I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

  • 142 Posts
  • 673 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2025

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  • I used to buy their stuff and use tuya-convert to flash Tasmota onto them. But they kept updating the firmware to lock that out, and I ended up returning a batch of 15 smart plugs because none of them would flash. They were too much of a PITA to try to crack open and flash the ESP8266 manually so I returned the whole batch as defective, left a scathing review, and blackballed the whole brand.



  • Nice. I’ve got the Anker version but it’s half the capacity at 1 KWh. It charges exclusively from 800W of PV input (though it can only handle 600W input) and can push out 2,000 W continuous and 3000 peak.

    I’ve got a splitter from the PV that goes to both the Anker and a DC-DC converter which then goes to a few 12v -> USB power delivery adapters. Those can use the excess from the PV to charge power banks, phones, laptops, etc while the rest goes to the Anker (doesn’t seem to affect the MPPT unless there’s basically just no sunlight at all). Without the splitter, anything above 600W is wasted until I expand my setup later this spring.

    All I can say for it is that it absolutely rocks! On sunny days, I run my entire homelab from it, my work-from-home office, charge all my devices, and run my refrigerator from it if I feel like running an extension cord). It’s setup downstairs, so I also plug my washing machine into it and can get a few loads of laundry done as well.

    All from its solar input.







  • I’m sure we’d be forced to use it if we own an android phone or Gmail account

    That’s part of why Google’s attempt failed so hard. They did force you to use it if you used several of their products. Comment on a YT video? Now you have a Google+ profile with that in its feed.

    They basically created a social media profile of your activity, automatically, any time you interacted with a handful of their products. Like, WTF were they thinking?






  • They’re separate queens and separate collectives/cooperatives.

    The Jurati Cooperative is, as of the end of Season 2, guarding the spatial anomaly that formed in the beginning of S2. They’re completely absent from the third season. Which I can understand since S3 was a fan-service reunion (which I loved) and there just wasn’t room in the 10 episodes for them.

    The queen from S3 is the same one from VOY: Endgame and First Contact and part of the same collective since they were first introduced in TNG.

    The new one affected the other one?

    AFIAK, no, they had no effect on each other. The alternate timeline queen (that turned into Queen Jurati) was not the same queen seen in S3 or elsewhere. That queen was from a 2401 that no longer exists. She and her cooperative only exist because they went back in time and took the long way back to 2401.




  • It’s so common for “anti-censorship” to be code for “Nazi-friendly” that I’m immediately suspicious of any platform that uses that as a selling point.

    I’m similarly suspicious, but it’s not just code for “nazi-friendly” but also crackpots, maladaptives, etc. Rational people who read and say “anti-censorship” in this context know it means that it’s not beholden to corporate or government interests. But everyone else seems to want to interpret that as “I can say whatever I want! How dare you mod anything I say?! Freeze-peach, y’all!”

    I wish they’d pick a different term for these non-corporate alternatives, but I don’t have a better suggestion to offer right now.



  • I don’t even bother with local ports anymore. It’s just too much hassle when I switch providers, email services all seem to universally sinkhole anything originating from a residential IP even if I am able to convince them to unblock 25/TCP, and I refuse to pay extra for a static IP or upsell to business class at a massive price increase.

    My ISP, while otherwise fine, still has not rolled out IPv6 yet and the DHCPv4 lease duration is short and will randomly assign a different IP rather than renewing the lease on the existing one. I don’t like relying on dynamic DNS or relying on running a daemon to update my public DNS records when my public IP changes. Been there, done that, and bought a crappy t-shirt at the gift shop.

    I’ve had a VPS for close to 10 years now that is my main frontend and, through some VPN and routing trickery, allows me to have my email server on-prem but use the VPS for all inbound and outbound communication. A side effect benefit of this setup is I can run my email server from literally anywhere and from anything with an internet connection. I’ve got a copy of my email stack on a Pi Zero clone that stays in sync with my main one. During long power outages, I can start that up and run it from a hotspot with a power bank running it for almost 2 days (or indefinitely when I’m also charging the power bank from a solar panel lol).



  • I can understand that speeds vary by area, but it’s not like it’s difficult at all to have those in a database where a web tool can return them based on your zip code. But yeah, it was like that when I signed up with Optimum (nee Suddenlink) years ago.

    The other thing they do is require a truck roll for any kind of hookup. They almost got some of my business back but were so rigid that I said “the hell with it”. My fiber provider was having some growing pains and I called Optimum to reactivate my service on a lower plan to use as a backup connection (I work from home). All they needed to do was setup the account and re-authorize my modem (my hookup was still live and I had my own modem). They flat out refused to do any of that and required a tech to come “within 3-5 business days” and read the modem serial number to them to activate it. So I said hell with it, called T-Mobile, and activated my old 5G hotspot.