I downvote anyone that whines about or asks why they’re getting downvotes. Otherwise I don’t up/downvote anything at all (except that guy that is posting triangles for upvotes)

Seriously, who cares?

I’m sure this guy’s dad that needs help installing Linux will appreciate the clarification, good thing you’re here to point that out

If you’ve got an ALDIs nearby, they’ve got a $5 cheese take n bake. Pro move is to get one of those and then cut your own toppings, bake, it’ll be better than any chain.

I’m sure there’s other good take n bakes, but $5 for a quality one is probably hard to match

Louis explains in several videos on his channel.

They’re experimenting with a business model where they ask users to pay for the product if you get value from it. Development isn’t free, their time is valuable. In return they’ll never harvest and sell your data.

If this experiment is a success it can demonstrate that it’s a viable business strategy to not harvest data, which is good for everyone.

Personally, at this point I’m trying out the FUTO keyboard but it’s too janky for me to pay for it. Lots of bugs and swipe is not good. I hope it gets better and I’m trying to help the project by submitting bug reports.

Grayjay I’ve barely used but I see the potential, and if it gets good I’ll pay for it. I paid for Signal messenger because it’s the same kind of thing.

It’s up to you. They’re telling you what the price is, it’s the honor system if you use it and get value from it.

You’re not wrong about reolinks, amcrest, hikvision, etc but their price:quality can’t be beat and they work well with many different NVR software suites, which makes them popular.

If you’re concerned about how they call home (they do, I’ve sniffed packets on my network to test the rumors and seen it on every one of them), you need to isolate the cameras off of the internet so they are blocked from the outside connection. This can end up being mildly tricky to very complicated depending on your network equipment, the way your LAN is set up at home, whether you want to view your cameras remotely, etc, but it’s the most cost effective long term option that is not subscription/cloud based.

I use blue iris on an old computer. It works great. I have unifi network gear, and I tried some of their cameras out but they’re not really ONVIF compliant and they’re extremely expensive for an equivalent Chinese brand. That’s the made in USA price, and tbh Unifi cameras aren’t even that expensive, they’re more “prosumer” for small business deployments or nerds at home. They have a walled garden ecosystem that I dipped my toe into and didn’t care for some of it, but I still use their access points, routers, and switches because they’re great quality and really easy to config.

But, if you have never done any of that, you might just want to go with an off the shelf solution or be willing to spend a lot of time reading. You DON’T want to mess up your network security trying to install local cameras if you’re not sure what you’re doing.

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is an RF/analogue camera kit. It’s not as easy to set up as POE (two cords to each camera and they’re way bigger so running them through walls will do more damage that you have to patch later) you can get an all-in-one NVR+4/8/12/16 etc camera kit with as many bells and whistles as you want. It will be cheaper as well and you don’t have to worry about network bandwidth issues because it’s analog. The feeds are super nice.