Texas counties have already outlawed the use of their roads by women traveling to other states for reproductive care.

With billions of batteries in use there are going to be plenty of complaints about issues. My specific experience is with an ancient Dell Venue convertible that’s been in regular use for 9 years with charge limiting applied that entire time. The battery still looks new and for what it’s worth, Dell’s UEFI reports it’s in excellent condition. This while the rest of the system including the charging port is completely worn out and at the end of its useful life. That computer is running Debian 12, HA and Frigate with only 4gb of ram and (outside the physical problems of a very old, heavily used laptop) is working fine.

Are the computers you have bought from Aliexpress UL listed, or do they have a European safety listing? I’ve read reports of some equipment and appliances sold by Chinese companies on various sites (including Amazon) causing fires. Not that those mean that much though. Even my UL listed Cyberpower UPS has had reports of internal shorts and fires.

There are literally billions of lithium batteries in use and you have a better chance of being struck by lightning that having a lithium battery fire. Your concern about the battery life isn’t realistic either. These batteries last for many years when the charge is limited to less than 100% and can be replaced when they finally wear out. If you run a UPS you’ll eventually need to replace those batteries too and your backup time will be usually be measured in minutes rather than hours.

As far as the ram limitation is concerned, it’s plenty for a supported Home Assistant installation and that’s exactly what this post is about.

Every machine has advantages and disadvantages, but I’m not sure why having a screen and a battery fall into the disadvantage category. The Aliexpress machines have some serious disadvantages including fans and an almost complete lack of support for most of them. And long-term support is a fantasy.

Dell sucks in many ways, but their support is in English and they produce firmware updates for several years after a product is released, especially for machines used by enterprise customers like this one.

Besides, if you add a UPS (and they all have batteries) to any of those Aliexpress mini PC’s you’re well over the price for this machine even with a gigabit Ethernet adapter.

For me $70 extra for a silent system with display, keyboard, UPS, a real warranty, and long-term support is a bargain.

Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!

I’ve found it to be simpler. Booting off a USB SSD allows full disk cloning to that same SSD without worrying about mounted partitions or using a separate USB thumb drive for Clonezilla. Once booted I can access the machine through SSH or NoMachine to create the backup and it is far faster than backing up to a network drive. For incremental backups Timeshift works fine.

The screen and keyboard are invaluable for backups. I have a portable SSD with Ubuntu installed for creating backups, but I often have to manually set the boot device on startup to get it to work. Setting a USB SSD for the first boot device in the BIOS/UEFI doesn’t seem to work reliably on any of my systems.

The point of a UPS or equivalent is to protect the SSD during a power failure. I’ve lost Raspberry Pi configurations several times due to power failures when I’m away from the house. It has been a major PITA and time consuming to recover from.

The one I have draws about 6 watts when running Home Assistant which means at $0.25 per KWH it would cost $1.10 per month to run. Just adding a UPS to any other platform is going to cost more per month and have a much shorter run time.

I just checked and Reddit did the same with my account. I spent hours editing and ultimately deleting my posts and comments, and the Spez Gestapo just undeleted years worth of content. I’m going to go through them again and this time I’ll leave the gibberish.

I’ve been using DD-WRT for many years and just moved to OpenWRT. Although there have been various generic vulnerabilities that effected all IP devices and needed to be patched on these platforms too, I can’t remember a single vulnerability that was specific to either DD-WRT or OpenWRT.

These idiots are not only harming themselves and their children, they’re harming and sometimes killing others who are medically prevented from receiving vaccinations. These scumbags are literally spreading disease.

Manchin has as much chance of becoming the Democratic nominee as Pence did at being the GQP candidate.

Makes not the least bit of difference: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/20/the-microsoftcrowdstrike-outage-shows-the-danger-of-monopolization

Literally hundreds of millions of people around the world have seen the Microsoft BSODs that resulted from this fuck up. Millions of people have had their lives disrupted. The vast majority of those will blame Microsoft. Executive boards and IT groups may know better but it won’t matter all that much - they will be aggressively looking to reduce their exposure to Microsoft’s near monopoly anyway.

I worked in sales for a Fortune 500 tech equipment and software manufacturer. When a customer had a serious outage with a single piece of our equipment it would cause them to stop and reevaluate their purchasing plans and dependence on my company.

IMO every government and business out there is going to be looking at this at every level and IT departments will be tasked to significantly reduce their reliance on Microsoft products. It will take years to actually happen, but I think Microsoft sales are going to take a serious, long term, and well-deserved hit.

80% of the items I considered had either jacked up the price prior to prime days, or advertised a large discount when the actual discount was tiny - a few percent. I ended up buying nothing. Amazon sucks.

Paypal locked my account after years of use for absolutely no reason. I never had a invalid charge, dispute, or any other kind of problem with it, just one day they decided to shut it down. They flatly refused to explain what was going on. With all the decent alternatives out there now there is no longer a reason to use their crappy service.

Love that they believe they’re the only game in town and can demand your bank statement.

It’s more insidious than that. Malignant narcissists like Trump believe their gaslighting and lies define reality for everyone.

Not against the rules, so I corrected the title.

Medicare Advantage is a huge scam created during Dubya’s term to turn Medicare into a profit source for insurance companies. It’s sold by sales reps that say they “don’t have any reason to push it over Medigap plans”, but the truth is the commissions paid are far higher for an Advantage plan than for a Medigap plan. Those commissions can continue for decades and mean hundreds of thousands of dollars more income for those sales reps.

Those sales reps also routinely tell people they can switch to a Medigap plan if they aren’t satisfied with an Advantage plan but neglect to mention that switching is only possible (for most people) for a few months after becoming eligible for Medicare. Once those months are up nearly everyone is stuck with an Advantage plan for the rest of their lives.

Advantage plans look good at first because if care is not needed, monthly costs can be much lower than for a Medigap plan, but nearly everyone needs more care as they age. When that care is needed costs of an Advantage plan can far exceed that of a Medigap plan. Once stuck with an Advantage plan, subscribers get to deal with companies that make extra profit off of denying care. Insurance companies consistently do that even if they’re breaking the law because the profits far exceed the penalties.

If you or are your parent are going to go on Medicare, be very careful before choosing an Advantage plan. Make sure you know exactly what you’re getting into before signing on the dotted line.

All nine Republican senators running for reelection this year voted against the right to access contraception:

• John Barrasso
• Marsha Blackburn
• Kevin Cramer
• Ted Cruz
• Deb Fischer
• Josh Hawley
• Pete Ricketts
• Rick Scott
• Roger Wicker