Omnilert later admitted the incident was a “false positive” but claimed the system “functioned as intended,” saying its purpose is to “prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.”

What?? How is it prioritizing safety if it did exactly the opposite and created an unsafe environment (a bunch of US cops with guns pointed at teens)?

If there’s no ground then I’d immediately contact an electrician and get a quote to replace all the wiring. The existing wiring is likely unsafe, especially with the amount of power pulled by modern devices (old electrical wiring wasn’t designed with that much power usage in mind!)

Also get them to take a look at the main electrical panel and ensure it’s okay.

My house was built in the 1960s, but the wiring was redone at some point by a previous owner. The 100 amp main panel was still original though, and it was a brand that was known for issues. I had it replaced with a new 200 amp panel.

They work well. They cost more than other options, but (at least in my experience) colours are more consistent and uniform.

Not sure if it’s still the case, but the ones I have from a few years ago use Zigbee so you don’t actually need their hub - any Zigbee coordinator will do (I’m using a PoE one, the smlight SLZB-06).

Consider using smart switches instead of smart bulbs. However, given how old the house is, you might not have neutral wires at the switches, which limits the types of smart switches you can use. Do you know if the electrical wiring is still original, or if it was redone at some point?

For the power outlets, I’d highly recommend getting an electrican to install more. It’s way more convenient than having power strips everywhere.

It was a feature built in to the web browser, providing a website, file sharing, a music player, a photo sharing tool, chat, a whiteboard, a guestbook, and some other features.

All you needed to do was open the browser and forward a port, or let UPnP do it (since everyone still had UPnP enabled back then), and you’d get a .operaunite.com subdomain that anyone could access, which would hit the web server built into the browser.

This was back in 2008ish, when Opera was still good (before it was converted to be Chromium-powered). A lot of people still used independent blogs back then, rather than everything being on social media, so maybe it was ahead of its time a bit.

“cloud” still mostly means services like AWS and Google Cloud. People don’t refer to Hetzner dedicated servers as “cloud” for example.

I’m sad that Opera Unite failed. It was the closest thing to self-hosting for regular non-technical people.

They should say at least one thing that’s unique to the cloud, though.

Dual-booting works fine. You can even have more than two OSes - for a while I was running Windows 10, Fedora, and Debian. Ended up sticking with Fedora.

base RAM usage down super low (50MB to 100MB range)

A base Debian system (minimal netinstall with nothing selected in the tasksel step) doesn’t use much more than this, or at least it didn’t in the last stable release. For https://dnstools.ws/ I have a few VPSes with 256MB RAM that run Debian and the DNSTools worker. They run fine.

The article is very confusingly written. Maybe AI? It’s conflating “cloud” hosting (AWS, etc) with renting hosting infrastructure (which includes the cloud, but also things we don’t refer to as “cloud”, like dedicated servers, VPS services, and shared hosting).

This paragraph makes it sound like Amazon were the first company to allow renting their servers:

As companies such as Amazon matured in their own ability to offer what’s known as “software as a service” over the web, they started to offer others the ability to rent their virtual servers for a cost as well.

but Linux-based virtual servers have been a thing for 20+ years or so, first with Linux-VServer then with OpenVZ. Shared servers in general date back to the mainframes of the 60s and 70s.

Similarly, this paragraph makes it sound like the only two choices are either to use “the cloud” or to run your own data center:

Cloud computing enables a pay-as-you-go model similar to a utility bill, rather than the huge upfront investment required to purchase, operate and manage your own data centre.

I mainly use smart switches rather than smart bulbs. Currently I’m using the Inovelli Blue switches which use Zigbee.

There’s way too much stuff that relies on internet access. If I’m at home, and my washing machine (which is also at home) wants to tell me when it’s done, why does that need to use the internet?

I try to stick to Zigbee or Z-wave devices where possible, since they’re guaranteed to be local-only. If I need access when I’m away from home, I connect with a VPN to access Home Assistant.

Pika is a GUI for Borg.

Rsync is doable, but it’s not great since you essentially only have one backup set. If a file gets corrupted and you don’t notice before the next backup is done, you won’t be able to restore it. Borg’s deduping is good enough to keep lots of history - I do daily backups and keep every day for the past two weeks, every week for the past three months, and every month indefinitely (until I run out of space and need to prune it). Borgmatic handles pruning the backups that are out of retention.

I’m using Fedora KDE and haven’t set up backups on my desktop PC yet, but on Linux servers (both at home and “in the cloud”) I usually use Borgbackup with Borgmatic. All my systems have two backup destinations: My home server and a storage VPS, both via SSH.

Looks like Pika Backup is a GUI for Borgbackup, so it should be a good choice. Vorta is also popular. GNOME apps tend to focus on simple, easy to use GUIs with minimal customization, so it’s possible Vorta is more configurable. I haven’t tried either.

Don’t forget the 3-2-1 policy: you should have at least three copies of your data, in at least two different mediums (hard drives, “cloud”, Blu-rays, tape, etc), one of which is off-site (cloud, a NAS at a friend’s or family member’s house, etc). If you’re looking for cloud storage, Hetzner storage boxes are great value. Some VPS providers have good sales (less than $3/TB/month) during Black Friday.

Here’s a funk theme by the two brothers from Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge

Wow I love this. I hadn’t heard this one.

I like this one too! I had never heard it before. I grew up with a Sega Master System and Mega Drive so there’s a of NES/SNES games I’ve never played.

I like Notepad++. It can handle anything you throw at it.

I switched to Linux (Fedora with KDE) and I like KWrite for similar reasons.

I’m in the USA and like the the Sengled smart plugs. They use Zigbee, can handle up to 1800W, and are ETL listed. Having said that, it looks like they don’t sell the ones I have any more. I don’t have experience with their newer ones.

Just make sure whichever ones you get are ETL or UL listed. There’s some that are cheap but haven’t had any sort of safety testing done. It’s not worth the small savings.

Nothing beats Tim Follin’s 8-bit music though.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4_gObHt1uZA

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SJwh3erQlyE

The current UI is very different to the original UI though.