Check out Valetudo. It turns supported robo vacuums into local only devices. Works amazingly well and integrates with Home Assistant for the whole tech nerd cloudless smart home experience.

Tubesync is pretty great

I switched to ebooks a long time ago, but had quite a collection prior to that, and was also the recipient of goodies from my mom’s massive science fiction book collection, including a first edition Dune (Chilton, 1965). My favorites are my signed Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams books, though.

None of them are going anywhere.

Not if you’re serving content to a device that can do the decoding, like a Shield. My Jellyfin server runs in a Proxmox VM with no GPU passed though, and transcoding disabled for all accounts.

Wizard: I’m too drunk to walk…or fly…

Bard: I’ve got it. Rubs a small jello cube with a cloth

DM: A slightly moist skateboard appears.

Party: What the hell is that?

DM: That’s what happens when you gleam the cube.

New Zealand Wizard: Yeah naw, you carked it, bro. That’s a sweet-as fish. Seen it plenty of times on the poster in my shid. Kī tōnu taku waka topaki i te tuna.

Gitlab is pretty great!

You may want to give it another shot. They’ve been working pretty hard to move away from config files - much more is done via the GUI these days to make things more user-friendly.

The devs have also really been focusing on voice this year as well - it’s been really interesting to see what they come up with. A few releases back, they released an update that allows you to give voice commands to HA via a landline phone hooked up to a $30 VoIP box. There is also support now for Espressif’s new “S3-Box” devices, which have small screens, a speaker and a few microphones for under $50 - this does require messing with yaml files at this point, but I should be able to finally ditch my Echos soon!

You can easily have a smart home without any data leaving your home network.

You need three things:

• Home Assistant software (free and open source)
• ZigBee (also free and open source) smart devices made by companies that comply with the ZigBee protocol
• Most importantly, a ZigBee controller.

There are several options available (Deconz Conbee II, etc), and this device gets plugged into the same machine Home Assistant is on, and it allows HA to control your ZigBee devices directly. No “hub” sending your data to a cloud server, everything is done on your local network. If the devices comply with the protocol, you don’t need their hub, even if they say it’s required.

I use Hue bulbs, but have no Hue hub. I use many Aqara devices, but don’t have an Aqara hub. It’s pretty great and works very well!

crushed by a herd of elephants

OG Hannibal style

For a long time, the US actually had something called the “Fairness Doctrine” which required broadcasters to present matters of public interest in a way that was fair. So if you had a guy on a show that said the president was a lizard person, that show also had to have someone on to refute that opinion, or the media company could lose their broadcasting license.

The Fairness Doctrine was repealed by the Reagan Administration in 1987, which immediately resulted in the rise of conservative talk radio, who could say whatever they wanted without having to present the opposing viewpoint, and they didn’t have to worry about losing their license.

The rise of conservative talk radio led to Fox News, which led to the election of Trump.

Interestingly, less than a year after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, a conservative political nonprofit corporation was formed called Citizens United, led by a man named David Bossie. The goal of this organization was (and remains) the creation of media that supports their goals of restoring “traditional American values”, which consists entirely of right-wing documentaries and attack ads.

In 2008, Citizens United made a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie”, which was basically a movie-length attack on Hillary Clinton, who had announced in 2007 that she was going to run for president in 2008.

At the time, there was a law called the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which essentially banned any attack ads that name a federal candidate from running within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days from a federal election, if the ad was funded with money from a corporation (including a nonprofit) or union.

The Citizens United nonprofit corporation knew this, and sued the Federal Election Commission, arguing that not being able to show their attack ad was a violation of their constitutional right to free speech, which, very importantly, had only ever been interpreted to apply to human individuals, not corporations.

The Supreme Court was dominated by conservatives in 2010 (and still is), and they ruled that corporations did in fact have free speech protection, that not allowing attack ads funded by corporations that were not required to disclose the source of their funding before elections was a violation of the constitutional rights of corporations, and subsequently nullified the part of the law that prevented Citizens United from showing their attack ad, while also removing almost all limits on the “speech” that corporations could engage in without repercussions and also happened to confer legal “personhood” to corporate entities.

Incidentally, David Bossie (President of Citizens United) resigned from Citizens United in 2016 to take a job as deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

If you’re rural, check out B4RN.

Unfortunately not, it applies to all clusters. A quorum requires at least 2 votes, which means 2 nodes. But if one node goes down, you only have 1 vote, and the cluster will go into read-only mode, which means you’ll lose the GUI and the ability to manage your nodes:

When your cluster is non-quorate (so at least half of all nodes are dead), the remaining nodes will change the PVE management into read-only mode. Because of that you will no longer be able to change and manage your VMs and containers and will also not be able to log into the GUI. This is done to avoid cluster split-brain problems in which they run into inconsistent states. (Source)

But if you have a device that will supply a vote in the event that one of the two votes is unavailable, the cluster will continue to function with a single node, which will allow you to use the normal Proxmox tools and interfaces to diagnose the problem, while also keeping any VMs on the single remaining node up and running (available).

Here is a Proxmox employee explaining it a bit more clearly than the official documentation:

… a cluster needs to be always quorate to work properly, not just for HA. High availability just means that the cluster will try to keep your HA-enabled VMs and containers always available, i.e. if a cluster node fails the HA-manager will launch HA-managed guests on another cluster node.

While a 2 node cluster should work with 2 active nodes, if one of your nodes goes down your cluster will automatically be non-quorate and will no longer work as expected. To have quorum in your cluster, you need a setup of at least 3 nodes, though you do not need 3 full Proxmox installations … you can setup something like a Raspberry Pi as a QDevice for external vote support.

(Source)

You may have trouble keeping a quorum with a proxmox cluster of 2. You should really have 3, or set up a q-device. (Source)

Each node in a cluster has a “vote” in a healthy cluster. If one of your devices goes (or is taken) down, you’ll lose quorum, and the GUI and some other stuff. You need 3 votes for things to work reliably. I have an old RPi set up as a q-device and it works fine.