I’ve heard the following rule of thumb:

Your bank has an existing customer relationship with you, so they have more of an incentive to make you a good deal on currency conversion, lest you pack up and leave.

The ATM operator’s relationship with you is literally transactional. They don’t give a crap who you are and even less of a crap once the ATM dispenses the money.

Thus, your bank is less likely to fleece you than the ATM operator, so you’re better off leaving the conversion to your bank.

As an alternative to forcing shitdown, you may want to try laxatives.

I wouldn’t say the extension was the beginning of the downfall; that kinda implies it caused the downfall.

I would agree that it was the canary in the coal mine – management types were ramping up their “just jam X into it” attitude, techies were starting to really feel it, and this was an initial, small protest. Unfortunately, despite the techies’ well-communicated newfound capability to run applications in my butt, the management types kept focusing more and more on their hype-oriented strategy – but that would certainly have happened without the extension too.

There is the dali-interface Python library which seems to support a few PC DALI interfaces based on USB-HID and serial. I don’t know how well the translation between USB-HID/serial and DALI is standardized, so I can’t tell you how compatible this library is with DALI interfaces that are not explicitly listed in the README.

Software using this library includes dali_mon for monitoring the DALI bus and dali_cli for sending commands.

Cate Archer from No One Lives Forever