Easily the most ridiculous is the one I made on a motion trigger from the camera pointed out my window to take a snapshot, pass it to ollama/qwen3, and have it compose a haiku about the scene to be read aloud by Pocket TTS.

That looks like it should work. Just a couple of thoughts: The default gateway is irrelevant. That’s only where the OS sends packets that don’t match the netmask. Since these addresses all lie within the same /24 range, the default gateway will never be used. It wouldn’t hurt to check the ARP tables of each OS to see whether the VM MACs ever show up on the remote host or VM. Are the two hosts connected with a cable, or via WiFi? If the latter, VirtualBox has to do some software trickery to make bridging work, and I can imagine that perhaps some WiFi devices wouldn’t play nice.

That’s exactly what I need to know. Thanks!

I have to give it this much respect: When I logged in to office.com (for work) recently and was confronted with the Copilot chat-box, I asked it how to disable Copilot. It was honest, and told me that it’s not possible because this is Microsoft’s new product strategy. Then, I asked how I could never see Copilot again.

It (no joke!) told me to install Linux.

Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/.

I saw that post, and honestly, part of the issue is that the pain of messing with mode-lines in /etc/XF86Config and worrying about physically damaging your CRT monitor with out-of-spec frequencies was a very real thing 30 years ago. Hence, the idea that configuring displays on Linux is fraught and difficult has stuck around, even though it hasn’t been true since the advent of DDC, and multiple displays for most use-cases has been sorted out for at least the past 15 years. Non-Linux users will still occasionally talk about displays on Linux as if we were still editing mode-lines in vi.

It’s a sore point, I guess I’m saying, and you poked it inadvertently. When I read the post, I just kind of smiled, because a few days before, I plugged the HDMI cable from a conference room display into my Thinkpad, and it lit up with an extension of my desktop. I started LibreOffice Impress, hit ‘F5’, and the presentation appeared on the big display, and the presentation notes on my laptop screen. (Actually, I was surprised and impressed at how smoothly it went.)

It’s no surprise that issues remain here and there, though. Glad to hear that folks wanted to be helpful!

I was about to get in the car and go buy the Sonos soundbar, but I checked the manual first. The network setup itself is done through an app that connects via BLE, and to use the app, you first have to create a Sonos account. That’s a ‘no’ from me. I may be unreasonable, but I don’t want to share my personal data and be gate-kept by a company, just to use hardware that I ostensibly own and is sitting in my living room. It’s too bad, because from what I read, the sound quality is excellent.

Why didn’t I ever think about RS232 control with an ESP32 device? Great idea!

So the LG TV can get connected to the local network without an app or cloud account? Perfect! I guess HA integration for a soundbar would be a nice-to-have-feature, but not critical. It would be nice to have Music Assistant connect to it directly for music playback, but as long as it turns on and off via CEC, I can continue to play music through Kodi/LibreELEC.

Absolutely! I guess I left out the part about what I want to do. I have an RPi4 with LibreELEC for media playback, so getting a smart TV and never connecting to the Internet is a fine plan. I want to be able to control the basics with HA, like powering it on and off, changing volume, and such. The RPi can turn on the TV that I have using CEC, but the TV doesn’t support powering itself off via CEC. And, even if it did, it’s a chore to integrate CEC with Home Assistant automations.

Long-press (or long-click) on the “Home Assistant” title at the top of the sidebar. That brings up a dialog box in which you can hide the items you don’t want to see. (It’s available in user settings, too, but this is a shortcut.)