Justin Schuh

5 Mar 2025

This meme seems handy for the foreseeable future.

I listened to that Faz Shakir interview with Grover Norquist, and I don't understand its purpose (short of click-generating ragebait). I suppose the long disclaimer/opener should have clued me into it being a largely uninterrupted gish gallop, but damn it was infuriating.

washingtonsun.comWhite House Is Weighing Mass Pardons for Junior StaffConservative groups influential with the Trump administration have pressed for the preemptive acts of clemency.

My pipe-dream fantasy is that the next administration reforms the courts and in a landmark anti-corruption case the new SCOTUS invalidates all Trump's second term pardons as part of overturning Trump v. United States (ie. he couldn't legally hold the office so the pardons are invalid).

Jeff Stein@jeffstein.bsky.social

Scoop: White House lawyers are weighing preemptive mass pardons for junior staff, sources says Under discussion: Pardoning everyone involved in deportation, war, or trade policy www.washingtonsun.com/whitehouse/w...

I refuse to accept anyone claiming that Perl is a better language than PHP. They're both just awful. Perl gets a very slight pass due to the legitimate historical reasons for it being so bad, whereas PHP has zero excuse. But they're both still trash.

Sometimes I think about the time traveler sent back to stop the Kennedys from triggering the collapse of civilization. I wonder if he stuck around long enough to realize he took out the wrong ones. 🤔

One of the fun things about Chicago is that pizza puffs are just a generic menu item. Like, I genuinely wouldn't be surprised to hear about Michelin star restaurants having upscale pizza puffs on their menu.

Question for parents: Have you successfully set up a debit card with tap-to-pay on Android for a child under 13? My kid has his own checking account and Pixel, and all concerned parties told me this shouldn't be failing. Meanwhile, kid 13+ worked fine, which seems like a COPPA thing at some layer.

blog.googleParents can now send money to their kids on Google Wallet.U.S. parents can set up a secure digital balance on Google Wallet for their kids to tap and pay using Android and Wear OS devices.

Google has a new workaround, which should fill the gap until he turns 13 (weirdly, they needed 2 state-issued IDs plus proof of address). It is not great that we're rapidly becoming a cashless society without a thought to who gets left behind. And of course COPPA is still a complete trainwreck.

Ah, Gemini. So helpful. BTW, this is overwhelmingly what most people suggest on public forums, and was the preferred solution of many Googler parents I knew when I worked there.

Although, this was actually pretty refreshing.

We want to watch Avatar: Seven Havens but we can't because Larry Ellison and Bari Weiss are terrible people (which is why Grandma cancelled her Paramount+ subscription). We'll probably wait until all the episodes have aired and then subscribe for a month to binge it (and maybe South Park).

californialawreview.orgThe Major Questions Doctrine: Unfounded, Unbounded, and Confounded — California Law ReviewThis Article offers a critique of the major questions doctrine from a different angle. It primarily contends that the reasons the Supreme Court has given for enforcing the doctrine do not withstand sc...

I'm annoyed that people haven't taken to calling it "The Made-Up Questions Doctrine" since it's literally just a far-right court making up reasons to question and then summarily overturn any policy they don't like. It's a terrible way to run a judiciary… or really a country at this point.

Aqara's matter-over-thread switches and dimmers don't need a neutral wire. Turns out they can act as an FTD only with a neutral, otherwise they're sleepy end nodes. From some testing they're very responsive and the power-stealing low enough that even a single dimmable LED can stay unlit.

I'm annoyed that on-device long-press and multi-tap events aren't exposed via matter (they're in the Aqara app). Maybe a future software update will fix that. I'm also not a fan of the dimmer paddle buttons, since I prefer flat buttons with a bigger main switch target and smaller dimming buttons.

The Eve Matter switches could be perfect: one big button plus up/down side control for dimmers; every possible state/control; great thread performance. But for some damn reason the main button is capacitive. So many potentially great products get ruined by capacitive inputs where they don't belong.

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The great irony here is that I added a power-monitoring smart plug to the sewage ejector only because I want to detect if it's failing to run when it should—so I can prevent flooding. And I used the pricier Eve plug because I naively assumed it would be more reliable than a cheap one.

The second smart plug started acting flaky, and I realized I'd never checked peak amps for the pumps. Turns out the inrush current can spike over 40A for a fraction of a second (enough to eventually fry the tiny 15A relay). Guess I'll have to cook up an ESPHome device to handle the power monitoring.

Oh, great. Unifi gateways don't support RIO router advertisements. So, that's why my vlan routes failed when the Thread leader changed. This is a regular thing with Unifi. Their hardware falls in the uncanny valley between enterprise and consumer, so stuff on either end may just randomly fail.

The best solution I can come up with is a tiny LXC VM to handle the necessary routing. It's not difficult, but it's another hassle and point of failure. The pitch for Unifi is supposed to be that it "just works," but I keep finding established, standard functionality where it just doesn't.

Well that sucked. Hadn't done any complicated network stuff in forever, but it's done. My isolated IoT/Thread vlan for the building now routes correctly to the other vlans. And the individual unit vlans can now have controlled access to only the smart devices located in the unit.

Eve's packaging also bugs me. Take smart plugs: The Eve box is 6x the volume of IKEA's. It's the wasteful legacy of the luxury packaging craze that Apple popularized. Relatedly, at 5x the price of IKEA, Eve does have some nice extra features. But IKEA can add all of that in future software updates.

