beala

Oops I initially posted this comment at the top level before I saw this thread:

I assume some of the concern around this is that folks don't want to live in a panopticon. If that's your objection, I can't really help with that. On the other hand, if your objection is that you don't want a backdoor built into your video doorbell (even one that you must opt into), I'm happy to report that there are good non-Ring options.

I switched to a Reolink video doorbell, and it has decent support for local-only operation. It has the ability to save footage to a local micro SD card, and if you're worried about someone stealing the entire doorbell and losing your footage, it also supports RTSP (a common IP camera protocol). You can even have it upload footage to a FTP server on a schedule. It also supports PoE if you're lucky enough to have ethernet at your doorbell, or don't mind doing the drop yourself.

Set up does require an app, but you don't need to use the app after that. Push notifs also require egress, but, iiuc, this is mostly because of how push notifications work. Push does NOT require a paid subscription.

I personally just use the app, but it's nice knowing that if Reolink tried to pull a fast one, I could just block egress on my VLAN and use it locally.

If you'd rather just go completely app-less, I imagine a dumb doorbell paired with an IP camera and a local ZoneMinder [1] install would provide most of the benefits of something like Ring. Of course, the tradeoff is you now have a second job being sys admin of your homelab. Pick your poison, I guess.

[1] https://zoneminder.com/

I've apparently flagged 6 articles and 1 post by accident.

That said, it's possible this is all accounted for in the system. Maybe the mods only get notified above some threshold and that threshold has been tuned to ignore the background noise of accidental flags. Adding a confirmation would lower the noise level, but perhaps not translate into any real benefit.

My current house is a new build. It’s a spec home, so customization was limited but I really regret not going overboard with the wiring. Next time I’m getting low voltage power to every window (electric blinds), coax and conduit to the attic (TV antennas and maybe ham antennas), Ethernet to the front door (video doorbell) and the eaves (networked cameras) and the ceiling in every room (WAP, presence sensors, probably lots of other things), and more circuits than I think I need to the basement (homelab). At the time, they were asking $150 per additional outlet, which seemed crazy so I got stingy. In retrospect, I wish I had rolled $10k in wiring into the mortgage. Oh well. Maybe next time.

I tried setting your domain as my resolver but no luck sadly.

alex@thinkpad ~> kdig @muppetz.com +tls news.ycombinator.com

;; WARNING: connection timeout for 116.251.193.218@853(TLS)

;; ERROR: failed to query server muppetz.com@853(TCP)

Yes I should have specified that this advice is specific to RAID configurations in NAS applications.

If you're occasionally copying data to an external USB drive, that's totally fine. That's what they were designed for.

The issue is that they were not designed for continuous use, or much more demanding applications like rebuilding/resilvering a drive. It's during these applications that issues occur, which is a double whammy, because it can cause permanent data loss if your USB drive fails during a recovery operation. I did a little more research after posting my last comment and came across this helpful post on the TrueNAS forums going into more depth: https://forums.truenas.com/t/why-you-should-avoid-usb-attach...

The official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a reliable experience. For example, I’ve heard that some usb-to-sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data. That said, there are of course many people on the internet who have thrown caution to the wind and report that it’s working fine for them.

Personally I’m in the process of building a NAS with an old 9th gen Intel i5. Many mobos support 6 SATA ports and three mirrored 20 TB pairs is enough storage for me. I’m guessing it’ll be a bit more power hungry than a ugreen/synology/etc appliance but there will also be plenty of headroom for running other services.

[1] https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/gettingstarted/coreha...

I have an HDHomeRun box and use it through Plex. I've never installed the HDHomeRun software. Plex immediately recognized it as soon as I plugged it in. There is a noticeable amount of latency between selecting a channel and starting the stream, so channel surfing is pretty cumbersome, but I almost never do that. With the paid version of Plex (Plex Pass), you also get DVR support which automatically removes commercials from the recording, so that's pretty much the only way I use it.

How's the power consumption? Everytime I look at used server deals on ebay that seem too good to be true, the hidden cost is usually power. It's fairly normal for these systems to consume hundreds of watts idle, and $1/watt/year is a decent rule of thumb in the US (but much more in places like CA). And that’s not factoring in running the AC more if you’re in a hotter climate.

I’m looking at a NAS build myself and am leaning toward a consumer mobo and an older Intel, like maybe a 9th gen i5. 6 SATA ports is pretty standard, and three mirrored 20 TB pairs is a lot of storage for most folks. Boot drive could be a small NVME.

