (that's of course assuming the good guys win the revolution). But I'm betting on aliens appearing and putting us all to work as their slaves long before America can fix itself.

I've never stayed there but I have been inside to meet some guests, it truly is quite an impressive interior, I was not prepared to see such a grand sight in Chiang Mai of all places. Some guy recently did a "tour" of the hotel, including the parts you're not supposed to see...

Further speculation: Five-year driver licenses may not be issued against a DTV, whereas with a Non-O you can do it. Biggest DTV benefit for me vs Non-O is I won't need an exit visa anymore. Such a pita and not cheap. My problem with the DTV is I have no income whatsoever. I'm envious of you guys with pensions! But if it's as simple as signing up for a 2 week cooking course I'll reconsider, even though I'm a decent Thai cook already I'm sure I can learn something new.

From what I recall of the place, it would be silly to reopen it as-is. It was an architectural nightmare. But after watching the videos I don't think there is any point in reopening it, it looks like it's already been largely destroyed by the elements, it will need to be knocked down. Just my guess - we'll see condos there soon.

It always was a pretty crap mall, but before Central Airport or any of those other malls this was basically all there was.

Oops, forgot to post the link to part 2. wow, what a disaster area

I thought this was quite interesting, I have plenty of memories of the place from back in the day. Unbelievable that it has been left to just flood and collapse in on itself......

I don't do any power monitoring at the moment. Once my solar/battery system is installed next month I'll hook HA into the inverter with a RS435 interface. But I have zero interest in monitoring individual bulbs or sockets for power use because nothing in my home uses electricity to such a degree that I need to monitor or control it. We're talking a few baht here and there, it's basically inconsequential. I may, however, use a clamp such as the one you mentioned, but only to monitor some of my dumb devices to determine when they are on or off, but nothing more than that.

I have WiFi smart plugs with energy monitoring sensors. They work fine, though I don't care about energy monitoring my devices. The trick is to use LocalTuya, not the default Tuya integration.

FWIW, my home is Zigbee, Z-wave, HomeKit, and Matter free. 100% WiFi, with at least 40 various devices now. I know a lot of people swear by Zigbee, but the advantages it offers are minor, at least for my home. Any hardware I need is available in a WiFi version. Worst case for me - I'm quite fine with WiFi sensors that take 2 seconds to go online whenever they are triggered. These technologies also all require additional hardware which I knew was just going to complicate things further down the line. Also, some of these protocols, such as Zigbee, can be vendor specific - there is constantly a lot of discussion online about which zigbee router works with which devices and which it doesn't. No thanks. My objective was to make home automation simpler, not get more technical - that's just gonna make a bigger beast to tackle when things go wrong later. I had a Matter LED strip controller, so I installed a Matter software router. The controller was buggy as hell, so I dumped it and installed a much cheaper Tuya Wifi version - works perfectly. I have a HomeKit Yale lock. Had to move a HomePod speaker close enough to the door to get the lock to go online. It worked 95% of the time, but with a 2 to 3 second lag. That 5% tho....grrrr. Made a $3 ESP32 bluetooth proxy which covers the entire house and now the lock is super responsive and uptime is 100%.

I am one of those people who prefer vaping to green. Legit vapes are also better in almost every respect, IMO. But with the choice of a fake vape verses a joint, I'll take the joint every time, smoke it outside, and just hope I do not hack my lungs out after. I used to know a few people who smoked synthetic cannabinoids because they were being random drug tested at work. Drug tests have been updated since, so it's generally not an option anymore. A synthetic cannabinoid such as JWH-018, on a commercial scale, is incredibly simple to produce at 99.8% purity. When I checked, it could be purchased from China for appx. $800 p/Kg. Consider that a "dose" is 2 to 3 mg. That means you have somewhere between 300,000 to 500,000 doses per Kg. Now mix in some other random substances you have lying around to make the "oil" such as glycerin, polyethylene glycol, propylene glycol or vitamin E acetate. You can buy all the parts for vape pens openly on Alibaba, including counterfeit packaging complete with holograms and scratch-off QR codes used to prove authenticity. Do the math, there are tremendous profits to be made for a relatively small investment. PSA: Don't try this at home. I'm not advocating anything here, just stating the facts.

Chinese-sourced synthetic cannabinoids mainly. They reach the same receptors in your brain as THC does, and they are considerably more potent. That doesn't make them a good choice. Short term use will give you headaches and brain fog. I can speak from personal experience about these things. I once smoked just a little bit more than usual, ended up in a k-hole like situation in a nightclub. Some friends were with me and tried to revive me - i could hear everything going on yet I couldn't move, couldn't respond, and could only see blackness with my eyes wide open. I eventually came back to earth after 5 or 10 minutes. It was terrifying. After this event I stopped smoking these vapes and suddenly my foggy headaches also vanished. I made the connection and started to research what I actually had smoked and, frankly, it didn't shock me, since I had purchased them from a black market seller and not a licensed cannabis dispensary. These vendors don't care about you. They don't care what is in their product either. Long term use will likely fry your brain and your lungs - at least do some googling first if you want to roll the dice on your mental and physical health. Synthetic cannabinoids are also illegal, unlike THC, so there's also that. There's no good reason to be smoking synthetic cannabinoids these days when actual weed is legal, plentiful and inexpensive.

Learn here. Also, learn here.

I hear you on the Wifi - I have 5 Wifi routers in my home, which is actually overkill, but I have tuned down their signal strength so they don't overlap and cause conflicts - if they overlap you can seriously degrade your network speed. I think Linus Tech Tips on Youtube recently did a video about just that. Regardless, I only need one bluetooth proxy in my home. I had planned for needing more, but just one with an external antenna turned out to be more than enough. But if more are needed, the boards are like 50~100 baht each, so it's not a major expense.