I use Raspberry Pi Zero W’s with the cheapest wide-angle USB cameras I can find. PS3 Eyes used to be (pre-covid) ridiculously cheap on eBay (like $6 each if you could find them in the bulk packaging). I dunno if you’re gonna find anything that cheap in 2025, but if you can find PS3 eyes on the cheap, they get the job done (but don’t work great in low light). Mine (about 8 total) have been running well for about 7 years now, some indoors, some outdoors (mounted strategically to avoid rain and heavy wind).

You can install Raspberry Pi OS (or your lightweight distro of choice) on each Pi and then install the Motion package, which supports pretty much any USB camera out of the box, and lets you set up things like motion detection, image capture, live streaming, etc with a little configuration. If you’ve got HA running smoothly, I suspect you’ll be able to tackle setting up a few Motion configurations. You just SSH into each headless Pi and configure Motion to start in daemon mode so it’s always running whenever the Pi boots. You can then access the camera feed remotely from the Pi’s IP address with an address like http://<local.ip.address.>:8080

A bit of work to set up (and maybe more expensive than cheap, cloud-based, AIO systems), but it’s incredibly worth it to have a wholly cloudless, entirely local security/nannycam solution.

A finished Pi Zero W + camera unit has a pretty small footprint, and can be mounted just about anywhere within distance to a power outlet with some velcro if it can’t just be sat on a table or something. My units typically look like this:

Though this one uses a Ubisoft camera (didn’t wanna take down a PS3 eye for this pic so I pulled my crappiest unused USB cam from the closet. This camera is awful, but I got it for free so I can’t complain, lol)

If the brownouts don’t last long, you could maybe solve this issue with a moderately priced UPS to keep the AC unit from powering off during the brief moments when power goes out.

I got a relatively cheap (~$30) tire inflator by Slime (weird brand name, I know) like 8 years ago and it’s gotten the job done every time. I’d highly recommend it. It looks like they don’t sell the exact same model I have anymore, but this one looks closest: https://shop.advanceautoparts.com/p/slime-12v-tire-inflator-8-min-inflation-0-100-psi-dial-gauge-bright-led-light-compact-lightweight-40050/12061423-P

Plugs into the cigarette lighter port and has a built-in flashlight in case it’s dark when you need to pump up the tires.

I just discovered WarioWare, Inc in the Switch’s Game Boy Advance collection. I didn’t expect to get sucked into these little minigames so quickly. The rapid-fire back-to-back format is really engaging some hyper-focus-y part of my brain.

Kinda frustrating at times, though, lol. Some of the games are really obtuse. It took me dozens of attempts at one of the trampoline games before I realized I’m controlling the trampoline, not the guy jumping on it.

Old machine learning joke I used to enjoy cracking at work:

When an algorithm randomly changes things over and over and hopes it works better it’s “machine learning” but when I do it it’s “horribly inefficient”

That’s what the umbilical cord is for. It’s nature’s leash!

Kudos to Germany for pulling it off. Was also happy to see them mention

Last year […] the government began rolling out LibreOffice as the default office suite to replace Microsoft Office.

Assuming this isn’t just a shitpost:

Yes, calling someone a useless piece of shit when they are trying hard, but failing, at doing something very difficult makes you an asshole. It is the opposite of constructive feedback; it’s just an insult. In case it hadn’t dawned on you, the guy wasn’t just having to solo parent, he was having to solo parent while presumably worried sick about his hospitalized spouse.

Do I blame you for being frustrated and snapping? No, but it doesn’t mean you weren’t a huge asshole in the moment. Own your mistake and apologize if you have the introspective wherewithal and didn’t just make this post seeking validation.

as if Pyramid Head, Bowser, and Shadow the Hedgehog aren’t always topping the “God I wish they were real” lists for women.

How you gonna do my boy Shrek dirty like that, not even including him in the top 3?

About 10 years ago, I read “Creativity, Inc” by Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar. It detailed the ideas and events that lead up to the advent of feature 3D animation and filmmaking. I found it to be an inspiring story that mixed a passion for computer science with the desire for compelling storytelling. I was independently studying animation at the time, and it definitely lit a fire in me, as it was written by and for computer nerds who would like to make art.

I’ve always been more technically-oriented than artistic, so it was nice to see a book written from a similar perspective. I spent most of my young adulthood working on my technical skills so I could get a decent job, but around the time I read this book, I actually started putting time into creative endeavours in my free time as well.

My parents and all their friends used to use PTT with their Nextel phones. It was a super handy feature. I wonder why it fell out of style. Seemed more convenient and less tedious than a phone call for short communications.

I dunno if I’d consider this in “dad joke” territory.

Per the sidebar:

Clean jokes only please. If you cannot tell this joke to a 5-year-old, you probably shouldn’t post it here. Please post edgier jokes to !unclejokes@lemmy.world

If you want a view to count you need to use an official client

I would think that parsing the website would count the same as any browser-based page load, since parsing the website requires first fetching the page (probably using something like wget or curl under the hood). I dunno if non-logged-in page loads are generally counted toward the overall view count on a given video, though.

