Lol glad to hear it!

Are you alive today lol

This sounds super interesting! I didn’t know that smart vents were a thing. I’d like to get some more smart home tech stuff in general and this seems up my alley. Plus my vents seem to be stuck open anyway so it wouldn’t hurt replacing them lol.

Haha. Well I don’t mean the dampers themselves are smart. I mean that the HVAC companies will do pressure checks make sure things are flowing and vented properly if they are adding in dampers in particular areas.

Haha well true. I just presume that if you have dampers built into the system by an HVAC company that steps would be taken to ensure it doesn’t mess up your system.

Thanks for the advice! I’ll have to read more into what goes into a mini split system. I’ve only ever had central air my whole life (or window AC).

The mini-split route idea is a great solution, but I am wondering if you have an unvented or poorly insulated attic that is a contributing factor to your problem. If your attic space isn’t setup properly and you throw a mini-split at the problem, it is sort of like pumping water out of a boat without fixing the leak that is flooding the boat. Even something as “simple” as a powered attic vent could help in HVAC performance and operating costs. If the hot air can’t vent or your insulation is inadequate, it just stacks down and heats the top floor.

Unfortunately, I don’t live in a free-standing house. It’s a townhouse, so it’s connected to other units so I don’t think that I can make changes to the attic.

The other thing I would be looking at is if the HVAC run up to the second floor is done properly or if the dampers are not right. A house that size really shouldn’t have much trouble if everything is balanced right.

I don’t seem to have any dampers at all as far as I can tell.

Having the nest with a second temp sensor would just force your HVAC to work harder to cool the upstairs.

Yeah, I get that I would be pushing the HVAC system to simply be on more, but at the very least I could actually set the temperature upstairs instead of having it fluctuate so wildly. Often, I’ll set the temp low at night to be more comfortable. It’ll be to the point where I’m basically freezing with the sun down. But then in the morning, when the sun rises it’s unbearably hot.

The single sensor nest can be a smart move to reduce costs with the higher degree of control.

What do you mean by this?

Having dampers installed does more or less the same thing as closing vents, but with a higher cost. A zoned system is expensive and kind of silly on a house of that size.

So there’s no real reason to get dampers installed then?

There is a single air return upstairs and the filter has been somewhat recently replaced

I know multiple people say to close the downstairsregisters, but HVAC sources that I look at say that it greatly stresses the system if you do this and that it’s a bad idea.

Stop making sense!!!

I do totally get paying to support something you use a ton.

But I don’t get comments like this calling blocking ads a cat and mouse game. It’s always been incredibly easy to block ads on the devices I own and I rarely ever have to mess with anything after installing a single browser extension or a single app.

On my desktop/laptop–ublock origin. I would install this regardless of whether or not I care about YouTube ads because ads on websites in general can be pretty cancerous. So I would already have it on my device to begin with. Install one extension and forget about it. Very occasionally ads start coming through, but then the extension auto updates itself and I don’t have to worry about it. It’s effortless and I absolutely never need to mess with the settings.

On my phone–YouTube ReVanced. Just basically download I think two APK files and you’re set. I’ve had to reinstall this a single time over the maybe decade(?) I’ve been using it as YouTube had some sort of breaking update or something. But having to install it again once every many years is hardly an inconvenience. Oh I guess I have had to install it again when I’ve gotten a new phone, but that’s really not that odd or inconvenient to me either…and generally I don’t get a new phone that often.

On my android TV device–SmartTube Next. It’s a single APK file. Set it and forget it. I’ve never had to reinstall the app.

One caveat with this is that it seems harder to watch YouTube ad free (without paying for premium) on Apple devices. So if you use a lot of Apple products it also makes sense.

I haven’t used Jerboa in ages because of how buggy it was in the beginning, but that looks very pleasing to me as well. So many of the apps out there just look too “busy” for me. I am also coming from Reddit is Fun, so I like as simplistic looking an app as possible. Voyager fills that role for me and fixed the bugginess issues I had with Jerboa.

I’m sure Jerboa is much more stable now, but I just haven’t had a reason to leave Voyager yet.

I identify as degenerate matter

Also in terms of games…I know Steam compatibility is supposed to be great, but if you use other platforms, you might run into some issues. Most of my library is in the Epic Games store (I know, terrible to admit this online…but they give you a lot of free shit), and I just could not get it to work at all the last time I tried Linux (maybe 6ish months ago).

