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.

No one “shatters,” “breaks,” or otherwise surpasses violates the diffraction limit. Rather, you operate in such a way that the diffraction limit does not apply.

This is not to take away from these accomplishments at all! All manner of super resolution techniques are fantastic, but they’re not violating the diffraction limit; they are violating the assumptions that go into the diffraction limit, or they are using a different definition of resolution (which is completely valid), or both.

Every so often there’s a post on Lemmy about how you should stick it to your landlord and put grease down the drain.

This is why that’s a bad idea, and it sucks for everyone, not just your landlord.

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.

As they say, it costs a lot to be poor.

Huh. I was expecting the comments to be a little more of the Fuck Cars crowd.

In my city there was a whole kerfuffle because people were fined for parking in their own driveway due to it not actually being a driveway, as there was no garage, despite having a curb cut. It sounds like this sort of thing has been changed under the new mayor.

Parent didn’t say develop, they said use. 80 acres of forest can be used as open space and not developed at all.

I think the spirit of parent comment was that if you have 80 acres of forest, but you live somewhere else and never set foot in it…well, maybe that land could be better used/enjoyed.

If you live on/near it, and enjoy it for some purpose other than strictly as an investment, that seems like you’re utilizing it.

Mac at work. Yabai+sketchybar is no i3wm replacement, but it works ok.

My .zshrc is basically the same as I use on my personal computers, and aside from a few coreutils differences it…kinda just works. I have apt aliased to brew so I can feel more at home.

Stock terminal works fine—I use xterm on Linux, so I’m used to relying on tmux for nice features anyway.

Basically, I miss the window manager, but practically speaking that’s a about it. (I obviously have xscreensaver installed!)

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

I’m a ~/tmp man myself.

Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)

640k 780k ought to be enough for anybody…

If you search around you might find free ones. Oracle has/had a free tier (though it’s Oracle, so…).

Sadly not really. I use the free tier Oracle, which honestly has worked very well, but I’m not going to recommend using Oracle aside to say that it functionally works for me.

If I were to switch I would probably go to racknerd.

Yes, but you can run multiple VPS, from different providers, simultaneously.

What I like is that while it does depend on an external provider, it doesn’t depend on a specific external provider. Any VPS with a public IPv4 would work.

VPS+VPN (WireGuard for me), with Tailscale as an emergency alternative, has worked very well for me. Knock on wood the only outages have been my own fault.