I have a few services running on Proxmox that I’d like to switch over to bare metal. Pfsense for one. No need for an entire 1U server, but running on a dedicated machine would be great.

Every mini PC I find is always lacking in some regard. ECC memory is non-negotiable, as is an SFP+ port or the ability to add a low-profile PCIe NIC, and I’m done buying off-brand Chinese crop on Amazon.

If someone with a good reputation makes a reasonably-priced mini PC with ECC memory and at least some way to accept a 10Gb DAC, I’ll probably buy two.

I appreciate the suggestion, but that looks like a Java library. Interpreted languages make me feel dirty. Java makes me feel even dirtier. If it’s not C, C++, or ASM, is it really worth using?

I’m okay with the “human-readability,” but I’ve never been happy with the “machine-readibility” of XML. Usually I just want to pull a few values from an API return, yet every XML library assumes I want the entire file in a data structure that I can iterate through. It’s a waste of resources and a pain in the ass.

Even though it’s not the “right” way, most of the time I just use regex to grab whatever exists between an opening and closing tag. If I’m saving/loading data from my own software, I just use a serialization library.

A lot of boomers are really particular about well-manicured yards, pristine gardens, etc. Squirrels do not help with this.

I love seeing little divots where our squirrels bury nuts. If they eat some of our plants, then I put a cage around it or plant new ones. Seeing the little guys play and eat the food we put out for them far outweighs any minor landscaping problems they cause.

The problem isn’t that Harris is being held to a higher standard. The problem is that Americans think of elections the same way they think of a sporting match. It’s “my team is going to win!” not “I’m going to vote for the candidate that is best aligned with my beliefs.” A huge number of the people who are voting Republican are doing so because the Republican party is their “team,” and damn it, their team is going to win even if it kills them.

Many years ago, I was discussing politics with a coworker (always a bad idea, but whatever). It went something like this:

“So, you don’t think the less-fortunate should be able to afford medical care?” “No, of course not, everyone should be able to see a doctor.”

“You don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry?” “I’m not gay, but they can do whatever makes them happy.”

“You support the war in Iraq, then?” “I support our troops, but the war is kind of a waste.”

“We definitely should legalize weed, right?” “Um, I’d smoke it if I didn’t get drug tested.”

“So why are you voting Republican, then?” “My family is Republican; we always do.”

I can’t speak to the AI voice generation part of this, but you might be interested in the Domesday Duplicator for digitizing your audio, especially if some or it is slightly degraded.

https://github.com/harrypm/DomesdayDuplicator

The project was originally designed for laserdisc, but it’s been expanded to support VHS and cassette tape. Traditionally, you would play your tape on a cassette player, then the built in analog circuitry would convert the magnetic signals into audio, amplify them, and feed them to a sound card on your PC, which then converts the analog signal to a digital audio stream.

With the Domesdsy Duplicator, you record the raw magnetic signal from the read head and directly digitize it into a bitstream that you can then process as needed. For DIY archiving from an analog source, it’s one of the best options for signal fidelity, and it will give you the truest representation of what’s actually on the tape.

I think I’m misunderstanding how LDAP works. It’s probably obvious, but I’ve never used it.

If my switch is expecting a username and password for login, how does it go from expecting a web login to “the LDAP server recognizes this person, and they have permissions to access network devices, so I’ll let them in.”?

Also, to be clear, I’m referring to the process of logging in and configuring the switch itself, not L2 switching or L3 routing.

Like several people here, I’ve also been interested in setting up an SSO solution for my home network, but I’m struggling to understand how it would actually work.

Lets say I set up an LDAP server. I log into my PC, and now my PC “knows” my identity from the LDAP server. Then I navigate to the web UI for one of my network switches. How does SSO work in this case? The way I see it, there are two possible solutions.

• The switch has some built-in authentication mechanism that can authenticate with the LDAP server or something like Keycloak. I don’t see how this would work as it relies upon every single device on the network supporting a particular authentication mechanism.
• I log into and authenticate with an HTTP forwarding server that then supplies the username/password to the switch. This seems clunky but could be reasonably secure as long as the username/password is sufficiently complex.

I generally understand how SSO works within a curated ecosystem like a Windows-based corporate network that uses primarily Microsoft software for everything. I have various Linux systems, Windows, a bunch of random software that needs authentication, and probably 10 different brands of networking equipment. What’s the solution here?

I’m a big fan of ZFS, and I use it extensively. For a single hard drive, though, wouldn’t ext4 and a few NFS shares make a lot more sense?

I’m fortunate enough to be a homeowner, but I rented places for most of my adult live. My current home doesn’t have central AC, and none of my rentals did either.

Everywhere I’ve lived, the mounting hardware that comes with portable ACs just didn’t work for me. What I found that did work is to throw away the existing window mount and build your own. I’ll take two pieces of plywood, cut them to the space that exists in my window (at one point this was a sliding door), and sandwich a sheet of insulation foam in the middle. Then drill holes for your AC tubes and screw on the mounts that came with your AC.

