ZigBee router thing:

I’ve been happy with the SMLIGHT SLZB-06M. You can easily flash firmware, and it has PoE which was important for me. I believe it also supports Thread, but I haven’t tried this yet (and I’m not sure if it supports it at the same time as Zigbee).

Zigbee smart plugs from Third Reality have been pretty solid in my experience, and they report power usage.

For circuit breaker level monitoring, I have an Emporia Vue2. I have it running esphome, completely local — unfortunately this requires some simple soldering and flashing, so it’s not turnkey. But it’s been rock solid ever since flashing it. (Process is well documented online.)

I’ve had decent luck with cheap wifi Matter bulbs, but provisioning them is finicky, and sometimes they just crap out and need to be power cycled; Zigbee bulbs (e.g., Ikea) have generally been reliable, though sometimes I’ve had difficulty pairing them initially. After power cycling a Matter WiFi bulb, it takes a while for it to respond to Home Assistant; Zigbee bulbs generally respond as soon as you power them on.

I have a wired smart light switch from TP-Link/Kasa (KS205), and it’s been completely hassle free (and totally local — Matter over wifi). The Kasa smart switch dongles I have work flawlessly but need proprietary pairing, and I’m afraid to update firmware in case they lose local support.

Good luck! Fun adventure :)

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

From our experience in the US, the birth is nothing compared to the financial drain of the other expenses. And at this age, childcare dwarfs all the other child-related expenses.

We have great insurance and don’t rely on family for childcare though, so the math is very very different for someone with “free” familial childcare and no/lousy insurance…

Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.

I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.

Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.

…and Synology users will probably have to wait even longer, and pay even more — what a deal!

We’re expecting a baby. Do people travel with a baby? Is it safe? Is it insane? I think we’re just gonna have to stay put for 3 years or so.

If your baby isn’t super fussy, the transportation difficulty (in our experience) is more in the logistics getting to/from airport, and dealing with other ground transportation. We just flew 5+hrs (coast to coast, US) with a 2mo and a ~3yo, and it was a piece of cake (typing that, I’ve jinxed the return flight…).

We haven’t done international travel with our kids yet, but we will eventually. When I was 2 my family went to Europe — some countries were meh with respect to kids, but Italy (from my folks’ retelling) was fantastic, as there is (or was) a big cultural love for young kids.

YMMV of course, but it’s absolutely doable! Kids — even starting as babies — have personalities, and you’ll get a sense of what’s appropriate with yours. Good luck!

Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

Ah, good point!

Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon seems like it’s trying to compete with the Air.

man rot13 ;)

I’m not mad at the huge amount I pay in taxes. I’m mad about what I get in return.

I would bet that if you remux BBB to an mkv and play that through JF, it won’t transcode — I think it will just remux it back to mp4. Just a guess…

Interesting — I wonder if it only displays the first reason for having to mess with the stream, e.g., if it’s really that it’s an unsupported container, video, and audio codec.

Possible to try playing an h264 mkv (maybe Big Buck Bunny)? Since your screenshot is h265 I wonder if it indeed needs to transcode because that’s unsupported (in addition to mkv).

unless everyone is using hardware acceleration

I think that’s what (almost) everyone does. My little N100 works just fine with QSV.

Is it definitely transcoding? JF can remix without transcoding iirc.

And over twice the GDP.

“Wow you signed the document in blood, you must be really hardcore.”

“No I’m just cheap.”

That’s…pretty believable.