It isn’t a magic solution, no, but you have a lot more control than crummy layer 3 firewall rules and endless lists.

The big players have far more data about what bad looks like. Either we can play whack a mole with outdated tools and techniques or get smart and learn to use what is available.

Self hosting doesn’t mean we go backward in terms of the sophistication and difficulty, it means embracing modern solutions.

In the dinosaur days, we had primitive tools, but so did the attackers. We cannot hope to self host with any measure of security if we bring piss to a shitfight.

Cooool, thanks!

They all sit on each others boards.

However it just takes a few activist board members who have big time fomo and want to be early in with a virtual CEO.

I’m sure I will be put out to pasture first, but at least I will be laughing from my cardboard box.

Lie to employees, absorb money, travel needlessly, tell everyone to RTO when they are never in the office, take a fat bonus, fire people, bullshit the board and stockholders, pull ripcord on golden parachute, lather rinse repeat.

Yeah, i think an ai could handle most of that.

I got some kasA devices on sale, they work fine. I dislike that I have to use their app for initial setup and when I rotate WiFi passwords. Will use them until they fail, then will switch to something else.

Give em to me!

I have a dozen or so, zero issues.

Having said that, I do prefer zwave to WiFi. Glad theyre starting to head in that direction. Just dont understand why zwave gear is always 20% more expensive.

Get a WAF. Sophos firewall is free if you want to diy. If not, use cloudflare.

Opening ports, logging, monitoring, nailing up allow listed IP addresses and dicking around with fail2ban is such a timesuck. None of that crap will stop something from exploiting a vulnerability.

Some things are worth farming out to a 3rd party. Plus, you can just point your DNS entry over and be mostly done. No more dynamic IP bs.

They sell stuff called Chewelry; it’s a necklace or wristband you can chomp on.

Maybe get the kid one of those? If not, maybe make one out of a piece of string and eraser?

This one’s for chewin’, this one’s for undoin’.

Yeah, that’s not how big corporations line their pockets though.

I set up HA a few years ago and I’m very happy with it. However, it has consumed a LOT of my free time in order to learn it.

I have used homemade sensors and controllers only a handful of times. I only do it when they are relatively simple to make or that the options to purchase are terrible and/or expensive. I’ve made some WLED devices with super cheap ESP32 devices and some soldering.

I wanted to do power monitoring for my home, but all of the commercial solutions are super expensive or require some stupid cloud account. I’m using the same cheap esp32s and some inductive coils to act as pickups for the power mains. I’ve found some plans that people have used and I have cobbled together something that should work. Board is flashed with ESPHome.

Either it will work or I will burn the house down. Can’t wait to find out!

Get a small voltage tester. All it needs to have is two wires and a little light. They sell them at any hardware store.

Go find one of your three prong outlets. Look at the two slots. If the ground pin is at the bottom, the left slot (taller than the right) is the neutral, should have a white wire. The shorter slot on the right is hot.

Try your tester by putting one of the probes in the neutral and one in the hot. It should light up.

Now put one in the ground pin hole and the other in hot. If its grounded, the tester will light. If it does not, that ground is not connected to anything.

Word of caution: some jackasses will connect the neutral to the ground on the back of the outlet. This is stupid and dangerous, but it will pass a quick test like the one we did. You should take at least one of the three prong outlets apart and check. If they did it once, they probably did it many times.

Turn off the power to that outlet (use your new tester to verify that the power is off) and pull the outlet apart. You might get lucky and find that the wiring had a ground wire (bare copper wire) that was just tucked away. You can just get a proper grounded outlet and attach the bare wire to the green screw.

Before you pop the bubbly if you find that bare copper wire, you need to test it again. With the outlet pulled out (leave wires connected to original outlet) probe the hot (black) wire and touch the bare copper ground wire. The tester should light up. If it does not, the copper ground wire is not connected to the ground in the breaker box (or in some older homes, the ground wire is connected to copper plumbing).

If the ground does not work, you can go on a hunt to find out why. Most houses, one outlet will daisy chain to another. If an upstream outlet has ground wires, but were not connected, that will be a problem. You can work your way backward to see if you can find and connect them all. If you’re taking the outlets apart, you may as well expect to do this anyway.

If the ground was tied to plumbing and someone replaced a copper section with a nonmetallic (pex, PVC) the ground will no longer work.

I would advise to at least try to figure out what is going on. You’ll learn a lot in the process and as a homeowner, its really important to understand your electrical system. Open a few outlets and probe (carefully). If you hit the wall, you may need to get an electrician in. They can probably tell you what’s up and then you can do the gruntwork of rewiring outlets.

