In other words, city governments are mad that they can no longer hold up approvals in order to get more fees coughbribes from these companies.

Uh. OpnSense on bare metal can also do snapshots, if you set it up correctly…

If a business charges nothing for a product then it is not the product. You are.

Sometimes that’s harmless as in they’re wanting you to try their service. Your business for other projects is still the product in that transaction.

Other times it’s your personal data that is the product and they’re wanting to then turn around and monetize that data.

But in both scenarios, you, or something of yours, is the product.

There’s hydraulic devices you can attach to basically any door to make them close automatically, and a micro-radar presence-sensing light switch is maybe $100 bucks if that.

Or died.

More evidence to support my distrust of governments in general.

I had a 1989 Ford Probe without a handle that stuck out like a typical car. It was recessed instead.

Better for fuel efficiency, which was also the intention of these stupid flush mount ones Tesla has been fawning over. But these were still manual door handles designed 40ish years ago…

And that’s the fault of whoever uses those hubs. You can use practically any zigbee hub you wish. Zigbee is zigbee.

You didn’t look very hard.

Cheap zigbee stuff exists everywhere. And zigbee is an open standard, so if it works, it will work until the equipment breaks.

The Linux kernel isn’t really much different between any distribution of Linux.

If it works on one, it works on the rest, in like 99% of cases.

The only real exception to that is custom distributions built specifically for a particular device or subset of devices.

In other words, for embedded devices, like phones, routers, TVs and such.

And those aren’t going to be running Ubuntu.

Naive? No. What’s naive is thinking that if you give power to anyone over your own data , even your government, that it will.protect it.

You think the EU cares about your privacy? I know my own government is doing it’s level best to destroy mine, but at least I’m aware of it.

You, however, have the naivete of Pollyanna and think your vaunted EU is better.

That sounds like privacy, not evil.

Because history, as well as current events, tell us that governments will absolutely make privacy illegal, so if you can do an end run of them by not being beholden to ANY government, then that is absolutely a good thing.

In my own experience, certain things should always be on their own dedicated machines.

My primary router/firewall is on bare metal for this very reason.

I do not want to worry about my home network being completely unusable by the rest of my family because I decided to tweak something on the server.

I could quite easily run OpnSense in a VM, and I do that, too. I run proxmox, and have OpnSense installed and configured to at least provide connectivity for most devices. (Long story short: I have several subnets in my home network, but my VM OpnSense setup does not, as I only had one extra interface on that equipment, so only devices on the primary network would work)

And tbh, that only exists because I did have a router die, and installed OpnSense into my proxmox server temporarily while awaiting new-to-me equipment.

I didn’t see a point in removing it. So it’s there, just not automatically started.

My reasons for keeping OpnSense on bare metal mirror yours. But additionally I don’t want my network to take a crap because my proxmox box goes down.

I constantly am tweaking that machine…

Yeah. We have a smart washer. It’s out in our detached garage/shop so even if the chime were on, no one in the house would ever hear it.

The only “smart” feature we use on it at all is remote notifications.

And we don’t use the GE app for that either. I have it linked through our Home Assistant, so no one in the family needs their crap on our phones. Yes, HA must link into their servers, but the only real data GE gets is how much we use it, and the “city” where our internet connection says we’re in… which is 300 miles away from our actual home, in a completely different state.

By replacing it with something better.

Because almost everyone else in the world has begun referring to their entire internet connection as “Wi-Fi” and it pisses me off, too.

Same. In my younger days, I couldn’t really tell much difference between mp3 and CD. Now? I can absolutely tell.

Yea, 320mp3 sounds close but if the music has a lot of very low or very high frequency music, mp3 seems to clip it off, even 320.

Opus seems to handle the extreme ranges better though. But if you have an MP3, and convert it, it’s no better. Converting lossy to lossy is a no win outcome.

Lidarr + last.fm recommended list.

Kensington TB550 thumb trackball for any pointy/clicky stuff, keyboard otherwise.

I don’t like a real mouse, and haven’t for decades.

I got my first thumb trackball in the 1990s when I didn’t have a big enough desk to use a mouse. It was a Logitech Trackman Marble.

Then I got a Marble Wheel. Then the cordless one, then the M570 that replaced it.

But Logitech build quality has really went into the shitter, and after a warranty replacement, and then having to buy another replacement, I tried a couple of different thumb trackballs before settling on my Kensington one.

The ProtoArc EM01 I have is also nice, but I like the feel of the Kensington better.