• 5 Posts
  • 133 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • I’d say start on Ubuntu too. I actually kind of hate it, but it’s was my second or third Linux distro and was stable enough to jump into it, learn stuff then form an opinion about what I want in a distro and move on.

    I think a lot of people get hung up on this — for basic use, a lot of distros offer more or less the same things. It’s when you start to drill into the lower level stuff (that you’re probably not now concerned with) that you become pickier with distros.



  • I think the part you’re missing (and others haven’t addressed) is that you don’t send 100% of your traffic to one endpoint (much like how most use VPNs). You can route different things to different places.

    For example, I’m in the US and have two Tailscale exit nodes. Both are located on VPS machines in the US, but one sends traffic down a double-hop VPN back out into the US, the other does the same but to Switzerland. My “default” route is through Switzerland (better privacy laws) but I am forced to route some things through the US exit node due to websites that won’t work outside the US. For my personal devices, traffic routes directly to them via WireGuard tunnels.

    In addition, my wife doesn’t care about blocking everything that I do (social media, tracking) but her phone still needs to update sensors in Home Assistant. She can choose not to use the exit nodes but can still communicate with our nodes on Tailscale. She also uses it to print documents at home from her laptop while she’s at work.

    Recently I was waiting in a hospital with public (unsafe) WiFi that blocked UDP traffic, but Tailscale does some magic that will relay traffic via TLS. I was able to access services at home with a 20ms latency. The tech is very, very nice to have.












  • You know, I think I was rushing through things too fast after a day of programming for 8 hours with close to no breaks.

    After I calmed down, ate dinner and came back to it in a more leisurely fashion I found it to be pretty easy.

    I think what got me was that I’m not too familiar with Matter and Thread, so having to have another Docker container going was unexpected and frankly I wasn’t in the mood to learn anything new.

    The sensors seem to be reporting happily and often. I’m pretty impressed so far (other than the ports on the hub, but I can live with that).


  • I just got an Aqara M3 hub as well as the temperature sensors today, and I’m already kind of wishing I hadn’t.

    It’s next to impossible to get an Ethernet cable and/or power cable into the damn hub. It got my WiFi credentials but refuses to connect to it since I used Ethernet during setup.

    Now I’m struggling to add it to Dockerized Home Assistant. I was under the impression Aqara was becoming Home Assistant “certified” but Home Assistant’s Thread/Matter support seems like trash.

    Currently pulling another Docker image to my burdened Raspberry Pi 4. It ran out of disk space.

    Just frustrated and not understanding why all this is so difficult. I can’t imagine what I’d do if I weren’t a big programming computer geek. They really sell this shit to normal people?