I’m drunk, and it’s all Mexico’s fault!

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 :)

“Enters”? You mean they weren’t already in racist meltdown mode?

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.

Let’s see Stephan Miller’s card…

…are Turing Complete, so what you can do with them is exactly equal.

But they’re only equal in the Turing complete sense, which (iirc) says nothing about performance or timing.

I’m too lazy to verify my hunch, but I’m guessing Texas is largely oil (exploiting natural resources), whereas California is largely intellectual output (tech, with some Hollywood and other sundry stuff), though California certainly does exploit its natural resources too (good farming conditions, some oil…).

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

Awesome, thanks for the detailed answer!

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).

I just wish they made toddler clothes in my size.

Do you still start in 1st? Do you skip gears?

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

I’d say it gets a little different with command line utilities — maybe “utility” is the appropriate term here, but I’d call something like grep a program, not an application (again — “utility” also works).

To be sure, grep is extremely powerful, but its scope is limited.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

From our experience in the US, the birth is nothing compared to the financial drain of the other expenses. And at this age, childcare dwarfs all the other child-related expenses.

We have great insurance and don’t rely on family for childcare though, so the math is very very different for someone with “free” familial childcare and no/lousy insurance…

from stdlib.h import cout

Wait this looks wrong, shit…

Anything can use it, but I think by convention it’s used for http on a non-privileged port.

Not the “trickle down” that we were promised, but at least this trickle down is real?