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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • quixotic120@lemmy.worldtoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comwewes
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    4 hours ago

    I was decidedly anti gun until I moved to a solid red town. Population of 400 and yet there’s probably 1,000 guns in this town, maybe more

    Pandora’s box has been open. Until regulation occurs (aka never) it’s the only way to protect yourself. Many of the people in this town are okay but there are a some very paranoid people itching for something to do vigilante shit over. What am I gonna do when one of them googles me, finds out that I provide trans affirming care to pediatric clients, and then puts me in their sights? Karate? Guns beat karate every time.

    I have cameras and motion activated floodlights all over my property and I have a gun. I’ll call the cops but they won’t come quick out here. Plus im not trying to get my dog shot.

    I’m not going to die and become a footnote news article that’s glossed over and forgotten after 20 minutes. And I’m not going to move because this town has queer people that need services, whether they’re adults that just built their life here or kids that are trapped. Plus a ton of non queer people that need services too, towns like this in general desperately need mental health services. Fuck the culture of fear they’ve created and fuck not doing whatever you can to protect yourself



  • The audio improvements are more impressive than the video improvements but they’re niche

    8k is a boring upgrade. We’ve officially reached the point where pixel density is like “well that looks better but only a little”. 1080p was dramatic, 4k was solid, 8k is eh

    The audio improvements are really for people who have external sound processing and want ultra low latency. This is cool but again only impacts really niche use scenarios. They use the example of AVR and headphones. I will use the example of gaming with an avr and games that rely on on low latency sound like bemani/rhythm games.

    I have an avr and playing rhythm games on it requires calibration every time, and often changing settings about muting player sounds so I don’t disorient myself with sounds that are triggered late by my own playing. The game I’m currently into shows an audio delay of just over .1ms with the calibration tool, mostly imperceptible for media watching and playing easy songs but a nightmare on hard difficulties.

    Certainly not worth upgrading my tv, avr, and cabling though




  • This is all besides the point. This is not a website. This is a product, that runs in your home, that was sold for years on the agreement that they would not be able to harvest this data (simply because I could run them without connecting to the internet). Now I still have that option of course, but I will eventually trade product updates to do so. It is a given, philips has said as much

    Also the data would likely include things like your wifi SSID and password (hopefully encrypted).

    It’s cool that you don’t care about your autonomy and privacy but the bottom line is companies like philips shouldn’t get to unilaterally get to make decisions that alter the tos over a decade later because people like you are apathetic. Some people have literal thousands invested into this ecosystem and many have hundreds, easily. Your apathy and people like you enables companies like philips to bully consumers and make consumer hostile decisions


  • Eu regulations won’t save you when someone hacks philips servers and all of the data they’ve stored on you is captured by malicious actors. And whoops, it turns out they stored a ton more than they needed to, your address, your lighting schedule, how many rooms are in your house, names of users with access to your home, etc. and whoops, turns out they did the bare minimum to secure their servers and hacking them was basically as simple as knowing how to hack things

    So terrible! What will the eu do! Be really mad at them and 8 years later sue them for 70 million dollars, which is 5% of their operating revenue. They will surely learn their lesson and definitely not continue doing the exact same thing without changing at all. But they’re really mad at them! And they can’t stop you from turning off the lights! Nice! Also they harvested all that data above and sold it to advertisers to make back the 70 million (and then some) so it didn’t even matter they got hacked, your info is easily available for like 24 cents

    They definitely don’t flicker though until they’ve had a significant amount of use. But there are a lot of comparable bulbs for much cheaper that don’t cost nearly as much. Not all of those are “smart” though, but you can combine them with a smart product that’s much more consumer friendly (like lutron caseta) and then you’re good to go. Or just get a z wave bulb if you want a bulb that can do things like change colors/temperatures. Fuck philips, fuck compulsory “cloud” services”, and fuck the regulatory bodies that have utterly failed us because they simply don’t understand tech beyond basic connectors (or they’re paid not to, I guess)


