If you already use Home Assistant, using the InfluxDB integration, coupled with Grafana will allow you to create very useful data visualizations that offers insight into your home over time. This includes things like: what are the humidity level fluctuations? What is the temperature indoors compared to outdoors? And much more ...

Many weather sensors just report a cumulative rainfall amount to their display unit. That is, when installed the sensor will start with 0 millimeters, and then as rain falls, it will just keep adding to that number, until the sensor loses power, or is reset.

Since it took me a long time to reach a working solution, I am posting this information to save people looking for the same hours and hours of fruitless searching, and frustrating experimentation.

For over a decade, I was running my home server on a trusty AMD Athlon II X4 PC, without any issues.

After upgrading to a newer motherboard the retired one was left unpowered for several months. Then when powering it up, Linux would not boot on it no matter what I tried.

Various distros were attempted, including Xubuntu desktop, and Finnix (highly recommended for testing and troubleshooting from the command line). The symptoms were the same: the PC reads the media, then the screen flickers and goes black with nothing on it.

Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform, written in Python. I have been running it for several years for various tasks.

However, I am running it using a less common Home Assistant Core installation method, consciously deciding not to run the custom Raspberry Pi image for Home Assistant, nor the docker container version for many reasons.

These reasons include:

OnStep is a full featured telescope controller firmware that was created and maintained by Howard Dutton.

As of late 2021, it runs on several types of boards with a variety of microcontrollers, including the Teensy, ST's STM32F103, STM32F303, STM32F446 and Esspressif's ESP32.

In order to convert a mount to OnStep, one needs to fill out a spreadsheet created by Howard that accounts for various parameters, such as one or two stages of gear reduction, microstepping, an motor shaft RPM.

An often quoted misconception is that vaccination offers less protection than infection induced immunity.

An overlooked aspect here is that not vaccinating is actually an implied choice of taking higher risks, because the infection may cause complications and damage to various organs. Those include blood clots, lung damage, neurological complications (brain fog), anosmia (loss of smell), heart inflammation, and more.

But even if we overlook the obvious, evidence so far points to vaccines being more effective than infection induced immunity.

The province of Ontario, Canada, is heading for a third wave of the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020/2021, and the reason is a yet to be identified variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

As we all know by now, the Coronavirus that caused the 2020/2021 pandemic has not stayed with the same genetic sequence of the original wild type identified in Wuhan China. This is completely expected, because all living beings mutate, and viruses specially so.

This article provides an overview of virus mutations, the current variants from the UK and South Africa, how the immune system works on pathogen proteins, and whether all this has implications on the efficacy of the current vaccines.

Mutations

Mutations are a fact of life for all living beings. Viruses, due to many reasons (generation rate in hours, infecting millions of cells, ...), have a very fast mutation rate. That is just what goes on.

Users on social media have been sharing news that China is using Anal Swabs for detecting Coronavirus infections. While this is true, it seems that this will not be applied to everyone being tested.

These anal swabs are soaked in saline, and inserted into the anus and rotated.

If you see this France24 article, you will notice this part:

SARS-CoV-2, the Coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and is responsible for the 2020 pandemic, is known to enter cells via the ACE2 receptor (see this video on the Renin-Angiotensin system).

In addition to ACE2, there are other receptors that either facilitate entry into cells (making the virus more infectious) or increase its pathogenicity (causing more severe symptoms).