Matrix would probably be one of the better options, but xmpp is a pretty good choice as well.

I looked into this a few years ago. At that time, if you had a “c wire”, there were several options that would work directly with HA.

I don’t have a C Wire so that didn’t help me.

Without a c wire, I was only able to find a single option. A “Sensi” brand that could run on batteries, but wouldn’t work directly with HA. Tou had to control it though Amazon Alexa or through their app. Neither option turned out to be particularly reliable.

Screw striking. Waste of time when the government will just call it an illegal strike.

When the bullshit outpaces the pay, walk away. Find another job.

That is a bit disturbing.

If I had to guess, never having used it myself, is that it has a decent UI that simplifies sometimes complicated operations and it has been around seemingly forever.

Of course they did.

Very much depends. I host the digital music collection for my entire family (6 people) all with very different tastes in music and very large music collections. According to Jellystat, I’m hosting roughly 52,000 tracks taking up just shy of 2 TB. I used to keep track of how many albums I had but I’ve long since lost track.

On average, a CD ripped to FLAC seems to run around 300MB. MP3 or OGG would generally be smaller (but with quality loss), dependent on the bitrate, call it 50MB - 200MB.

In short, a person hosting a normal sized personal music collection is unlikely to run into space issues.

You can. I started my Jellyfin server on a RPi3. Not great hardware for video streaming, but it will work fine for music. Could also use Navidrome. For local network only, that would be all you need.

To stream your media collection outside your home network, you’ll want to set up either a reverse proxy and set your ISP’s modem to forward the traffic to the reverse proxy, or set up a VPN like Tailscale. Tailscale would be the simpler option most of the time and is more secure for the average self-hoster.

Only if you only get your news from social media. There has been other stuff going on. US economy is weakening, there has been a Nissan recall, some tech news, apparently another bank either has or will soon fail. Same old, same old.

My social media feed though are nothing but protests, ICE misbehavior, and propaganda from all sides.

Might want to pick an actual news organization to follow to see what else is going on in the world. Lately, for me it has been apnews.

I don’t disagree that we need people like the Colonel to stay in, but the man has served faithfully for 24 years. More than long enough to reach retirement. We have to trust in the training that he has given the men and women that have served under him, and hope that it will prove to be enough.

Well, there are 2 problems with banning weapons that I see

One. Weapons are dead simple to make. I can go to the hardware store and buy everything I need to make short range, single shot firearms, and this doesn’t even take into consideration how dangerous slings and sling shots can be when used as a weapon. Additionally, more than a few full auto sub-guns have been made by folks in their basements or sheds, with admittedly mixed results. Turns out that the magazine is actually the hardest part of a repeating firearm.

Functionally, it’s an impossible task. Weapons are generally the simplest of physics problems to solve. Just ignore safety and you’ve got t weapon.

Two. Lets say you succeed. Short term, what changes? A few less deaths, but overall crime goes up because the risks go down and you haven’t done anything to address the true causes of the crime in the first place.

Long term, you have even bigger problems if people from outside the community that has banned weapons, suddenly view you as weak and helpless. And this also discounts the possibility of your own community leaders suddenly deciding to attack in order to seize more power for themselves.

I grew up listening to Art Bell and still have my tinfoil hat. I believe that there are things in this universe that we don’t remotely even begin to understand. All manner of things and legends could be true at least in part.

But I’ve also grown up enough and seen enough to realize that 99% of so called supernatural or otherworldly things are either jokes, pranks, or misunderstandings of known natural phenomena. I’d hazard a guess that at least 2/3rds of the rest also have quite mundane explanations.

As for the rest, I am grateful that there are still things in this world that we still don’t understand. It makes things interesting.

Like actually use?

No, not anymore, though I do prefer to purchase media (movies, albums and the like) on physical media. It then gets ripped to digital and the originals stored against future need.

I’ve had my trust broken a few too many times.

EVs seem to be exclusively trucks and SUVs in the US, which is incredibly annoying because that drives up the prices

Lol! I’ve been cursing the exact opposite for the last couple of years! Seemed like all anyone wanted to sell were high priced, luxury EV sedans. It wasn’t till recently that I started to see EV and hybrid pickups.

90% of people that own them just use them to commute back and forth to an office and don’t need them either

No kidding. Around where I’m at, we call them beauty queen pickups. And are usually poking fun at their owners.

They’ve made our streets into an arms race of size and weight which contribute to major safety issues as well as all the other issues that come with excessive oil consumption like environmental issues, dependency on foreign countries, war, etc.

That was actually a result of the CAFE standards. Basically killed the light truck market over night. I remember back in 2007ish when the standards were changed and the new models started showing up on the streets, going “Fuck, that’s huge!”. Actually confused them at first for medium duty pickups (Think F250 or F350). Before then, the most common vehicles around me were, if I remember correctly, the F150 in work trim (which was about half the size it is now), the Ford Ranger (usually the 2 door extended cab vesion), and Honda Civics. Time may be playing tricks on me as to what was common at the time, but all of them were smaller.

Slightly shorter, but taller than a Nissan Altima based on specs.

If I may ask, why the hate against pickups?

That’s basically what I’ve been doing ever since my old F-150 decided to start chunking spark plugs through the hood. Been driving a Nissan Altima since. It’s fuel efficient and does the job 80% of the time, but damn, is it a pain in the ass when a random project pops up unexpectedly. It’s been a damned rare month when I haven’t needed to rent either a trailer or a truck (or both) to get something done.

Basically I miss having a truck bed. Can’t say I miss the fuel bill though.

Text editors are a really personal choice and there are a million different ones. I use either Kate or Micro. Both are great for my use.

Considering what I want is a 1990’s Ford Ranger or Mazda S-10, and the closest I can get, here in the US, is the overpriced Ford Maverick…

I’m just worried about how much the larger battery pack is going to cost, because I know the price they are claiming is with the smaller pack.

I don’t need something the size, capability, or price of the current F-150 very often, just need a cheap truck that can haul a few 2x4s or sheets of plywood. That hasn’t been available on the market for a long time.

That or finish bigger household projects. Who has money for vacations?

Depends on the application. My NAS is bare metal. That box does exactly one thing and one thing only, and it’s something that is trivial to setup and maintain.

Nextcloud is running in docker (AIO image) on bare metal (Proxmox OS) to balance performance with ease of maintenance. Backups go to the NAS.

Everything else is running on in a VM which makes backups and restores simpler for me.