I assume you’re referring to the cuckpdate chair.

Whenever I have a Linux box without Internet I just USB tether an Android phone—if the phone is on WiFi then it uses that (not cell), so it’s basically just a WiFi adapter that’s almost universally supported. (I think it NATs, so in some circumstances won’t work, but good enough for most emergency use cases.)

I would recommend PoE security cameras. You probably want support for RTSP / ONVIF.

I have some Amcrest cameras talking to Frigate. It is completely local—cameras on a separate VLAN that can’t talk to the Internet, footage is recorded on a server running Frigate. Works very well for me. No vendor lock-in is also nice!

640k 780k ought to be enough for anybody…

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.

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.

Some would call the former command cat abuse.

In short, unless you want the contents of a file printed to stdout (or multiple files concatenated), the command can probably be written without cat, instead using the filename as an argument (grep pattern file) or IO redirection (cmd < file).

Stylistics and readability are another thing though.

Yabai+sketchybar make tiling+virtual desktops…at least usable on mac.

Of course, I’d take i3 any day of the week.

Coming from Debian, it was…not expected. I understand how and why it happened, but the user experience was surprising.

Debian keeps the previous kernel around, which makes perfect sense to me — in the event that a kernel update borks your system you can just load the previous one. This would probably only happen due to out of tree modules (looking at you, Nvidia…).

Coming from Debian, it was…not expected. I understand how and why it happened, but the user experience was surprising.

Debian keeps the previous kernel around, which makes perfect sense to me — in the event that a kernel update borks your system you can just load the previous one. This would probably only happen due to out of tree modules (looking at you, Nvidia…).

Linux distros can still do…questionable things. In grad school I tried Arch for a bit, and I once was late to a video call because I had updated my kernel but did not reboot. Arch decided that because there was a new kernel installed, I didn’t need the modules for the old — but currently running! — kernel, so it removed them. So when I plugged in a webcam, the webcam module was nowhere to be found.

But yeah…somehow, still not as bad as Windows updates.

Our Internet went out for a few hours today, so naturally my smart switches, lights, cameras, motion sensors, door sensors, and power monitoring… continued to work as of nothing was wrong.

Home Assistant is great, and using local-only devices is awesome. If my smart home stops working it’s my own fault, not some 3rd party.

ZigBee router thing:

I’ve been happy with the SMLIGHT SLZB-06M. You can easily flash firmware, and it has PoE which was important for me. I believe it also supports Thread, but I haven’t tried this yet (and I’m not sure if it supports it at the same time as Zigbee).

Zigbee smart plugs from Third Reality have been pretty solid in my experience, and they report power usage.

For circuit breaker level monitoring, I have an Emporia Vue2. I have it running esphome, completely local — unfortunately this requires some simple soldering and flashing, so it’s not turnkey. But it’s been rock solid ever since flashing it. (Process is well documented online.)

I’ve had decent luck with cheap wifi Matter bulbs, but provisioning them is finicky, and sometimes they just crap out and need to be power cycled; Zigbee bulbs (e.g., Ikea) have generally been reliable, though sometimes I’ve had difficulty pairing them initially. After power cycling a Matter WiFi bulb, it takes a while for it to respond to Home Assistant; Zigbee bulbs generally respond as soon as you power them on.

I have a wired smart light switch from TP-Link/Kasa (KS205), and it’s been completely hassle free (and totally local — Matter over wifi). The Kasa smart switch dongles I have work flawlessly but need proprietary pairing, and I’m afraid to update firmware in case they lose local support.

Good luck! Fun adventure :)

Most Linux filesystems, being case sensitive, won’t find the SUDO command.

I think a lot of companies view their free plan as recruiting/advertising — if you use TailScale personally and have a great experience then you’ll bring in business by advocating for it at work.

Of course it could go either way, and I don’t rely on TailScale (it’s my “backup” VPN to my home network)… we’ll see, I guess.

Can you explain the Ethernet requirement more? Was that just that the computer didn’t have WiFi, or was it set up such that only the wired interface worked with their VPN, or…?

Can you explain your travel router situation? Did you use the travel router to access WiFi and provide an Ethernet port for the computer (I think this is called “WISP mode”)? Or was this an 4G/5G router?

In any event, at least on Android you can connect to WiFi and tether to a computer over USB. It’s very useful for setting up a computer without WiFi drivers, as Linux will almost always recognize the shared Internet (so, it’s functionally a USB wifi dongle with very good driver support).

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

Bonus points: use non-qwerty keyboard for added obfuscation (but keep the qwerty key caps of course).

I hope I’m wrong! I’d definitely consider buying some — hopefully you can report back with results. If they’re slower than advertised but have the actual capacity that’d still be awesome!

This looks like it might be it:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/buyer-beware-fake-samsung-1080-pro-4tb-ssd-promising-unbelievable-158-gbs-speeds-for-dollar43-is-too-good-to-be-true

The drive doesn’t provide 4TB of storage either, considering the single NAND chip. That means if you were to attempt to write that much data to the SSD, at some point it would either fail or start overwriting existing data.