  • It doesn’t matter if it’s free. Fuck that. Your iot shit should NOT be on “cloud” servers. I love having automated tech shit in my house, it’s great, but it’s 100% not worth having if it can’t run offline. If my internet is down I should still be able to control my lighting with 0 issues

    My one exception is if it needs an initial authentication online and then can run offline forever. Lutron caseta is an example I will endorse, the product works extremely well. Never have drop outs, unresponsive devices, etc. it does require an internet connection to activate a device initially but after that it can run on an isolated vlan with no internet access indefinitely (I have verified this)

    Philips, like so many other iot providers, will likely skimp on cybersecurity. Why should I trust them to potentially sync my address, my lighting schedules, information about the layout of my house, etc? Further they will absolutely harvest my data and sell it. If not initially then eventually. Fuck all of that. The best option for security is to air gap all my iot shit and not connect it to the internet at all. If the vendors don’t respect that then I don’t respect them. Either I’ll hack it to make it work, find a workaround, or sell it. Either way I’ll make sure I shit on them online every chance I get because I’m so goddamn tired of corporations stealing our autonomy as consumers

    Highly recommend home assistant btw. Only voice assistant you can actually run locally and only voice assistant you can actually have autonomy over. It’s frustrating that the choice is a more feature filled product like alexa, siri, or hue versus home assistant or a pure z wave bulb but the former always robs your autonomy. They either fill the space with ads whenever possible (alexa), don’t allow you to customize the assistant and control your data (siri and alexa), at any time will change the tos to revoke api access (chamberlain, mazda), force server sided bullshit (hue), etc


  • All LEDs are flicker free on dc power and they all flicker on ac power so what you’re looking for is an led bulb with a good quality internal dc power supply. Unfortunately many, even those advertised as flicker free, don’t meet this requirement, because they’re built cheaply.

    This also depends to a degree on your eye sensitivity. My vision is poor but I can clearly see the difference between 30 and 60 fps whereas some of my friends and family don’t seem to notice such a thing. I don’t know if that’s similar but I’ve had experiences where I’m like “these lightbulbs are flickering” and other people are like “no they arent” and I then question if I’m potentially mentally ill or my eyes are possibly worsening even further (although thankfully sometimes other people notice too).

    To oversimplify it it has to do with the rectification of the power supply and constant vs switching current dc power supplies

    You can verify this by taking a high quality slow motion video of the bulb at least 240fps. I have some clips but they won’t upload.

    Basically a hue white ambiance doesn’t flicker. This meets your requirements as it is adjustable between 2200k to 6500k. However, these are expensive and frankly I wish I never bought them because philips changed the terms of service after sale. I bought into their “ecosystem” years ago and I only run smarthome stuff on my local network but they are pressuring users to move to “philips security” which will require your lighting to be connected to their servers 24/7. This is apparently going to be necessary in a future update. A workaround is the bulbs do work with z wave but that requires additional hardware/software, plus why support a company that pulls such bullshit

    A second video I have shows that as hue bulbs age they do begin to flicker though it is hard to see/perceive for some time. This is not a criticism of hue and more just something to be aware of with led lighting, the power supplies will begin to weaken and fail over time. Thankfully this takes quite some time, the bulb I have is approaching 8-9 years of life. But considering the price that’s not necessarily a great price per year (although keep in mind they’re regularly on sale). The flicker is mild

    A third video shows a cheaper no name bulb that was marketed as flicker free. My partner says they are not bothered by it so it’s in their office but I can’t stand it. The video shows a much more dramatic flicker.

