It’s a regional dialect. He’s from upstate.

I have a lot of time for Eaton kit. As others have said, not cheap but seems to work well. I’ve not used APC in a while but they used to make good hardware, even if their software was dogshit.

Glad that this works for you, but goddamn that’s some condescending shit. Maybe I want other people in my household - people who don’t give a shit about VLANs or Docker or transparent terminal windows - the ability to browse and watch content on their TVs and tablets with an easy interface that doesn’t require them to learn some specific incantations and a bunch of file paths? Fuck it, may after a long day I just want to crash on the sofa and watch Bojack Horseman without having to get two knuckles deep in an SSH session? Again, glad it works for you but holy shit your manner is tone-deaf.

Definitely something screwy with your setup. I have over 70 ZigBee bulbs from a mixture of brands and even the most distant ones - two or three hops from the dongle - are rock solid. My bedroom has eight bulbs and is as far from the controller as it gets and it’s rare for there to be a delay of more than half a second.

Just in case anyone was thinking “I’m gonna buy one and put ESPHome on it” or something, the microcontroller is a Beken 7525UQN68 which I’ve not been able to find any robust documentation for. It is Tuya, so that might be an angle of attack. The quality is shockingly good for such a small sensor and the included batteries are a pair of 18650s which was a nice surprise. I’m probably going to reset and return it or just drop it at a charity shop.

Yeah, my rule is that any Tuya device that uses Wifi is to be avoided. I’ve got plenty of Tuya bulbs and power meters that use Zigbee, though, and they’re alright but they talk directly to Home Assistant.

To confirm the suspicions, yes, it is Tuya. It actually says so on the box. I’m still going to grab one, though: quite often the chipset can be reprogrammed and the fact that the specs say it’s 2.4GHz only make me think they’re using something pretty old-fashioned like an ESP32. Tuya stuff that advertises being dual-band generally isn’t worth bothering with at all.

Lidl’s smarthome kit - specifically their lightbulbs - comes around once in a blue moon but is very good quality. Not up to the standard of Phillips, but on a par with IKEA.

+1 for Home Assistant, and then with Add Ons it can also do other useful home network stuff (network ad blocker, VPN, *arr, etc).

Every military in the world uses UTC so I’m gonna say that.

Otherwise, I’d go for UTC-1 because… well, look at it. There’s no way they could lose because there’s nothing there to lose. Nuke away, boyos, it’s all ocean.

Yeah, me too. Two VPSs (one Helsinki, the other Nuremberg) each with a couple of IPs. Been running perfectly for years aside from when I fuck them up.

Paradise City from Burnout was pretty amazing, especially given you were supposed to navigate it at 250km/h. Lots of three-dimensionality about it too, with tunnels, overpasses, rooftops, etc.

It’s actually even wilder than that.

The earliest know pyramids date back to around 2600BCE, and Cleopatra reigned around 50-30BCE, so her reign is closer to the modern day than to the first pyramids by about 600 years. One of the earliest surviving pyramids, Djoser, was built by Imhotep (with help, I assume) during a period called the Third Egyptian Dynasty meaning, as it’s name suggests, the unified Kingdom of Egypt was already well-established by the time it was built. The First Dynasty started about 3100BCE so even ignoring the proto-Dynasty period of Egypt, that’s pretty humbling: if you drew a timeline with the founding of Ancient Egypt on the left and the founding of OnlyFans to the right, Cleopatra would be three-fifths of the way along it.

I don’t know if you’re asking seriously, but if you are the answer is: Enterprise manageability and accountability. There’s a reason why every hospital, Fortune 500 corporate campus, military base, supermarket, distribution centre, etc, etc all run Windows workstations. Why would a ruthlessley profit-driven corporation buy expensive Windows licenses when Ubuntu is free? Because when you’re dealing with ten thousand workstation in 150 countries, each with own requirements for data protection, working time, employee rights, etc that not only need enforcing, but need to be audited, you can do all that with a single Windows server and a half-motivated sysadmin. And for everyone smaller than that, you still get access to those same tools for your school, office, factory, whatever on your fleet of twenty mismatched laptops from eight different vendors.

Nothing else comes close, and until it does nothing will change. They would all drop Windows in an instant if there was a sensible alternative.

Cows.

A friend of mine was taking over his family farm with access to open moorland for grazing and as an experiment we wanted to see if we could implement tracking without giving a monthly small fortune to a company for a proprietary product or noisy polluting methods like a helicopter. BLE beacons are cheap and long-lasting so each cow got one, and we bodged together about twenty solar powered Meshtastic nodes with GPS that were small enough to be worn on their collars (since the cows tend to heard together only one in the group needs a node), plus another dozen we could install at choke points on the land (old gates, land bridges, etc) the cows were likely to traverse. The nodes were like this, but smaller and shitter. The nodes were programmed to report every time they saw a BLE beacon nearby, with the mobile ones also reporting their own GPS location, all being fed into Home Assistant for mapping. I just checked and apparently, aside from a couple of storm-damaged fixed nodes and replacement batteries it’s still going strong after two years.

Is this loss?

Not sure what you mean. I use Meshtastic a lot, both as a hobby but also for remote sensor reading and herd tracking. Works a treat.

Amazing that they weren’t using Signal for comms outside their group, but for internal comms it’s even more amazing they weren’t using something like Meshtastic.

This is yet another reason why you don’t use whatsapp

ftfy

Look on eBay for USFF PCs. They’re mini computers the size of paperback books that are designed for use in large organisations, and they’re made by the usual suspects - HP and Dell mostly. Because they get replaced regularly they’re cheap but they’re just regular desktop PC hardware. A ten year old i5 can handle being a 4K media centre no problem and can be had for €/£/$70.