I got a doorbell camera with full Home Assistant support and a 180 fisheye camera for around $100 each (don’t remember the exact price). I could use the built in recording until i got my NVR setup and it scaled with me. I thought they were great value.

Now, if you want just a bunch of standard cameras to cover your house with, maybe those other options are better, I’ll save your post and take a look if I’m ever in the market. I’m not a camera expert, just a tech/home auto enthusiast so they work for what I want.

Initial setup with Reolink is hit or miss. You’re right that those settings are off by default, which sucks. The better cameras host their own WebUI with which you can login and make changes with no app required, but the cheaper ones cut that corner and need the app. With that said, yes it is an initial hoop you might have to jump through, but once done and isolated you’ll never have to deal with it again. It’s a worthy trade off for the affordability and featureset IMO, but of course it could always be better.

Uh oh, you need to look into that right away. Most of the camera brands we’re talking about CAN be run local, by which we mean you can sever their internet connection with firewall rules and they’ll still operate. You have to do that though. They’ll almost all connect to the internet if allowed to.

Yeah, I understand the limitations of the frequency and the compromises mesh networks have to make. I wouldn’t expect it to be an internet substitute. My point is, and I do apologise because I cannot remember the source, I recall hearing about a convention or a protest or some larger gathering where people tried to use Meshtastic and it cratered due to load.

If that above case actually did happen and I’m not mis-remembering, then it doesn’t bode well for adoption by the non-tech savvy. You get into this odd area where you have tech and RF hobbiests that think this is cool beans, but they don’t make up enough people for a robust network. However the more people you bring on that don’t understand radio settings the more succeptible you are to poor performance. Then if it ever does it mass adoption it is likely oitside the abilities of the tech and scale just isn’t possible. You need this sweet spot.

With ham or something else you can have a few people in more remote locations because of superior range, but with low powered RF like Meshtastic you really want portable devices for people on the ground. All this is to say I love the idea of being able to give something like this to a loved one going to a protest or something, but I’m just not sure if it’s more than a toy yet.

I’m not sure what they could do to keep this open while ensuring stability unless they start to add dynamic settings to tje protocol. Something that detects if there’s too much congestion, or if signals are too strong to automatically switch from LongFast to something more applicable to a the dense group you’re in. Then manual settings get hidden behind an advanced menu? But that would be entirely on tje firmware to control.

Anyway, I’m rambling and trying to solution without actually owning one, so I could be way off. I just really like the idea of short range personal communication and want this to be more than a tinker tech.

Do you need the doorbell hardware itself to be open source? Or just compatible with self hosted open source software?

If just the latter take a look at Reolink products. You can block their internet access and they still work great locally with Home Assistant and whatever NVR you want. DoorBird and a few others have HA support as well.

Leave him alone, he hasn’t even crossed the $200,000,000,000 threshold. He’s basically a poor. Can only afford one jacket :(

How resilient is something like Meshtastic? My understanding is that anyone can configure their device poorly so that it can become overly chatty, congesting the network. Even in ideal an ideal scenario with properly configured nodes, could this actually survive if it saw more than hobbiest adoption?

I think it’s really cool and i like having this idea of a backup communication system, but if has serious range limitations and is likely to be overwhelmed in a no-cell scenario is it even worth it, or is it just fun to play around with?

I don’t know if I’d sat left to rot. I still use it almost every other day, and Google is working on a version for the Pixel phones as well.

I think the Moto Atrix and Dex were probably a bit ahead of their time, but likely going to make a comeback soon.

Every new law changes the rules of the game. Every new rule presents an opportunity to those who can circumvent it.

The wealthy have always succeded by gaming the system.

In the car manufacturers mind, these are all uncommon issues because you should be using cloud services for everything.

Nor would I, but if apps were actually optimized instead of the Electron nonsense we have now we’d be in a better place. I really hope this forces us to finally build better again instead of relying on infinite resources.

That’s still of no concern. If it all collapses and they need to start selling to consumers again, gamers will be desperate for the upgrade and pay top dollar. Screwing us over is a win-win for them.

Sure, but AMD never undercuts enough for it to matter. They’re always behind on features, brand recognition, software and say… eh $50 off.

The last time AMD actually undercut and sold well was the RX480 and that was a long time ago. AMD has just settled for 10% and is not willing to fight for more, and with enterprise being the big market now it’s definitely not going to change.

That workaround is slowly coming to an end as these devices start making DNS requests using DOH, which you will not be able to redirect, and will be much harder to detect and block.

The cat and mouse game of having a piece of technology you bought work with your interests in mind continues…

AI is just soooo fucking expensive. Silicon Valley has made burning cash up front a standard practice, but the amount they’re burning is just astronomical. There is going to be a demand for profits, or the path to profits, much sooner than usual.

I’ve not had any wear like that on my deck, but I’m not crazy hard on controllers. At worse the whole stick can be pretty easily replaced. The repairability on Valve hardware gets a high priority.

