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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Running a bunch of services here on a i3 PC I built for my wife back in 2010. I’ve since upgraded the RAM to 16GB, added as many hard drives as there are SATA ports on the mobo, re-bedded the heatsink, etc.

    It’s pretty much always ran on Debian, but all services are on Docker these days so the base distro doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

    I’d like to get a good backup solution going for it so I can actually use it for important data, but realistically I’m probably just going to replace it with a NAS at some point.




  • For baseboard heaters, I have the Sinopé line of ZigBee thermostats, with home-assistant on my home server. Baseboards are kind of particular in that you have one thermostat per room, so at 350+ for a Nest, it’d be cost-prohibitive as I have like 15 thermostats in the house. Also, they’re line voltage, meaning that they directly switch the full power of the heaters, so they need to be well made.

    I’ve had my Sinopé thermostats for 2+ years now, and I’m very happy with them. No clouds involved here.


  • Well, yes. But when all your friends are already on Facebook Messenger, good luck getting them to install Signal only to talk with you. Network effects are important; a messaging app has no use when you have nobody to message on the app. Supporting SMS was taking advantage of its network effect, and I don’t think their network was big enough to be self-sustaining for most users (it wasn’t in my case, my only contact in there is my wife).



  • Well, I happen to disagree. I’m a privacy-conscious person, but I’m not an activist. Most of my contacts in real life (i.e the people I need a messaging app to talk to) are non-technical, and not really privacy-conscious. They’re not going to install a different app just to talk to me. The big draw of TextSecure (before it became Signal) was that they could just set that as their default SMS app, and it’d magically start to send encrypted messages if the other end was also using TextSecure, and they had to change exactly 0 of their habits.

    I guess it depends on how you view it:

    1. Move as many people as possible over to encrypted comms with the least friction possible, or
    2. Provide a niche secure messaging platform for niche activists with niche needs.

    I thought the goal was 1, but turns out it was 2. All my contacts are now back to Facebook Messenger…