Also, if at all possible, avoid the single-hose portable units. You’re wasting cold air. A dual-hose unit uses outdoor air to cool the unit itself, and the hot exhaust gets expelled through the second tube. Do make sure you have a screen on the inlet, though, unless you want to be cleaning out bugs from inside your AC. I have used window units, single-hose portable, and dual-hose portable units. At least in my experience, the window units work best, the dual-hose units are a close second, and the single-hose units are crap.

As far as HA integration, I recently went through the process of finding a new AC that works with HA. What I found is that everything available either requires internet access and works with proprietary “cloud” access or just doesn’t have any sort of remote connection. Some of the “cloud” solutions have decent integration with HA, but I have a hard-and-fast rule that none of my IoT devices access anything outside my home network. What worked for me is buying a “dumb” portable AC with a remote control and using a Wifi-connected universal remote to provide access to HA.

I’ve been an electronics hobbyist for years, and I still don’t own a 3D printer. You can buy premade enclosures in almost every size you can imagine. Then just drill holes to mount IO ports.

I do want to get a 3D printer exactly for this reason, but I’ve just never gotten around to buying one. They are certainly not a necessity if you want to build your own stuff.

One of my favorite automations is my “temperature lamp.” HA takes an average temperature, humidity, and illuminance from various outdoor sensors around my property. I have a template sensor that uses these values, then gives me a “feels-like” outdoor temperature. Another template sensor takes this “feels-like” temperature and converts it to a percentage between 0 (freezing) an 100 (> 120 degrees F). It uses this percentage to calculate a value between blue and red on a perceptually-uniform colorspace (CIELAB) and spits out an RGB value. An automation watches this RGB value and applies it to a RGB light bulb in my living room.

The result is that I have a light that displays what the temperature “feels like” and changes color in a way that people perceive as matching the temperature. So if the lamp looks “kind of blue” it’s going to feel “kind of cold” outside. If the bulb looks “kind of red,” it’s going to feel “kind of warm.”

I set this up for fun, but it’s actually ended up being really useful. Before we leave the house, we can just glance over at the lamp and know if we need to put on a sweatshirt or a coat, or maybe leave the outerwear at home.

I don’t necessarily feel like people are scared of criticism, but more so scared of being attacked. In my experience, a large number of people don’t know how to give constructive criticism in a way that’s actually helpful.

Lets say you’re training somebody at work and your trainee makes a mistake. I’ve seen trainers respond to this in two different ways:

• (Laughing) “Really?! No, why would you do that. This is the right way to do it.”
• “That might work in some cases, but that’s not exactly right. A more efficient way is like this.”

Humans are emotional creatures, some more than others, and our emotions influence how we handle criticism. It’s a fact of life. Most people want to learn from their mistakes, not be put in a position where they feel like they need to defend themselves. It feels a lot better to think “Okay, I’m making a mistake, but I know how to keep myself from doing it again” instead of “Wow, this person thinks I’m a piece of shit.”

I’d be interested to hear how you have it set up. My issue is definitely with HA. I can see the messages making it to the broker; HA just isn’t recognizing them it seems.

The strange part is that the BlueIris integration already has “Motion” devices for each of my cameras. The documentation made it sound like I just needed to start feeding HA with MQTT messages that these devices were expecting.

I may do like you suggested and just manually set up binary MQTT sensors. It would look a lot cleaner to tie it into the existing integration, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the extra troubleshooting.

I spend less money on beer and don’t have to drive to get it. Otherwise, not much has changed.

I’m going to break with what most people are saying and offer the suggestion that search engines are actually doing a decent job. If my mother searches Google for the phrase “Can you please show me a recipe for apple pie?,” she’s probably going to get a recipe for apple pie. If I search google for “c++20” “std::string” “constructors”, after I skip over the ads, I’m most likely going to get a web page that shows me the the constructors for std::string in c++20.

Ad-sponsored pages and AI bullshit aside, most search engines do still give decent results.

I don’t understand how this is an advantage. Yes, you can swap RAM with the system powered up, but what happens to the information in the module that was removed? Is the OS doing some kind of RAID-like memory allocation? The article wasn’t clear on how this would actually work.

Depending on how accurate you need your energy usage data to be for individual devices, you might be able to get away with just using a whole-house energy monitor. I’m using one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08LV8DDFP

I already have a large number of Zigbee plugs, so by looking at the power usage from my energy meter before and after one switches, I can get a general estimate of how much power a device is using. Of course, the rest of your home is going to to skew the results, but you can mitigate this a bit with some of HA’s statistics functions. It’s been a while since I tried this, but I did test it with a 3.5kW heater a while ago. I took a median from a certain number of samples before and after the heater switched on (I think 10 seconds worth of samples), and the result was generally accurate to within about 100w.

In the US at least, most equipment (unless you get into high-and datacenter stuff) runs on 120V. We also use 240V power, but a 240V connection is actually two 120V phases 180-degrees out of sync. The main feed coming into your home is 240V, so your breaker panel splits the circuits evenly between the two phases. Running dual-phase power to a server rack is as simple as just running two 120V circuits from the panel.

My rack only receives a single 120V circuit, but it’s backed up by a dual-conversion UPS and a generator on a transfer switch. That was enough for me. For redundancy, though, dual phases, each with its own UPS, and dual-PSU servers are hard ro beat.