clokwise

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.

Yes, it's possible to buy fakes in the USA too, however if you go to a legal weed shop in the USA they are gonna sell the legit ones. Besides that, it's pretty easy to identify fakes once you've seen legit and fakes side by side. As to how I import them, I'm not gonna share my method here, but over the years I've imported dozens of carts for my own personal use and never had any issues whatsoever.

I've got half a dozen of these in and around the house. They are very reliable. The firmware can be easily flashed using this utility, making them 100% compatible with HA and also adds new and improved functionality. You just need a bluetooth proxy (no soldering required) placed near the center of the house for full coverage.

I've still got at least half a dozen "THC" vape pens here. All fakes. Do not smoke fake weed vapes, they don't even contain THC. They use chemicals from china that cause all sorts of health issues. The main issues I got was day long headaches, fogginess, and also just not getting very high. I've yet to see a legit THC vape pen for sale in Thailand. Someone above mentioned Muha Meds, they are the most notorious fakes. Smoke at your own risk. If you want 100% legit THC vapes, go to the USA and stock up then bring them back. That's what I do.

I posted a response here.

Agreed. We're also getting quotes for installation only. We'll likely go that way.

Good point. I think we could exclude the pool pump, washing machine, oven, EV charger, and possibly water heaters from the backup box. But I feel it would be reasonable to use the inverter/battery system for everything else, including AC since we generally only have one medium sized AC on in the house at any time, and no other devices use much electricity.

Have you encountered any limitations when charging EVs?

Thanks very much for the advice and encouragement. Yeah, I'm also looking into buying these parts myself but paying a professional to install. Still taking my time with getting quotations from many places. While a battery backup is a major reason for going solar, we also want to send less baht to PEA every month.

I've been neck deep in Home Assistant for a few months and I've learnt a few things I would like to share with people new to smart home stuff: Home Assistant is ideal for customizing your home using a diverse mix of different devices and systems. It is far superior to and can completely replace HomeKit or Google Home or Alexa. Steep learning curve, but worth it once you become comfortable with how it works it's easy. Most of the time you can use the GUI exclusively to manage integrations and create automations, so it's not as daunting as it may seem at first. But even non-techie users will need to become at least somewhat familiar with YAML for certain things. The HA Dashboard can install on any phone/PC/tablet. It has custom levels of access for different family members. You can integrate all your IP cameras too. And once you have built your dashboard, you can uninstall all those Smartlife, Ewelink, Reolink, Sonoff, Smarthings, etc apps from your phone. You only need them for initially install of the device, then you should never need to open them again. One app does it all. Home Assistant is open source and updates are issued monthly or even weekly. It operates 100% offline*, including voice control and TTS. You can be certain you are not sending your data to China or Silicon Valley with HA. If you have a spare PC, you can install it today. It runs in every type of operating system and doesn't use very much CPU or memory. I originally installed it on my NAS, but a couple months later purchased a cheap Beelink mini-PC off AliExpress and installed it there via Proxmox. It rarely uses more than 4% CPU and the Beelink PC barely uses any power at all. Pet peeve: Home Assistant uses YAML, which is a terrible and antiquated markup language and even worse scripting language, and is especially inappropriate for a home automation environment intended to be used by (largely) non-techies. But it is what it is. Luckily I have over 40 years background in computer programming in all sorts of arcane languages, so this didn't set me back much. The dashboard is a clusterfruck, they should have gone with HTML+CSS, but in its current state it's a weird mishmash of arcane code. Do not like it. As such, I've given up trying to customize the dashboard and just use a couple of the HACS dashboard defaults - and they are generally good enough, in my opinion. *Some devices still require a cloud service. At least with Tuya (and several other brands) there are workarounds which remove the device from the cloud which actually makes everything work considerably faster once you've done it - no more waiting 3 seconds for a command to go to the cloud and back just to turn on a light. Samsung still requires their cloud if you use HA, but you can alternatively buy a cheap Tuya IR blaster and control your AC (via HA) with that, cloud-free. I personally continue to use Siri - it's convenient for the family and I don't have a major paranoia about privacy. The good thing is Home Assistant can bridge HomeKit (Siri) where you can limit access of your devices. And once done, Siri can semi-magically control pretty much everything under Home Assistant, even stuff that Siri couldn't otherwise control. The open source community has built amazing integrations, it is truly impressive just how much you can control with Home Assistant. The best part of Home Assistant is the automations. There is nothing you can't do with only a few lines of code. It's YAML, but still, it can do everything. ESP32 devices are another rabbit hole. I built a bluetooth proxy to control my Bluetooth Yale lock, and I built a custom transceiver for my Somfy blinds. Another device I built is a highly configurable mmWave sensor. I have near-zero hardware experience but, at least doing these particular things, it was actually very simple. Recommendations to get started: go to Lazada and AliExpress, buy a couple switches or sensors and become familiar with basic automating of stuff. Just use their own apps at first. Once you start to get the automation itch, grab Home Assistant and delve in.

This is one quotation: Deye Hybrid Inverter 10kW. 3Phase Freesun Lithium Battery 48V. 280Ah 20x Longi Tier1 Solar Panels 580W + assorted accessories and installation = THB 377,000 We tend to get power cuts every couple weeks which is why we're looking at hybrid off-grid with battery. My wife is fine with cold showers, me, not so much, but no big deal. Good to see replies here saying it is possible to just switch the entire house over to solar or battery. We have had a couple extended power cuts that weren't back up until early morning. Is it possible to keep a house running on battery for an entire night?