For me, the appeal of i3/sway's model is that by having a desktop per topic (eg, one for browser, one for code, one for slack, etc) I can instantly jump to the topic I need with a single key press. The desktops I assign never change, so it's always Super+1 for my browser and Super+4 for Slack. It's all muscle memory, and I could do it in my sleep. When I jump to that desktop, everything is open and tiled. This was a revelation to me coming from MacOS, where I was constantly hunting for windows with Cmd+Tab or squinting at thumbnails in Mission Control. So I'm surprised to hear that you prefer Niri's scroll model, which to me sounds like hunting for windows all over again.

Makes total sense. Please don't take my comment as a defense of Russia. I can understand not wanting any of your money flowing into the Russian economy, especially with Russian violence so close to home.

It happened this morning at the military gathering: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-preside-over-unusual-...

Here's the Kagi article which potentially could have mentioned this: https://kite.kagi.com/s/8b5ta4

It's unclear to me if any of the source material reported this when the summary was generated, especially since the source articles may have been updated throughout the day.

IIUC, the basis for this claim is that Kagi pays Yandex (a Russian search company) for access to Yandex's image search API. Is that the entirety of their link to Russia? If so, it seems like a stretch to accuse them of being a "Russian disinfo laundering service" (GP's words, not yours), but this is my first time hearing this, so if I'm missing something, I'm all ears.

I don’t see what racism has to do with it. Most of my electronic components originate from China one way or another, but there’s a real difference in quality between established brands and the random stuff popping up on amazon in the last few years. To review a few experiences I’ve had:

- Wires I bought for breadboard prototyping turned out to not be made of copper after I noticed them sticking to a magnet on my workbench.

- A power supply module I purchased appeared to be using counterfeit chips. The switching frequency didn’t match the TI data sheet for the markings on the chip.

- I wasted several days trying to get an sdcard module to work. I gave up and ordered from adafruit instead and those worked on the first try.

Not to mention the well documented problems with counterfeit sdcards, etc.

With mini PCs, there are a million different ways bargain brands can cut corners that won’t show up immediately.

I'm also a premium subscriber, and have struggled with the same issues on the iPad app. I try to keep some shows downloaded for my toddler, and the download feature never seems to work on the first try.

I finally got so fed up, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 off ebay for $50 and flashed it with LineageOS. I can now load whatever media I want onto the 1 TB sdcard I've installed in it. The 5 year old hardware plays videos just fine with the VLC app. And, as a bonus, I discovered that NewPipe, an alternative YouTube client I installed through the F-Droid store, is actually much more reliable at downloading videos than the official client. I was planning on using yt-dlp to load up the sdcard, but now I don't even need to do that.

Tough crowd.

fwiw, `tar xzf foobar.tgz` = "_x_tract _z_e _f_iles!" has been burned into my brain. It's "extract the files" spoken in a Dr. Strangelove German accent

Better still, I recently discovered `dtrx` (https://github.com/dtrx-py/dtrx) and it's great if you have the ability to install it on the host. It calls the right commands and also always extracts into a subdir, so no more tar-bombs.

If you want to create a tar, I'm sorry but you're on your own.

I think the issue is that dnsmasq will happily forward requests that contain characters outside the ASCII subset, but the upstream resolver will silently drop them after correctly determining that they're invalid. So the special characters are a way of reliably triggering the silent drop upstream. This is required because it takes many attempts for the brute force attack to succeed.

Chromium based browsers treat localhost as a secure context, so HTTPS isn't required to access APIs like the clipboard, web serial, etc.

I'm not sure what aspect of smart locks you don't trust. If it's reliability, most also accept a physical key as a backup. As far as security, I'm under no impression that the firmware is free of vulnerabilities, but any hack is likey to be at least as hard as lockpicking the average lock, which most people can master with a 10 minute YouTube tutorial. If you're a lock nerd and have upgraded all your locks to some Fort Knox style Medeco model, then sure a smart lock will probably be a downgrade, but for the average person I don't think it's substantially worse than what they already have.

Surely if running a local LLM is a goal, you're going to be disappointed by any small form factor desktop. Even an M4 Max is slow compared to a 5 year old rtx 3090, and the M4's only advantage is that it can run larger models, but very slowly [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1jn5uto/macbook...