Eww, yeah that’s not cool. Was that Samsung forcing that on the phone or the carrier? I know US carries are atrocious for their uninstallable apps like that. Regardless shame on Samsung and the others for allowing it. The only apps that came on mine were Samsung apps.

Regardless, your dislike is completely justified. I really wish someone else could step up and make the phone we need. Repairable, jack/slot, small-midsize, proper updates, but I just don’t think the market is there. The iphone-ification of smartphones is basically complete, and now Microsoft is trying to do it to the desktop. In the future there’s going to be a lot of old people telling stories to their grandkids about how they used to own a computer and choose what was installed…

My very fist Android phone was a Samsung and while it had all kinds of cool features like TV out and an IR blaster, the software never got updated. I ended up installing and tinkering with custom ROMs and that led me to the Nexus line when it first launched. I stayed with Google ever since because they kept the Nexus and A series affordable, and had a much nicer clean OS with constant updates.

When they switched from Nexus to Pixel they decided they wanted to price it like an iPhone, even though it totally lacked the polish and value proposition. I stuck with my Nexus until they introduced the A series. It was affordable and new, but lacked video out, wireless charging, and thr SD card. Things the Nexus line all had. It was the beginning of the iphone-ification of Android IMO, but there were no other good options because every other vendor abandoned their phones after a year.

Now several years later things have only gotten worse. The amount of brands selling Android phone that are actually decent is like 2, maybe 3, they all are just slate designs with nothing interesting, and only a few actually give you proper updates. Samsung stands out in that crowd for having the most interesting phones and still decent support, but I agree that they are too expensive when new, and the locked bootloader sucks.

As you mentioned I’m 100% I’m just talking about Samsung’s phones here. Samsung as an entire company is one I would stay away from in most cases. I also would never buy one of their appliances and while I may have considered their TVs in the past due to them being an excellent panel manufacturer, I would think twice today.

I agree and disagree. I switched from a Pixel to an S series and I have to say I like the Samsung better.

While the Samsung UI used to be a sore spot, I think the Pixel design language shift of the past couple years is far worse. All the big colorful pills with too much whitespace… Samsung brings back a proper notification shade with lots of quick buttons, like it used to be 3 or so versions ago with a Pixel. I put my custom launcher on and basically forgot it’s Samsung.

There’s spots all over Android that have been rough that Samsung just, smooths out. It’s like they’re actually using the phone and willing to take matters into their own hands when Google isn’t, because Google is focused on AI assistants and letting everything else rot. Samsung lets you customize, whereas Pixel keeps walking you toward an iOS style experience one step at a time.

DeX, if you have a use for it, is awesome. During my lunch break at work can unplug my laptop from my dock, connect my phone, and have a personal workstation for watching videos, whatever. I also have a much better Private Folder with multiple apps. It’s like Samsung understands that with one device we need separation. Google has been saying a competitor to this is coming, but at this point it’s so far behind I’ll believe it when I see it.

Samsung doesn’t hold you hostage in format wars. My old Pixel in 20fucking23 couldn’t support external storage with anything but FAT32. That’s insane. It was screwing me up trying to easily back up a large file and that was no problem for the Samsung. Same with casting, Google is all in on Chromecast and nothing else, Samsung can CC but it can also Miracast. So now I can cast to any TV instead of only some.

Samsung’s hardware is usually better. They try new things sooner so you have a refined ultrasonic fingerprint sensor while Pixel was still doing illuminated, depending on your version the processors are better.

Now, places where Samsung sucks are obvious and you stated a few. No unlocking is bullshit. I own the phone, I should be able to unlock it. If you’re into tinkering then stay away, but Samsung’s do tend to have higher resale value, so if you want to get into ROMs then you can always sell the Samsung and grab a cheap used Pixel. Samsung kept the headphone jack and uSD around a little longer, but they’re both long gone on today’s models so that’s moot.

Samsung (and I can see where they’re coming from) was concerned with how much control Google had over Android so they made their own first party apps for everything. This means a lot of duplicate apps. I will say that while some can’t be easily uninstalled, they can be easily ignored. I just don’t use most of them and I’m fine. They don’t really force them on you or keep changing them to the default handler or anything. I’m OK with it, but I could see some people being annoyed.

That’s about it honestly… Samsung reminds me a bit of the early Nexus era days. Lots of customization, interesting tech, and work being put into the OS. Google is just plodding along, content to lock people into an iPhone clone and sell AI. I say give them both a try. If you pick up used or a refurb you can save a fortune and easily switch if you don’t like it without losing much if anything.

We were originally discussing why subscriptions can make sense to fund ongoing costs and you replied:

What kind of subscriptions require large infrastructure?

My response was based on the original topic of services provided by large companies, not self hosting for individual consumption. I also run a proxmox server and have similar requirements to you, but this is not indicative of the type of infrastructure a larger company with higher SLAs and demands would require.

Saying you can slap together a couple proxmox servers and have something equivalent to what it takes to run Netflix is highly disingenuous. Saying you can do the same and have an alternative to Netflix for YOU is true, but not what we’re discussing.