Whenever I try switching to Linux, there is always something that doesn’t work right and takes forever to finagle with to fix if it’s even possible. I’m primarily a Linux Mint fan (daily drove it on my aging desktop until it died of old age a few years back), but I’ve also dabbled in a few other noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu (was really into it when everything was still orange and brown lol) and Pop OS.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love using Linux to breathe new life into older systems, but it just isn’t a good option for me personally if my device hasn’t gotten sluggish yet.

As an example, I have an aging laptop that started blue screening a bunch. It doesn’t support the Win 11 upgrade due to it’s processor not meeting minimum specs. So I thought it was finally time to see if Linux would improve it.

First of all, I had a hell of a time installing various distros without having them boot to a black screen after installation completes. Took absolutely forever to finally sus this out on the various distros I tried. Then I find that the couple extra buttons on my basic Logitech mouse don’t work. These are essential buttons for me that I use constantly. I go through a million troubleshooting steps before finding out that it’s a Wayland issue, so I switch back to Xorg and everything is cool. But then I start running into lag issues which never occurred on my Windows install. I also tried playing some games I had in my Epic Games library. I could not for the life of me get it to work, no matter which platform I tried. I get that Steam has better Linux compatibility, but not all of us have all of our games on Steam.

Finally got tired of the whole ordeal and switched back to Windows. Did a bit more troubleshooting and seemed to have resolved the blue screen issues and now it seems to work perfectly and much better out of the box than Linux. It’s not an old enough device a Linux refresh to be worth it yet.

I get that Lemmings are die hard Linux fans, and I think Linux has some fantastic use cases…but for many users it actually isn’t a good alternative. I find it works best when you want to breathe new life into older hardware or if you have every component specifically built to work for a particular Linux distro. But when basic features don’t work properly without hours of troubleshooting (if you can ever get them to work at all), it’s a little hard to just recommend it to your average Joe whose Windows/Mac computer works just fine.

This “everything just works” Linux experience a lot of people talk about on Lemmy/Reddit has absolutely never been my experience, even though I’ve been a casual Linux fan for over a decade now. Meanwhile, I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows (unless you’re talking really old Windows versions like Win XP and older).

I bought one off the shelf at like Target or something before I got my first pair of Bluetooth headphones. The adapter is trash. Static noise like you said and when slightly kinked it just stops working. It’s not like I used it forever just fine before it started doing all this…it was trash to begin with. Apparently a lot of these adapters are just known to suck.

Yeah I’m a bit salty that it’s gone, but I’ve actually found using Bluetooth earbuds to be a way better experience. I’m no longer snagging a cable on everything and ripping them out of my ears. Maybe I’m just a clumsy idiot, but I did this all the time with wired headphones.

One thing that Bluetooth headphones still suck for is gaming. The lag is too obnoxious. So I have a pair of headphones that can convert to wired for that purpose. I don’t game on my phone so that part is a non-issue for me.

You can also get a decent pair at a relatively inexpensive price nowadays. It used to be crazy expensive to jump in, but there are a lot of cheaper ones out there nowadays that still offer great sound.

Edit: I saw a commenter complain about the lag when watching videos. This doesn’t happen for me. I’m not sure if the tech is in my phone itself or in my headphones (I have two different pairs from different companies), but there is some sort of processing that goes on that makes it so the audio and video are synced, no matter if I’m watching a local video on my phone or a YouTube video. I can even manually adjust it with a “Bluetooth metronome” setting/app, but I’ve never needed to manually adjust it. For me, lag only happens when playing video games.

For people explicitly following Sony, sure it makes sense. For the average consumer that doesn’t know anything about that stuff, no it doesn’t.

For the average consumer and the average company, the bigger the number means the newer the device (ex: iPhone 12 vs iPhone 11 S23 vs S22, etc.). And then it’s pretty easy to tell that words like “pro,” “max,” or “ultra” denote a more high end experience than those without in the title (ex: S23 vs S23 ultra). Obviously there are nuances and variations, but it’s easy enough for the average consumer to quickly skim before inquiring with a salesperson.

Your average consumer doesn’t delve deep into hardcore researching everything and won’t be sitting there following the specific naming scheme of every single product line of every company. They just want to quickly be able to tell what the latest and greatest models are.

The rest of the world isn’t techie like Lemmy/Reddit. So no, the naming schemes don’t make any sense.

Sony really has no idea how to name some of their product lines lmao

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