I'm getting quotations for a 10Kwh + battery on/off grid system. I don't have any prior knowledge of solar installations, so it's all new to me. One of the questions the contractors are asking is to decide now which devices in the house I wish to stay online when there is a power cut at the grid. Not so much asking, but insisting, that I do this. It was my prior assumption that, since I have will a battery backup, when the grid goes down the entire home will simply switch over to battery, at which point our smart home automation or myself can turn off any unneeded devices drawing excess power. Apart from perhaps the A/C or fridge, nothing in my home actually requires a lot of current. I fail to understand the necessity of literally rewiring my brand new home to put unrelated and randomly scattered devices onto a new circuit. Further, it seems that if I did do this and my needs change later (likely will), we will have to rewire again. The contractor is saying that if the grid goes down that there will suddenly be too much power drawing from the inverter/battery. But will that happen - actually? We rarely use more than one A/C at a time, and a handful of lights and fans surely can't demand that much power? And worst case - wouldn't the breaker at the battery shut it off if it's overloaded? I can deal with that, unless it can't handle much current at all - in which case I'm now questioning why I should install a battery backup at all if I can't even use it like I want? My home was wired by a professional electrician familiar with solar installations - they have even already built the conduits and wired them up ready to go. He did such a terrific job - the circuit breaker box is practically a work of art. So, why can't I just leave my home as-is and simply install a battery and inverter ? Is this really a thing? Help me understand why I need to rewire my home.

I bought a Pixel 6 a few years ago. I was in the USA at the time, so it was very simple to purchase it. It came with a 2 year warranty. It died (and hard died, there was no recovery) literally just one week after the warranty expired. I guess their engineers should be congratulated for building to a minimum spec to just barely outlast the warranty period but not longer than that. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a Google Pixel service center in Thailand, so I chucked it in the bin and very grudgingly replaced it with an iPhone. The lesson here is, don't import expensive gear into Thailand if you might need service, warranty or not.

That's the beauty of Home Assistant, it doesn't care, you can use whatever voice assistant device you want, or none at all. You can even add-on your own open source voice assistant which is fully customizable and is fully local, not cloud based. In fact, if you hate cloud based devices, HA can operate these devices locally (with a few exceptions like my Samsung SmartThings ACs), but the community behind HA is working to make everything 'local' without any internet connection.

FWIW, I recently built a new home and ran CAT6 into every room. Also ran neutral wires into every outlet and switch. I have a central server room with a router, modem, NAS, UPS, and other devices. CAT8 is absolute overkill unless you are constantly transferring a tremendous volume of data from one server to another server. Running CAT8 from your router to a laptop is ridiculous, as your router can't supply enough data to saturate a CAT6, let alone CAT8. And for most laptops network adapters, even CAT6 is overkill. But you do you. But if you want to have fun playing with your network, however, I'd highly recommend you check out Home Assistant and make your home "smart". If you are familiar with Apple HomeKit or Google Home, it's like that, but on steroids. Pretty much any device can be made smart these days, one way or another. It is a deep dive and a steep learning curve tho. You can create fully customized dashboards to control all the devices in your house, even when you are not at home. I've also started building custom ESP32 hardware into the mix, which is great fun if you're a retired IT nerd like myself, but these are definitely not necessary. HA can also integrate into your home security system, such as IP cameras. Best of all, it's free open source, it doesn't care if you are an Apple or Google or Alexa household. And the hardware relays you need are super cheap - like 3 to 5 dollars on average and you can buy them on Lazada or AliEx. This is a really cheap hobby, your wife will surely approve, especially when she sees the benefits of it. You can install Home Assistant via Docker on your NAS, or if you have an old PC you don't use, that will do. Cheap NUCs also work fine too, like a Raspberry Pi or Beelink Mini S12. Just for example, we have automations which : Opens the front gate just before arriving home Unlocks the front door once we approach it Turns any light or lamp in the house on and off, either based on time, sun, or PIR Tests the soil dryness and turns on the water sprinklers if it gets too dry Turns fans around the house on and off depending on the temperature Does a routine check of the house before sleep - turns off all lamps and fans, checks if any windows and doors are open, and alerts us if something isn't right If someone turns on the AC, it will notify if any windows in that room are open Alerts for open windows and doors anytime someone locks the front door Motion sensor detects where someone is sitting/sleeping and turns on/off devices as desired Checks for a water leaks under the sink (we have some dodgy pipes attached to a water filter) Raises the blinds in the house when the bedroom door is first opened in the morning Everything is voice responsive - you can "Hey Siri" to control anything in the house It outputs TTS to smart speakers located around the house to alert us of any issues

Yup. And I married her over 20 years ago. Best thing I ever did.

I recently tried to get a Pfizer/Moderna COVID booster as it's been a year since the previous one. Was told it's not allowed to get it at a private hospital, must go to a public hospital. Went to the public hospital and was told they don't do COVID boosters anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've had repairs done at iCare Airport. They do Apple authorized repairs in shop. No charge (if under warranty).

One failing business model acquiring another failing business model. What could possibly go wrong?

We've already done that. And we have made a couple contacts with individuals who maybe may know somebody.... but we can't count on anything. We'd prefer to find a dedicated agent.

This isn't a normal house.

We originally paid 15 million, and we have since expanded the size of the house, kitchen remodeling, extensive landscaping, and we've just completed refurbishing all the teakwood inside and outside the house. All these additions cost another 3~4 million. While there may be some home depreciation to take into account, the land value itself has skyrocketed because it is in the actual city, not the suburbs. The neighboring moobaan, built at the same time as our home, but with smaller identical looking houses, has even higher asking prices (per sqm), and is full of Chinese families.