    There is this website which verifies this for you, bulbs listed are either truly flicker free (category a) or imperceptible flicker (category b):

    https://flickeralliance.org/collections/flicker-free-light-bulbs

    This post is brought to you by autism


  • Moving to a rack is nice, I love my rack. If you’re in or near a city I suggest keeping an eye on Craigslist and ebay (search by distance nearest and lowball ones that have been sitting for months) because it’s not uncommon for nice racks to go real cheap as long as you come get them. I got my rack realllll cheap ($40, 42u, fully enclosed with massive pdu) because it’s a 90s ibm rack and it’s welded steel so it’s like 450lbs. Moving it was a nightmare but it’s real sturdy and I’m never moving it again now that it’s in my basement

    For my goals in the short term I have to replace a sas cable that caused a crc error on one drive, it only happened once per smart data but still want to get that done asap. I also have another drive that’s beginning to show some smart issues; it’s on the same sas cable so it may be related because the errors didn’t increase (they all were related to an unclean shutdown, confusing things) but it’s old anyway so better safe than sorry I guess.

    Medium term I want to finally upgrade my ups. The one I have now is not a rack mount which is part of what led to the unclean shutdown. It’s also a bit undersized. I have a generator for my house so I don’t need something massive but the one I have is 450va and several years old so with the tired battery I only can get about 5m of runtime. It’s more than enough to cover the transfer from power cutting out to generator power but I want something that’s a bit more reliable in case of generator failure. This is pricey though because my array is pretty huge so it’ll probably be held off unless I find a good deal on a dead one that has cheap batteries available

    I also want to put the rack on its own circuit. This is something I should do asap because it’s cheap, just gotta find time and rearrange my panel a bit because it’s pretty full. This would be the other part of the unclean shutdown as the outlet would be in a much better location and I could also install a locking outlet

    Would also be nice to pick up a super cheap monitor locally, like something for $15-20 from a pawn shop or Craigslist or something for the rack. Earlier this year I had nginx crash on my server and the webui became inaccessible, I had to drag my nice and kind of large desktop monitor down to the basement to solve the issue, would be nice to just have a shitty small monitor on the rack for that

    Speaking of nginx I keep meaning to setup some kind of reverse proxy or mdns for all my dockers so that I can just do whatever.whatever instead ipaddress:3993 which makes my password managers barf but I’ll probably just be lazy and edit my hosts file

    Longer term I want to add a secondary low power server that can run something like pfsense to handle my routing, then turn my current wireless routers into access points because they kind of suck as routers.

    And of course the array could always be bigger, especially if drive prices fall

    I will probably realistically only do the drive and cable replacement, the circuit thing since that’ll be like $40 and a half hour of work, the monitor if I can find one, and maybe the hosts file thing. If I run into cash (unlikely) or a crazy deal (you never know) the ups would be my next priority but there’s a million other things going in life (deductibles just reset for health insurance, hooray)



  • Every game for the year?? That’s crazy

    Highlights:

    Tears of the kingdom: amazing game, sunk an absurd amount of hours into this

    Like a dragon: infinite wealth: so good, favorite franchise, rgg consistently puts out quality and is the only studio ill bother to buy full price games from

    Tales of arise: really good

    Hi fi rush: extremely good, but no jet set radio

    Bomb rush cyberfunk: not as good, much closer though. actually felt like next gen jet set radio. just wish they bothered to improve the formula at all from 2000 or whenever

    Dead space remake: I found myself having to push through the end of this, got very tedious

    Silent hill free game on psn (I forget the name, the suicide one): so heavy handed, awful writing, awful voice acting, but it was free so whatever

    Silent hill 2: pretty great remake but wish I waited for a price drop.

    Persona 3 reload: basically same as above

    Ff7: solid overall, really liked it

    Spider-Man 2: not as good as the first one but decent

    Unicorn overlord: really good

    Forspoken: not amazing but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be based on the initial reactions

    Tekken 8: love it even though I fucking suck

    Smt: vengeance: great

    Dave the diver: played on a whim without knowing anything about it, sucked me in

    I know there weee more but that’s what I can remember off the top of my head

    Excited to play metaphor, hellblade 2, Indiana jones, riven remake, erdtree dlc for Elden ring, cyberpunk dlc, Alan wake 2, god of war ragnarok dlc, new taiko no tatsujin, armored core vi, like a billion more