Check out Valetudo. It turns supported robo vacuums into local only devices. Works amazingly well and integrates with Home Assistant for the whole tech nerd cloudless smart home experience.

What kind of headaches are you having? I’ve been running two completely different machines in a cluster with a pi as a Qdevice to keep quorum and it’s been incredibly stable for years.

Darktable (or the fork Ansel) or Rawtherapee and Digikam should get you where you need to be.

Several things keep Americans from moving to Europe.

First, immigration laws of the country one is moving to. If one is not able to get a passport from an EU or EEA county based on ancestry, you basically need to be sponsored for a work visa by a company in the country you want to move to, which can be quite difficult. And even then, you have to be employed in that country for long enough to qualify for permanent residency, then citizenship, which can take up to 7 or 8 years in some countries.

If one is lucky enough to have parents or grandparents who emigrated to the US from a European country and can claim citizenship based on that, it’s a lot of work to get all of the paperwork together and verified and accepted by that government’s consulate (at least it is for Germany, but German bureaucracy is … special).

Second, the US is one of the only countries in the world that double taxes its citizens. If someone was born in the United States, they will have to file taxes reporting income to the US government every single year until they die, and PAY taxes to the US government on any income over a certain amount every year until they die, regardless of the source of that income, and regardless of the fact that taxes on the same income need to be paid to the host country.

While I have zero respect for the snivelling shitgibbon name Boris Johnson, he was born in New York and had to renounce his US citizenship to escape the IRS. You also have to PAY the US government $2350 (in cash) for the privilege of giving up your citizenship, which is also…unique.

Sometimes there are tax treaties that can take most of the sting out of the double taxation issue (Norway’s is decent for US citizens), but it depends on the country.

Finally, it just never occurs to many Americans that leaving is even a possibility.

Usenet and hard drives. LOTS of hard drives.

That dude is going to merge with his barcalounger one of these days and we will all end up watching a weirdly swole chair yelling about Apple, and I am totally here for that.

Snip snap!

Ooh, I know this one! Here’s what I did to get it working and set so it survives a reboot:

1. In a terminal, run sudo arandr
2. Set all of the monitors to 1080p
3. Close arandr
4. Go to Settings > Display
5. Rearrange monitors in correct order if necessary
6. Set the each monitor to the correct resolution and frequency, applying the settings after each update
7. All monitors should now work, BUT they will not survive a reboot in Pop-OS 22, because the GDM3 login screen will NOT have this information, and will reset everything. So we must copy the pop-os monitors.xml file to the gdm3 config directory:

sudo cp ~/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/gdm3/.config/

Note: You may need to do this as sudo -i

8. Reboot, and all 3 monitors should be loaded in the correct positions, at the correct resolution at the login screen

You may want to give it another shot. They’ve been working pretty hard to move away from config files - much more is done via the GUI these days to make things more user-friendly.

The devs have also really been focusing on voice this year as well - it’s been really interesting to see what they come up with. A few releases back, they released an update that allows you to give voice commands to HA via a landline phone hooked up to a $30 VoIP box. There is also support now for Espressif’s new “S3-Box” devices, which have small screens, a speaker and a few microphones for under $50 - this does require messing with yaml files at this point, but I should be able to finally ditch my Echos soon!

Fundamented and silverpilled

You can easily have a smart home without any data leaving your home network.

You need three things:

• Home Assistant software (free and open source)
• ZigBee (also free and open source) smart devices made by companies that comply with the ZigBee protocol
• Most importantly, a ZigBee controller.

There are several options available (Deconz Conbee II, etc), and this device gets plugged into the same machine Home Assistant is on, and it allows HA to control your ZigBee devices directly. No “hub” sending your data to a cloud server, everything is done on your local network. If the devices comply with the protocol, you don’t need their hub, even if they say it’s required.

I use Hue bulbs, but have no Hue hub. I use many Aqara devices, but don’t have an Aqara hub. It’s pretty great and works very well!

Servers and computers get Ankh-Morpork street names.

The robot vacuum cleaner is GLaDOS.

SANGUIS DEO SANGUINEO

Just please don’t use the crystals as deodorant (unless you have sideburns in the shape of stars)

Never go in against the Red Cross when blood is on the line?

I don’t think that comes from Latin, it probably refers to a fish rising to take bait on the water.

Imma upvote you for the quote, but YSK it’s “risible” which is an additional layer of humour if you’re familiar with Latin (which was what the Romans spoke), because “risible” is an archaic English word from around the 1600s meaning “to provoke laughter”, which is itself based on the Latin word “ris”, which means “laugh”. “Ridere” means “to laugh” and “ridiculus” means “laughable”.

That is crazy. According to a comment on that article, most BIOS uses UTC (as does Linux, obviously), but Windows uses localtime for some reason, so it converts UTC to localtime after boot, then back to UTC when it needs to do little things like networking or TLS.

You cannot register to vote online in 8 US states, all of which have Republican governors and Republican control of the state legislature:

• Texas
• Mississippi
• Arkansas
• Montana
• North Dakota
• South Dakota
• Wyoming
• New Hampshire

Hell, I can get a 30 year old HP LaserJet 4 printer working just fine on almost any version of Linux with the official HPLIP CLI software provided by (shockingly) HP, which was updated 2 months ago with support for over 50 new printers and the following OSes:

• LinuxMint 21.1
• MxLinux 21.3
• Elementary OS 7
• Ubuntu 22.10
• RHEL 8.6
• RHEL 8.7
• RHEL 9.1
• Fedora 37

I HATE HP and their printers (PC LOAD LETTER WTF FOR LIFE) but I will admit that this is impressive support.