The Eve Energy plug died after a week of use—it failed open with a sewage ejector plugged in. Fortunately, it's for a laundry room, so I was just mopping up soapy water. There's zero chance of a refund. It had been sitting unopened since I bought it for $30 a year ago. Maybe Eve will replace it. 🤷‍♂️

I'm very close to deciding to just build my own ESPHome thread thermostat. I thought matter-over-thread thermostats would be a no-brainer (it's about the only viable wireless protocol for a battery powered smart thermostat). But no one seems to make them for central HVAC systems.

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Thermostats also seem like the perfect candidate for an e-ink display with manual backlight. The thing would sip so little electricity that even without a C-wire you could safely power-steal enough during on-cycles to keep a LiPo charged within its ideal range pretty much indefinitely.

I just want a connected thermostat that's reliable, integrates with my smart home, and fades into the background. But everyone wants to sell me some obnoxious thing with a touchscreen and overwrought industrial design that demands attention and maintenance. It's an endemic problem with modern tech.

It'd just be an esp32-c6, temperature/humidity sensor, and some relays. The ULP core can handle all the schedule and climate logic, only waking the big core for the UI. Hell, if you had a C-wire and wifi connection it could just let the main core run as a background border router.

Speaking as a retired sandbox guy, I'm beginning to question how good these AI companies are at sandboxing. 🤔

Coincidentally, my son asked about this knife earlier today. I had these made for the Site Isolation Team, for accelerating the launch due to Spectre/Meltdown. I do kinda miss sandboxing, though. It's security engineering that just really clicked with me, which is probably why I did it for so long.

It's not that sandboxing is very hard in the abstract, but it does require consistent engineering processes that are hard to maintain in practice. And when I read about what AI companies are doing, I get the impression that robust sandboxing wouldn't really mesh with their engineering cultures.

nbcnews.com‘We all got played’: Hollywood torn over Paramount settlement with AGsThe deal announced this week resolved the last remaining major obstacle standing in the way of the merger. But it didn’t put an end to the drama in the entertainment industry.

A prediction: Jake Tapper stays at CNN and gets elevated to a larger role because he signalled early that he's Bari Weiss friendly. I also think both Rob Bonta and Gavin Newsom will suffer some political fallout, but it's unclear how much that matters.

Manufacturers need to learn that capacitive inputs are simply a non-starter whenever you need to operate a device: - Without looking at it (operating by feel) - Exposed to the elements (gloved hands, wet, etc.) - Where it's likely to be brushed against it A wall switch runs afoul of all three.

Justin Schuh@justinschuh.com

There's no good reason why every smart switch/outlet/plug doesn't have a child lock mode and full control of indicator LEDs. It's all software that can be trivially wired up. At least I can emulate the lock in Home Assistant, or pop out the physical buttons and replace them with 3D printed stubs.

Every year the kids go back to school and we all spend a few weeks passing around colds. It does at least get better as they get older. The teen and tween do seem less inclined to put random objects in their mouths than they did as toddlers.

goughlui.comReview, Teardown: XTAR 1.5V AA CLR 4300 2700mAh Rechargeable Li-Ion BatteryIt would seem the market for lithium-ion-based rechargeable 1.5V AA cells is heating up, as Ni-MH rechargeables don’t always provide optimum performance due to their lower voltage and disposa…

Alkaline batteries have a smooth discharge curve that makes it easy to detect a low battery early. That doesn't work for lithium, which has a steep discharge cliff. Now there are rechargeable AA lithium batteries with an integrated MCU-controlled voltage regulator to fake a discharge curve. 🤯

It's wild that it even makes sense to do this. We're using a modern, high-density battery chemistry plus a tiny battery-brain to emulate a weird quirk of a century old chemistry and cell combination that's been a de facto standard for 60+ years. It works. I'm buying them. But it's crazy.

budgetlightforum.com[Review] XTAR 1.5V AA CLR 4300They can be found in remote controls, radios, game controllers and watches: devices with AA batteries are everywhere. It is just as common to find leaking batteries or devices that do not work properl...

The funniest part is it requires a special charger, but not for the usual chemistry reasons—after all, it has a built-in battery management system. It's because it takes 5V (normal USB voltage, plus the Li-ion cell is 3.7V anyway) and no standard charger would ever feed 5V to a nominal 1.5V AA cell.

It's interesting watching my thread mesh self-optimize over time. I have a handful of cheap Onvis T20 smart outlets that were gradually promoted to be my core backbone routers. It makes sense given their location, but there are similarly placed REEDs. I guess the T20s just have better link quality.

17 Sept

Just learned I owe a large bill for underreported taxes from a few years ago due to a data processing error. The part that bothers me is being assessed a penalty when the IRS had this data the whole time and even refunded taxes I'd prepaid to cover the amount owed. Honestly, fuck the GOP.

And it's not that the Dems are perfect here, but they do have a history of tax filing reforms/improvements. Biden did IRS Free File, and the people who qualified loved it because it worked like tax filing in the rest of the world. Of course Trump killed it. It's been like that going back decades

propublica.orgHow the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax FilingIntuit, producer of the top-selling tax software, has opposed letting the government do your taxes for free – even though it could save time and headaches for millions of filers.

17 Sept

The greatest irony is that I filed my taxes that year with Intuit Turbotax, which is the GOP aligned company arguably most responsible for ensuring US tax filing is awful. But of course their EULA is structured such that they have no liability for this particular data processing error.

There is no reason for tax filing to be as painful as it is in the US. Financial institutions are required to send the IRS everything they need to process taxes for the vast majority of people. In my case they could have easily identified the error and suspended the refund so I could correct it.