Get a domain name and use that for your email; most providers let you set a catch-all that delivers everything to one place. So if you got, say, strawberrypigtails.egg you could give every service you sign up for a different address: ebay@strawberrypigtails.egg, sdf.org@strawberrypigtails.egg, pornhub@strawberrypigtails.egg and so on. Then, when you start getting loads of spam, you can look at where the email was sent to rather that where it came from and either take action against that service or just block emails sent to that address.

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.

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.

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.

Title: You’re Fine, You’re Fine, Don’t Tell Mom

Media: X-Ray on Silver Bromide

Year: 2023

Artist: Unknown

Not even a joke: I know someone with a wine cellar and he has bottles set aside for certain people’s death and there’s a bottle for Trump in there.

TIL that NextCloud can use an external database.

It’s cloud all the way down.

Removed by mod

Generally speaking the customer is the one paying for the product. For a commercial TV station, the customer is the advertiser, not the audience. The audience is the product being sold. Like IKEA felling trees to build furniture, or Exxon pumping oil, the TV station makes programmes as part of the product manufacturing process.

Also, this is a reason why public service broadcasters need to be cherished.

Do not trifle with Appellomancers.

Alt Text: “Anyone who tries to give you a new name is suspicious. Your parents, for example.”

Source: https://www.oglaf.com/branding/

One hundred percent go for USFF. Even the cheapest, most basic processor will smash server roles because it’s not having to power desktop applications, graphics, window managers, etc.

To be honest, I used to have an ISP with dynamic addresses and it wasn’t a huge deal. The address only changed every month or two. I used afraid.org’s dynamic DNS service to get a dynamic address that followed the changes and created CNAME records for my real domain pointing at that. The actual connection was fucking awful but the dynamic IPs never caused any problems.

As for services: Nextcloud is well worth looking into for file sync and photo backup, especially if you’ve already got a file server running.

As it happens, I’ve just finished setting up a system exactly like this for a completely off-grid setup. I needed a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to be completely self-contained to monitor an adjacent, larger system that is only powered up intermittently (close enough that the two systems have a common ground).

Short version: the Raspberry Pi and the Huawei LTE router I’m using for connectivity draw a steady 9W between them (there’s a lot of monitoring going on). I went with an old pair of 80W panels in very suboptimal positioning, a simple MPPT charge controller and a 110Ah deep cycle leisure battery which costs about €45, €30 and €120 respectively. The system has been running a few months now and the battery had never, ever dropped below 12.4V. The Pi uses WireGuard to connect to my VPS so Home Assistant can be accessed with a web browser since the network I’m using on-site doesn’t do public IP addresses.

Something, something, neighbour’s lawn, sprinkler, something.

I’m a bit late to the conversation here, but I bought four of these car seat occupancy sensors - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/316523892197 - and installed them between the mattresses, one at butt level and the other at shoulder level on both sides of the bed - and connected them to an ESP32 on ESPHome. Works a treat. They’re sensitive enough to momentarily disengage if someone rolls over or shuffles about if you need that, otherwise a generous bounce detection allowance smooths it out.