a1studmuffin 🇦🇺

A new deal is being forged with 4chan instead.

And imagine being the guy who’s got to clean out the train car afterwards of all the tiny pieces. Nightmare fuel.

I did some more research after your comment and it does indeed sound like it’s not for the feint of heart.

Spam seems to be one of the biggest challenges, both incoming and outgoing. For incoming, it’s a constant arms race with spammers to circumvent spam filtering techniques. But at least that’s something you have control over, you can just turn off your spam filtering and ensure you receive all important email. The real problem is ending up in other people’s spam filters, which you have very little control over once you’ve decided on your mail server domain/certificate.

The crux of the issue seems to be that SMTP is ancient insecure tech designed for an innocent era when email was for universities only. We desperately need a more secure open source email protocol designed for the modern era, but capitalism isn’t having it - instead we’ve got corporations wrestling for control of the next big thing with proprietary protocols… Discord, Slack etc. And big tech companies that continue using SMTP (Gmail, Outlook etc.) simply treat any servers outside their sphere with a high level of suspicion.

Has anyone tried self-hosting on a NAS or similar? I’d be interested to hear the practicalities of it, I imagine it’s not exactly set or forget, and the realities of the enshittified internet present some obstacles, like ending up in spam filters etc.

Would love to see the same tests with an adblocker installed.

I’ll level with you… I’ve never used Matrix either. 🤣 But all the cool kids around these parts recommend it, and I fundamentally agree with the cause of the project and saw they had the WeChat bridge, so thought I’d mention it.

Ah, that’s interesting and makes sense. So I guess your best option (if you must use WeChat) is to use the international version of the app with as many permissions disabled as possible.

Or maybe look at the Matrix WeChat bridge? https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/wechat/

The US has absolutely atrocious employment laws, so yes they can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

I would strongly consider just crying about the headphone jack. Like you I’m really annoyed that most phones got rid of it, but take a look at how many more options you have on gsmarena phone finder if you ditch it.

My main use case for it was sharing my wired noise cancelling headphones between my work PC and phone for zoom calls. But I ended up getting a nice pair of Bluetooth headphones recently and so haven’t used it in a long time. I’m sure it’ll still annoy me on occasion living without it, but if it’s only a few times a year I can live with that for all the options it opens up for new phones.

Support local business!

… isn’t that the point of mechanical keyboards?

I feel like you could totally change the switch resistance with magnets. Electromagnetism goes both ways… apply a variable current to a coil in each key that repels it from or pulls it towards the base?

AliExpress is the worst at this. Which category should I disable? AliExpress, aliexpress, Chat or message push? And even if I figured it out, there’s no way to stop store spammers from sending you useless messages constantly, detracting from actual sellers with questions.

It might stop the heat though if he’s a US puppet to appease congress.

It’s a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries split system. The two options I had were an IR blaster or a DIY ESPhome-based module plugged directly into the unit that controls it over the SPI bus. I opted for the latter as it gives full status info in addition to control.

I’ve also got a Samsung unit in another room that I can control. For that one I use SmartThings… not ideal as it goes through the cloud, but I’ll take what I can get.

If you’ve got an old-school heater, you might have luck with some of the smart thermostats designed to be retrofitted into old houses.

Edit: just looked up your heaters online. Since you’ve got a lot of them, and they look pretty old, I’m guessing the smart controllers are just acting as relays. So yeah perhaps an ESP32 relay module would be the way to go! Once you’ve got the code working for one, you could roll them out to the rest. You’d need some confidence working with relays and electronics of course.

The simplest automations are the best. An hour before I typically get up, if the bedroom is too cold, turn on the heater.

Slight tangent, but I recently cleaned out the house of a parent after they passed away. There were boxes and boxes of family photo albums. We kept them for a while out of guilt, but we really didn’t know anyone in the photos aside from one or two people. Eventually we got rid of them. Point being the value of your stuff is probably far less to others then it is to you, especially photos to future generations.

Very reassuring to see how quickly the security issues were resolved, awesome work Home Assistant!

Large data sets are valuable. And many people who hack are primarily motivated by the challenge, so targeting a site isn’t always a vendetta. Unfortunately sometimes hackers stumble across these things and are motivated by money too, because they’re human like the rest of us.

Damn, I didn’t know that! What a shame they pulled out of so many markets. Their phones are expensive but they sure have all the bells and whistles.