I bailed on Plex a while ago, went to Emby, now Jellyfin.

I forgot what happened to Emby, but I do recall some enshittification, and bounced. Jellyfin seems pretty solid.

There is a difference (to me) of what constitutes an asshole. They are hateful pricks with no concern for others.

You dont need to be an asshole to fight one, you just need to be brave enough to fight one. Of course, they are assholes and they fight dirty, you will get dirty in the process.

First step, dont be a Asshole. After that dont support one. Then, dont raise any. Finally stand up to them.

I agree.

The reality is that he said intentionally provocative things as his means of making money. He said them to people who are known to be extremists. He encouraged a lot of bad behavior, he shunned kindness and embraced anger. He fanned the flame of extremism and he courted danger in the process.

That he was murdered by someone who disagreed with him cannot come as a surprise. Did he really think that you can play with fire and not get burned?

I don’t agreed with murdering anyone, and I firmly believe in free speech. However, he played a dangerous game and it was his undoing.

There is a limit to how far you can push extreme ideas before bad things happen.

This is the truth. Once he got money, he turned into the asshole he was always wanted to be and oh, what an asshole he’s blossomed into.

Now he’s added piece of shit who likes genocide AND is entirely brain damaged about what the KKK does and has done.

Pretty solid work to show that you’re a piece of shit, like murder and have zero clue about the KKK all in one go.

If this country is going up in flames, can we put the boomers on the front line? They love to talk a big game, let them live up to their own hype.

I will bet this new model does amazing things that have never been seen before! This is going to be super super cool and i am going to wait in a very long line to get one. It will totally be worth it when I can show it off and people will be able to recognize it since it will be very different from all the other models.

Get fucked and/or fired a few times for no good reason. That hide will thicken up might fast. Forces you into a new perspective and resets some priorities.

I’ve learned that the boss can and will be a prick as he pleases (always dudes in my case). Hes going to do that and you can either fight with him and get fired or backburnered, or you can just eat shit and move on.

You can get into pissing matches with peers, but the person who wins is the person the boss likes more. If it isn’t you, accept defeat and move on.

Modern work is just the act of eating shit for money. There is no dignity, there is no payoff. You are just giving untalented clowns what they want in exchange for money. I don’t think any of us wanted it this way, but here we are.

I have fully been broken and institutionalized by the system. I have zero hope of ascending to some lofty position by virtue of my intelligence and hard work. Those who run everything pick their own. Unless you grew up with parents who run everything, there is a very low chance you ever will. They pick their own kind, anyone else is a liability.

I’m also in central Ohio.

You need to get out into public. Start small, just little steps. Go someplace that attracts a diverse crowd, buy a coffee and leave. One Line would be perfect. Dip a toe, try more later.

Get the same coffee and then take it to goodale park. Watch the chaos of unleashed dogs and note that nearly nobody is looking at you.

You will come to realize that leaning into that fear is paralyzing. Most people don’t pay mind to others unless you give them a reason to. If you want to just blend in, it is wildly easy.

If you need a sherpa for your early expeditions, let me know. I’m a jobless bum right now and have time on my hands.

And adding a trashcan full of opinions takes everyone further from truth, not closer.

The world does not need a fucking opinionpedia. We have enough morons filling the internet with bullshit; having an authoritative, factual source for a wide variety of data is a good thing.

I have no desire to read some crackpot’s opinion on RFK. Objective facts are critical to a healthy society. We can see how bad things get when people tear apart the fabric of knowledge and replace it with misinformation.

Fuck that right in the ear.

Almost 50, I could not imagine exerting the effort it took to get my now teenage sons parented properly.

It takes so much time, energy and patience and you dont really get more of those as you age.

Then the kid has to explain their old dad to friends and tell everyone that he is not the grampa.

Old dad also won’t necessarily have a lot in common with other parents that are 20 years younger, so those interactions will be very odd.

Old dad ain’t gonna be able to keep up at the amusement park or zoo. He isn’t going to want to sleep in a tent because his back hurts and he has to piss four times a night. Even if he can, it won’t be pleasant.

I am watching my in laws do this, they started at 40. It does not look fun and neither of them will play with the kids much. Little kids need active play, they need to be chased, wrestled with, tickled and tossed in the air. My in laws just keep telling their hyper daughter to just chill out all the time. It doesn’t work and she is perpetually frustrated.

Tl,dr y’all too old.