Open, or standards-compliant local-only gear is the way to go for smart home stuff IMHO. Never had a problem with a Zigbee, Matter, or ESPHome device suddenly deciding it would stop working because manufacturer said so.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550465000/behold-the-fatberg-london-s-130-ton-rock-solid-sewer-blockage

You’re not just “sticking it to the man” when you do this though — you’re being a dick to your city, its residents, and employees.

Move ‘em 2 millimeters in the wrong direction and you’ll have a bad time

Are you referring to getting, I dunno, yogurt in places outside the digestive tract?

My understanding was that gut bacteria play a pretty crucial (beneficial) role in overall health, not to mention the whole gut-brain stuff.

Pretty sure those “horrible little scalawags” play some pretty crucial roles in the human microbiome…

Or just a San Francisco resident — these ads are everywhere on BART (+Muni I guess) right now. (As far as ads go, they’re pretty good I guess — and no, I don’t even use them, much less work for them.)

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 it’s probably better to amend it to, “if it was covered in poop would you get rid of it and not replace it?”

Not parent, but when a minute isn’t quite enough, 77 seconds might do the trick. Multiples of eleven are quick to enter, and with a simple nuker with no “minute” button, 66s is easier than 1:00.

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.

It’s a pretty standard bandwidth/latency tradeoff in my view: email is high bandwidth (it’s in writing, you can re-read, etc.), whereas phone is low latency (several back-and-forth explanations can happen in seconds). Each has its place.

If social anxiety is a factor, that’s a perfectly valid, but separate, issue.

Well, yeah — dude’s brake cables are missing!

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sickos-haha-yes

In my head it was definitely Cave.

I know the “attack helicopter” bit is a transphobic trope, but given how hard those fans are probably working, I think this computer might actually identify as one.

(If this comment is offensive I can remove it/mod can obviously remove it — not trying to be a dick!)

Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

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).

That’s…not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

The CW folks would presumably be sending QTH instead — I wonder if this graph captures that/if it would make an appreciable difference?