Yeah, good point. The “app setup” is built into android and iOS as far as I can tell (generating matter credentials, etc.). Better than 3rd party IMHO but not ideal, and a nonstarter for a lot of folks. Hopefully HA will come out with their own onboarding process at some point.

Fair enough; I have a dedicated SSID which is VLAN’d off from the rest of my network with no Internet access. Only my HA server can talk to those devices.

+1 for ThirdReality. They’re a little pricey but I’ve generally had good luck with them.

I’ve also had pretty good luck with cheap Matter-over-wifi bulbs. Pairing them can be a little finicky and needs to go through an Android or iOS process, but after pairing you can block Internet access for them and they work great local-only.

There’s a bug in some wifi matter bulbs where they crash, especially when going from off to a desired brightness/color state (as in, “light on” works but “light to 50%, 3000K” will crash the bulb).

I don’t think you understand what local control of smart devices means…

Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat would ask for various airplane specs (“what is the service ceiling of an F-4E?,” “what is the ferry range of a MiG-15?”), and you had to flip through a booklet to find the answer.

You could copy the book, but it was fairly long so I guess the friction kept you in check.

I would probably add “transmit power” in there somewhere, but I guess if you’re assuming regulatory limits then it’s not a big variable.

Global Outbreak World Response Outreach Network, perhaps?

Not sure how serious your comment is, but I could certainly imagine Microsoft introducing new dependencies/hooks/all-executables-must-support-copilot, etc., that break compatibility faster than Wine can keep up. Glad to hear that’s not the case!

For old stuff though…yeah, I’d hope it’s not moving backwards :)

VNC? You have your choice of servers, and clients are ubiquitous.

A big gotcha is that you need to be careful with encryption/security, as in classic UNIX style VNC does one thing (remote desktops). It’s easy to forward over ssh though.

You can also use VNC to share, which is not what you want; this depends on the type of server/settings. But you can definitely create a new virtual X11 session and access it remotely.

San Francisco’s current trolly bus fleet are from New Flyer, a Canadian company, though they use German motors.

The difference between a cheap bike and a nice bike is similar to the difference between a Chromebook and a decked out ThinkPad or Macbook IMHO.

You’re absolutely right: most folks just browse the web, and a Chromebook is enough. But the other products do have value.

Whenever I mess with my bike brakes, I only do one wheel, then a few rides later allow myself to do the other. That way if I botch it I should have another brake that sorta still works.

Bookmarked, thanks!

I bought a Rockchip SBC (Orange Pi 5+), and when it worked it was awesome…but man, the software support (mainly kernel space) is just not there. Exercise in frustration to get everything working at the same time.

Currently running armbian. I don’t think HW acceleration is working, and I don’t think HDMI out is even working, but for my use case it’s a stable config…for now.

200MWh is about 1/100 of Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Compressed air can get out all at once given the right circumstances.

Storing energy in a way that can go boom is something I’d be a little scared of, were I a nearby resident. I’m sure thermal batteries can have gnarly failure mechanisms but I would way rather live near one of those than a giant compressed air cylinder.

Yeah, one of the issues I was having with running VPN on router is that you need a somewhat beefy router if you want to use your full bandwidth—my router maxes out at about 90Mbps with WireGuard, even though it can NAT around 1Gbps (which is our service).

I implemented two workarounds, one was to use my access point as a VPN router since it had a beefier CPU, and the other was to just use an ARM SBC with Linux to handle that task. (I ended up with the latter, as the former ended up maxing out at around 400Mbps, and introduced some additional headaches.)

I also have an SSID that doesn’t get VPN’d, though my DNS is always VPN’d.

As for accessing JellyFin, etc., I think we have somewhat different setups. My self hosted services are by default accessible without a VPN (SSID is on a VLAN with e.g. 192.168.0.0/24, servers are on 192.168.1.0/24, router routes between them). For the blanket VPN’d SSID I have a routing rule that routes over the main, not VPN, table, so local services can be accessed.

So: local traffic has a rule to route without VPN, reddit routes with a specific VPN, and general traffic routes with a different VPN.

There are lots of VLANs involved in my setup, and I’m sure it’s overly complicated and has gaping security issues, but it’s just a home network and it’s kinda fun :(

I have this set up on my router. My wifi is blanket tunneled through a VPN. For annoying sites that restrict access like reddit, my router routes through a specific VPN server that doesn’t (yet) get blocked (I don’t post/comment/browse, but occasionally find a post that answers a question). That way it works on my whole home network, regardless of device.

Same could be done for YouTube presumably, but maybe a little more complicated (reddit seems to work with a single /32 address).

Plus, it’s fun to set up—MikroTik router, Mullvad, and an ARM SBC doing the VPN duties for me, but myriad ways to get it working for other configurations.

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But once you got that XFree86 config dialed in, life was awesome.

(Ok looks like Xorg has been around for 21 years, so maybe you were running it instead.)