Try HomeSeer. I ran it for years before switching to HA.

Nice in concept.

In practice this is useless- a $150k fine when removing the satellite will someday cost millions.

It’s also worth noting that de-orbiting was never the plan here. Geosynchronous satellites are too far up to make that practical- at 22,000 mi altitude, the amount of delta-v necessary for a deorbit is gigantic. So instead the satellite ‘boosts’ up to a ‘graveyard’ orbit about 300km above the geosynchronous ring.
Dish only boosted it 122km above the geosynchronous ring. Thus the fine. In practice this satellite will probably cause nobody any problems.

Sorry, I forget that while Reddit had a largely American userbase especially in political posts, Lemmy does not. I refer to the United States Constitution, which I think is damn near perfect, but has been screwed up by multiple generations of voters who pay little or no attention to their government’s mismanagement and just keep re-electing the same incumbents despite having shit approval ratings for Congress, because they don’t bother to actually do any research of their own or read what the candidates write other than just a few sound bytes on TV.

Our Constitution as it is is pretty good, so wisdom would be to tread lightly. I think the only change I would make is to prohibit primary elections. That would be considered a right, as in, no person or group may deny a candidate with sufficient signatures the right to appear on the ballot. I would also mandate some sort of ranked choice voting or instant runoff election. These two changes would be to fix the problem of having to vote against a bad guy rather than voting for a good guy. It far too often ends with the second worst candidate who goes into the primary, coming out victorious. We should be electing the best, not the second worst.

Ah how three mighty have fallen.
I remember the days when Google was optimizing their page to save 1/10th of a second of load time, when they publicly stated their goal was to get people off of Google as quickly as possible and on to whatever they were looking for. That was back in the ‘don’t be evil’ days. Those days appear to be long gone.

Just updated a Windows 7 box to Windows 10 the other day. So apparently this only applies to Windows 11. No idea if it lets you use Windows 10 as a stepping stone between 7 and 11 but don’t care. I have no plans to use Windows 11 anywhere anytime soon, so as far as I’m concerned if this means it will stop nagging me to upgrade, so much the better.

Interesting. Do you have any sources on this or more reading material behind it? I have yet to really see any things suggesting utilities are asking to do CapEx on infrastructure improvements but are being told no.

AmITheAsshole. There’s a few but they’re all bots that repost Reddit content. No original ones that I’ve seen so far

Small tractors are easy. The issue is efficiency. The big tractor is big because the tool it pulls behind it covers ~10 rows per pass. You can easily build a small tractor that does 1-2 rows per pass, but that means you need a lot more passes, which means doing anything takes a lot longer.

I assume by “Raspberry Z-Wave module” you mean the RaZberry z-wave addon board, and I couldn’t agree more. I tried to get that thing going with another home automation package and gave up after a few hours of fucking with it.

That said, these days I’m using Home Assistant on a RPi with a Nortek z-wave/zigbee combo radio USB interface and I couldn’t be happier. If you’ve never used HA it’s worth trying out; used to require a lot of scripting but now it’s a beautiful and polished system that has all the tweakability a nerd wants with a nice high-WAF GUI. They have a plugin that does exactly what you’re doing and makes a virtual alarm system out of existing sensors.

I also agree block connections and use a VPN to access it, I do the same thing.

Use a bidet. The idea sounds weird- a toilet that sprays water up your ass. I wasn’t sure it was for me. Then I tried it. Holy fuck game changer. FULLY clean EVERY time.
But yeah, sitting down. Finish the dump, run the bidet, then wipe to dry, all while sitting.

Very interesting. So you basically have an alarm system in software then? What do you use for software? Do you have an arm/disarm function?

Of course it is.

We have more energy consuming stuff than ever. But do you ever see NEW substations being built? NEW long range power lines? I don’t.