Geerling benchmarked LLM performance on the Framework Desktop and the results look pretty lackluster to me. First, the software seems really immature. He couldn't get ROCm or the NPU working. When he finally got the iGPU working with Vulkan, he could only generate 5 tok/sec with Llama 3.1 70b (40 GB model). That's intolerably slow for anything interactive like coding or chatting imo, but I suppose that's a matter of opinion.

https://github.com/geerlingguy/ollama-benchmark/issues/21

Whether or not suitable battery replacements exist in 10 years is probably a function of demand. If there's a large demand for replacements, the market will provide. It's probably worth buying a popular model if you plan on keeping your EV for 20 years. For example, you should probably stay away from the Fisker Ocean [1], but I bet Tesla Model 3s will be well supported 20 years from now.

My metaquestion is: is it even rational to keep a car for 20 or 30 years? To me, the subject of the article seems penny wise but pound foolish. Certainly at some point since 1985, an upgrade would have been positive expected value for better safety, mileage, and comfort.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisker_Ocean

Google's "AI Overview" feature is particularly bad.

o3 gives the following response:

> Short answer: it isn’t. Rum isn’t “healthy” any more than other booze.

It goes on to give a bulleted list on why it's not healthy. Full output: https://chatgpt.com/share/6894871f-be9c-800e-8cc9-9e5ec2d5d6...

A sibling comment speculated that Google's response is expected because it's just a summary of bad search results. To test this, I ran a fresh query against o3 with the Web Search option enabled. The results:

> Rum is a tasty way to get ethanol into your body, but it is not a health food. Any modest upsides you may have read about (a bump in “good” HDL cholesterol, slight blood-thinning, a bit of antioxidant pickup from barrel aging) are the same things you’d get from any spirit, and recent large studies show those benefits are either tiny or disappear once you control for lifestyle. Meanwhile the well-documented downsides—cancer risk, liver disease, high blood pressure, weight gain, addiction, injuries—kick in from the first drink.

It goes on to give an extensive debunking of all the nonsense health benefits in the Google summary. It looks like it saw the same search results but was able to course correct and view those results with a more skeptical eye. Full output: https://chatgpt.com/share/6894885d-51dc-800e-ab8c-55af0a5bb2...

This post is about Google, so it's fair to focus on their search product, but I'd be careful to generalize to other LLMs. There are huge differences in quality between different models.

I was just about to shell out $2k on unifi equipment for my home but after reading this discussion it's sounding like a much worse proposition. Sadly, it doesn't seem like there's a solid competitor either. Mikrotik seems like more complication than I want or need. I'm now looking into TP-Link Omada, but the entire point was to move away from consumer gear. Sigh. I guess I'll just keep making do with my old Orbi Netgear setup for now.

Setting up an international chain of surf schools actually sounds quite ambitious and stressful, though.

A bit of a tangent, but BT is also great for getting rid of tomato hornworms. The bacteria is harmless to humans, but fatal to the hornworms. A single application saved my tomato plants last year.

That said, the more I garden, the more I find the entire process a bit horrifying. Waging biological warfare on the critters is not what I thought I was signing up for.

DEET is super effective, especially if you go to an outdoors store like REI and get the extremely concentrated 95% DEET they make for backpackers. Will it give me cancer on 20 years? Who knows. But it does work.

My in-laws use a system like this, maybe the same one. It uses a CO2 tank rather than burning propane. He runs it 24/7 and he needs to refill the CO2 tank every 1-2 weeks iirc so it's definitely more expensive to run than the death bucket. I think it's a 20 pound tank like you'd see on a homebrew keg system. When he showed it to me, it had caught an absolutely nightmarish number of mosquitoes over the course of a couple days. Like maybe half a liter to a liter in volume squirming around in the net. It made me queasy honestly. I didn't notice anything like bees or butterflies in the trap but I didn't look very closely.

It's usually not a single weekend. If you're like me, it starts out with thinking it'd be nice to install Plex on an old gaming PC. A year later, it has organically grown into a rube goldberg machine of proxmox and home automation. Which I guess just reinforces your point.

Joking aside, a minimal setup just using docker compose is pretty manageable. Self hosting many projects is as easy as 'docker compose up -d', and upgrades are straightforward as others have pointed out.

Is the dead man's switch necessary? Unless your homelab contains secrets you don't want revealed until after your death, I'd just put this in a Google doc.

A pain point you mention is that everyone must run the tailscale client. Have you considered exposing everything on the public internet using something like Cloudflare Tunnels? You can have cloudflare handle auth on their edge network, which mitigates the worry about having to deal with 0-days on a self hosted auth solution. You have a pretty sophisticated directory setup tho so I'm not sure how well this would fit in with the existing infra.