I’ll share my input, although it’s primarily speculation and a smidge of deductive reasoning.

Given these three particular pieces of information:

• Local network use is unaffected (for e.g. accessing SMB shares to a local server)
• Happens with my current ISP (Leaptel), but also happened the previous ISP (Aussie Broadband)
• Ping is unaffected and hovers around 12ms to geographically close remote servers, with no packet loss or jitter.

My first instinct is the issue may be upstream (non-local) network congestion. Since it appears that connections are slowing to a crawl rather than dropping packets. Ping requests don’t seem to suffer, but they’re a lot smaller than loading content via CMMS, Reddit, etc. You mentioned it could happen twice or more in a 10 hour shift, or sometimes not at all; network congestion being highly variable could explain this.

Are you in a remote area? If so, there may not be much nearby infrastructure (routers) to handle the big spikes in traffic when everyone in the immediate area clocks in to work at 9am, or gets back from lunch around 1pm, etc. If that’s the case, the local routers would get overwhelmed regularly by congestion and packet delivery times would suffer. This could also happen in more densely populated areas, depending on what the local infrastructure looks like.

Though I’m not entirely sure how to explain speed tests not suffering if congestion is the issue; unless the particular routes to the geographically-close test servers aren’t congested (because large numbers of people are trying to connect to real services, not the speed tests, during these congestion times).

The fact that some live services like Google & Facebook load while others like Reddit and Lemmy do not could be explained by the difference in those services’ respective high-availability (HA) solutions. Facebook and Google don’t typically drop below 99.95%-ish uptime because they scale their server infrastructure very aggressively to meet demand. But even huge services like Reddit have considerably more downtime than Facebook or Google (Reddit seems to have major outages several times a year, while Google and Facebook do not). Some upstream services having more servers to handle more requests more quickly could account for the inconsistent ability to load websites during this congestion.

I’m not sure the best way to test this hypothesis, though. Given how much troubleshooting and information gathering you’ve already done, this is a tricky one.

A wojak image can’t really refute anything; it’s just depicting the original poster as being a seething dumbass (an ad hominem response). If the poster accompanies said wojak image with a counterargument, that could refute something, but most wojak responses don’t bother with actually making any kind of salient point. Which is why it’s such a popular format: it’s low effort.

Edit: Realizing the error in my argument, I have included the following addendum:

I really like the Interactive Relationship Graph on your site. Reminds me of when I used to work with graph databases and could visualize all the information in the database as a handy graph of nodes and relationships.

I guess I’d probably pick “money” because I am generally risk-averse. I might already have incredible luck, but I don’t gamble, so how would I know? I’ve been incredibly lucky in non-gambling endeavours (my health, my family, my career, etc), but if asked to pick between being stochastically lucky and being guaranteed a certain level of comfort (and thus being able to provide for my family) for the rest of my life, I’m gonna pick the latter.

I took a cursory glance through the source code (for the Firefox version, at least), and I’m not seeing any calls to the gitflic.ru URL outside of the update functions (there appear to be two different places where these might be triggered) and one function for importing custom sites:

// Import custom sites from local/online
function import_url_options(e, online) {
  let url = '/custom/sites_custom.json';
  if (online)
    url = 'https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_updates/blob/raw?file=sites_custom.json'  + '&rel=' + randomInt(100000);
  try {
    fetch(url)
    .then(response => {
      if (response.ok) {
        response.text().then(result => {
          import_json(result);
        })
      }
    });
  } catch (err) {
    console.log(err);
  }
}

I noticed in the manifest.json, there is the optional permissions array:

"optional_permissions": [ "*://*/*" ],

Which seems to grant the extension access to all URLs, so maybe that’s why the HTTP request is able to fire on any given website rather than just the ones explicitly defined in the regular permissions array. Though this is speculation on my part; I’ve only ever written one or two complex Firefox extensions. I’m not sure if the “optional permissions” array can be declined upon installation (or configured in the extension settings after installation); perhaps access to the wildcard URL can be revoked so that this update call isn’t occurring constantly.

All looks okay to me, but this was a very quick audit.

I’ve had great results with various refurbished Dell Latitudes from eBay over the years. I have a stack of about 5 or 6 of 'em and they’ve all run many mainstream Linux distros with fantastic out-of-the-box support. I pass 'em out to members of the household whenever a laptop is needed and they’ll usually get the job done.

I’d just type in “Dell Latitude” on eBay and filter by price and such. I suspect any model with an i5 and 8GB RAM oughta be fine for light programming work. I’ve found sellers with high ratings (like 97% or higher) and thousands of sales are pretty reliable (and tend to have return policies in case you get a lemon). Just test all the hardware (webcam, microphone, headphone jack, USB ports, ethernet, etc) as soon as you get it.

I’ve saved a lot of money over the years buying secondhand, and these machines have been running without a hiccup for years of casual use.