Around here, the utility has a deal- they will sell you a top of the line $400 color touchscreen WiFi thermostat that talks to Alexa and displays the weather report and does a bunch of other shit, for $10 (not a typo). In exchange, you let them remotely shut off your AC if the grid gets overloaded.

Why do they do this? Because a few truckloads of thermostats (with a bulk discount) are a fuckton cheaper than actually upgrading the grid.

And so we hear about grid overload days and possible brownouts and incentives to shut stuff off as if this is the way it’s supposed to be. But the reality is these problems only exist because utilities don’t keep ahead of necessary upgrades. After all, why spend the money when there’s shareholders to answer to?

security? For surveillance or something more?

This is harder than it looks.

See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don’t mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that’s working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there’s big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can’t be used.
Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that’s not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it’ll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.

What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It’s huge.
The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.

As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it’ll keep the cars cooler in summer.

The key is make them easily removable.

If it’s ‘removable’ but it requires heating the edges of the phone up to 120F and then prying apart a sheet of hair-thin glass without breaking it, then most people won’t bother.

If it’s 4 Philips head screws then you’ll find a lot more people doing it.

Unfortunately, the economics for device manufacturers are clearly in the adhesive category- cheaper to assemble, and they’d rather a user buy a new device than service the old one so they DGAF how hard it is to service.

The only exception is companies like Fairphone catering to a niche audience of nerds who value repairability. Most people don’t even consider how hard something is to fix when buying it.

Sadly I think legislation is the only way to fix this. You have to legislate either a. that the battery be removable and replaceable without tools or ‘with standard fasteners and not adhesive’ or something like that.

The only way to really fix this is to stop gluing phones together.

Matrix is really awesome and I hope it becomes the gold standard. However, if I were a Snowden, I would pick signal over matrix for the simple reason that signal doesn’t store your conversations on the server. Matrix does. Those conversations are encrypted client side with a key the server doesn’t have, but they are still stored centrally. That has advantages and disadvantages. It is much better for usability, because you can log in from any device and you see all of your conversations in one place. Unlike signal, there are no primary and linked devices, you can run matrix on desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, or straight from a web browser. When logging in from a new device, you need your username, password, and to either authenticate the session from another device, or manually put in your encryption key to decode the chats. That also means there is no need for backup or restore of anything other than your encryption key. For that reason, I am more frequently pushing people to install matrix than signal these days.

However if security is more important than usability, signal wins, if only because there is never a question of storing anything on any server. Start a chat with somebody, make the messages disappearing, and you can be pretty sure that as long as neither of your devices are captured while the chat is in progress it will never be seen by anybody.

If you have home assistant, you don’t need a zigbee hub, just a ZigBee USB stick. There’s a whole bunch of them, I think they’re all pretty similar, a few have Z-Wave also. I’m 100% Z-Wave so I can’t say personally what is the best stick to use… Just check the forums and whatnot.

Or just get a ZigBee hub and keep using the bulbs without the Hue hub

Ukraine successfully defends against Russia because the rest of the world sends them tons of weapons. And because the famous ‘second best army in the world’ turned out to be a paper tiger. Poland does not want the same thing to happen. They don’t want to have to get weapons after invasion, they want to have the weapons beforehand to hopefully prevent the invasion from ever happening.

You are also thinking logically, like look at our military and look at their military and figure out if we can beat them or not. Dictatorships don’t always work that way. If delivering bad news to the great leader has negative consequences, everybody’s going to come up with good news whether it’s real or not. ‘Oh yes great leader, of course great leader, yes our military is strong sir, we stand ready to crush them like a small insect and there is nothing they have that can possibly stand up to your glorious military sir.’. It works until Great Leader actually orders a fight, and then when said fight goes to shit some people accidentally shoot themselves twice in the back of the head before tripping and falling out an unlocked window in tragic freak accidents.

Point is, Russia has shown that logic is not feeding their decisions. So when faced with an illogical enemy, Poland wants to arm up to dissuade any attempts from being made and fight them off if they happen anyway.