trailee

joined 10 months ago
[–] trailee 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Second this, including buying from Costco. I don’t love the Lorex interface, but they’ve been around for a long time and can’t really compete on the modem Ring-style features so they’re now advertising the privacy benefits of their local storage.

PoE (Power over Ethernet) cameras are the way to go, connecting the camera wires directly to the NVR box, which doesn’t itself need to be connected to your network. The NVR box has a hard drive and an HDMI port. If you do optionally connect it to the network (but just don’t), then their app will facilitate connecting to your box either locally or over the internet so that you can stream your video directly from your hard drive, not their cloud.

If you want it protected against power outages, you just put the NVR on a UPS and you’re done.

Of course, if a burglar finds your NVR and takes it, then all of your footage is gone.

[–] trailee 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It sure says gal there but based on your annual chart and common billing in the US I’m guessing the actual billing unit is 1 HCF, which is 100 cubic feet or 748 gallons. You could call and ask your utility company to be sure.

[–] trailee 1 points 3 weeks ago

go through the normal login process and login with empty credentials. It will prompt you to connect as guest.

Thanks for this tip - I never would have thought to try that if I hadn’t found this comment through a search. It’s a very unintuitive process, and it also seems buggy (I can’t do guest browsing on a server where I’m also logged into an account; instead of the guest option I get an error message demanding that I supply a username and password).

Have you considered making the guest browsing workflow more obvious at the join/login screen? Or perhaps better yet, providing a mechanism to see the list of default communities a server recommends? By that I mean whatever shows up in the communities list when browsing a server anonymously (such as viewing https://vger.app/posts/sh.itjust.works on the web).

But even that wouldn’t cover what I really want, which is to see a list of all communities on a server, so that if I notice one interesting federated community I can easily browse what other communities exist on the server that might also pique my interest. Maybe the thing I want is being able to put an empty “@server.tld” into the search box and be shown all communities registered there.

[–] trailee 5 points 3 weeks ago

Why have you never been able to do it? I set up a full mail system years ago on a Xen/Linux VPS with stuff like Postfix, maildrop, Courier IMAP, a custom set of MySQL tables for aliases and such, and at one point migrated my TLS from CACert to LetsEncrypt. I enjoyed some aspects of the huge pain in the ass that all of that was, and having it work nicely was great. Spinning up a new email alias was easy and free, so I created a new one for damn near every site I interacted with, which later turned into a form of lock in having to continue running my server.

The continual server maintenance was a pain in the ass, requiring me to remember in substantial detail how it all worked so that I could appropriately integrate new things I had to learn like SPF and DMARC. I’m glad to have had some detailed sysadmin experience, but I was so glad in the end to finally migrate away from all that and just pay Fastmail instead.

I still have nearly the same flexibility with Fastmail and my custom domains, but they’re the ones that need to do all the maintenance. I can’t scale across unlimited domains for the same zero marginal cost, but I can make it work for a reasonable price with a few domains and scale arbitrarily within that. I’m sure there are other hosts out there that do a similarly good job, and Fastmail hasn’t been without its own troubles, but it’s been a net win for me.

I don’t recommend running your own server. I won’t do it again. I do recommend building an army of custom aliases all at your own custom domain(s).

[–] trailee 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Here’s a ~30 year old excellent law article on jury nullification by James Joseph Duane, who is also somewhat well known for his excellent “Don’t talk to police” lecture on YouTube. Click through the SSL warning in that first site to get the pdf - I think that’s better than the JSTOR library-login-wall link but you can see it there too.

It’s a pretty comprehensive positive treatment on jury nullification, with a bunch of history and context, well worth your time.

[–] trailee 19 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Leaders at Allied Universal, which provides security services for 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies, said their phones were “ringing off the hook” on Wednesday with potential clients. Allied covers a wide spectrum of services — including stationing guards outside offices, chauffeuring executives, surveilling their homes and tracking their families.

Protecting a chief executive full time costs roughly $250,000 a year, said Glen Kucera, who runs Allied’s enhanced protection services.

NYT article

 

The link is to a year-old article that helped me decide not to pay Alaska Airlines’ voluntary SAF carbon mitigation fees. I’m still not certain about the right choice, and would like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

The big picture includes acknowledgement that there’s no such thing as ethical consumption within capitalism, so in some ways this choice is entirely irrelevant. Also that flying is by far the most polluting form of transportation per passenger mile so we should each minimize doing it. Finally that flying has the most challenging logistics of shifting energy sources, fundamentally because batteries are heavy.

Alaska offers me a choice during the checkout procedure to contribute to SAF accounting for between 5% and 20% of the fuel that my flight will use, but it has nothing to do with the fuel actually consumed by my flight. They are already buying some amount of SAF and using it in their SFO hub only, so the program is hand waving about the fungibility of fuel consumption. Really they’re just offering me the opportunity to donate money towards their SAF usage, indirectly supporting the growth of the SAF industry.

It seems to me that the whole SAF industry is currently greenwashing bullshit, piggybacking on the big lie from the past few decades that adding ethanol to automotive gasoline is “sustainable” in some meaningful way. But that ignores the water usage depleting aquifers at an accelerating rate, necessary fertilizer use and soil depletion, using food-producing acreage for fuel instead, energy usage in planting/harvesting/refining/distilling, and so on.

Please validate my choice not to donate to the current state of SAF, or provide links to interesting reading that supports your claim otherwise.

[–] trailee 18 points 1 month ago

For $4.2 million, the administration had just sold off the first 561 acres of Blue and Gold, an estimated 83,259 trees.

They’re selling off rights to log (miscategorized) old growth forest for an average of Fifty. Fucking. Dollars. Per. Tree. That’s damn near free.

[–] trailee 4 points 1 month ago

Actually I’ll agree with you that a spreadsheet could do a lot, but that’s a niche solution. Building a good one requires a fair bit of technical know how, and even using one well requires a lot of understanding.

[–] trailee 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Why would you assume the cycle is regular? It’s a biological process that can vary quite a bit, which is part of why you would want to track it in the first place. There’s also much more to track that just the expected start date of your next cycle. The various tracking apps are quite a bit more involved than just a calendar.

[–] trailee 57 points 2 months ago (4 children)

The article is very misleading. It says

The research paper…notes that the human body is particularly efficient at generating 40 MHz RF energy. Tapping into that through a 'worn receiver' provides power without using any invasive means.

But I read much of the pdf linked at the bottom of that link, and there’s nothing about the human body generating energy at 40MHz. The trick is that skin is pretty effective (sort of) at conducting energy at that frequency, so the authors hooked up a power transmitter worn on the forearm, 5 or 15cm away from a receiver on the hand.

This isn’t about powering anything by body energy, it’s about strapping a battery-powered transmitter somewhere on your body and then having another device pick it up when strapped somewhere else on your body. No thanks.

Oh and it’s actually pretty inefficient and won’t provide much usable energy.

[–] trailee 20 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

You can get tiny rubber hands that each go onto one of your fingers. There are lots of vendors that sell these on Amazon, and presumably many other places. Different skin colors exist.

I’ve also seen even tininer ones that you can put on the first set of hands, so maybe you can find those as well.

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