• 169 Posts
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Joined 2 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月15日

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  • IMO when dealing with corporations, after they’ve been notified once of a problem like yours, any others that happen because they haven’t fixed their systems are clearly active malice. It is almost certain they’ve been notified of this kind of problem many, many times. It is also almost certain UHC hasn’t fixed anything at all.

    Corporations are legal persons but our society and government consistently hold them far lower standards than real persons face. They literally murder but don’t face jeopardy from criminal laws, poison people and are met with a slap on the wrist, and enrich themselves while paying only a small fraction of their illegal profits in fines when they’re caught. Can you imagine the penalties if you or I did these things?

    The world would be a far better place if UHC was held to the same standards as the people they insure.


  • United Heath would routinely deny payment for the entire visit if my doctor did anything besides look at the initial issue during an appointment. Let’s say I was there for ear pain and my doc said I was due for a vaccination, UHC would deny payment for everything. Since making a second appointment for the vaccination was far more expensive, the only possible reason for this was that a certain percentage of people would pay the bill and United Health could just steal from them and pocket the money.

    I spent many hours on the phone after doctor visits demanding they pay the bills as my policy’s contract required. I wonder how much the UHC crooks made because of the people who just paid the doctor bills and UHC was able to steal money they didn’t earn?

    United Health Sucks.







  • If you’ve not ordered from Aliexpress be aware their website is set up to display deep discounts for first time orders by default. Once you log in after your first order the discounts disappear and the prices are much higher.

    Pretty crappy business practices, but when a product is 1/4 the price of buying locally, still hard to pass up. For $4 a pop I put leak sensors under every sink and toilet in the house. At the time they were $17 each on Amazon. Also be aware it is very easy to buy a wifi version instead of Zigbee because of the way the website is set up. Many Tuya wifi devices require always on Internet access.



  • A friend just had her Windows 11 PC hijacked and used to drain money from her bank account. Not too much of a worry with Linux of any flavor.

    It took 5x as long to wipe the disk and reload Windows as it would have to load Linux, plus another hour to change the settings to turn off as much of of Window’s advertising and spyware as possible. Microsoft will no doubt change the settings back when Windows update runs, or maybe they’ll just pile on more ads.

    I’d much rather deal with some hardware incompatibilities than Microsoft’s bullshit.


  • Occasionally someone (me mostly) will forget to hit the start button on the washer only to come back an hour later to a washer full of dirty clothes. An automation watches for the power draw on the washer to remain above the “powered off” but below the “running” wattage for a few minutes and sends a “Washer not started” notification if that occurs.

    Roku loves to push menu updates while the TV is turned off and we would randomly find a new menu entry for “Zombie Housewives of Beverly Hills” when turning on the TV. An automation turns on OpenWRT firewall rules blocking Internet access when the TV’s are turned off, and automatically disables those rules when the TV’s are turned on. Menu updates still happen but they don’t seem to happen as often and the automation works so well no one notices it. It also blocks the constant stream of data Roku sends to the company’s servers except when the TV’s are actually in use. Roku has voice activated remotes that are probably always listening (no matter what the company says) and it blocks that traffic too. Between that and Adguard Home’s blocking of all other UI ads the TV’s are almost completely deshittified.

    I have a couple of old but high quality pieces of audio gear that are used with Spotify Connect. An automation powers on whatever amp / receiver Spotify is playing on using an IR blaster or wifi smart plug and powers them off when play stops. One receiver draws 80 watts when powered on and it was annoying when it was accidentally left on for a couple of days. This automation alone saves us a whole dollar or two a year.

    Bonus 4th automation: I bought some Kasa smart bulbs that are really unreliable and randomly will stop responding to wifi commands. Usually 1 bulb out of the 3 in a ceiling fixture will remain on when an automation had sent a command to turn them all off. 3 different redundancy automations watch for mismatches between bulb states and when the offline bulbs wake up again (usually in 30 seconds or so), it resends the command to sync the bulbs. These automations have made the Kasa bulbs usable when they otherwise would have been trashed.