I just saw a video yesterday on hacking old bitcoin mining GPUs to unlock their RAM and PCI bandwidth and whatnot for general-purpose use. Desperation is the mother of invention, after all.

The problem isn’t that it can’t be done, it’s that the manufacturing cost vs. labor cost in the US stops it from making economic sense. They do repair and reuse electronics in places like China (that’s where those modified GPUs with extra RAM and cheap desktop motherboards with old Xeon CPUs on them you find on EBay and Aliexpress come from, for example), but that’s because the technicians doing the work get paid a lot less than skilled people would be willing to accept here.

Sonoff S31 (and I think this might have been the guide I used to flash them), but I think they’ve been discontinued and the replacement model might be more locked-down.

I mean, you can – that’s what consumer protection regulations are for. It’s why people can’t sell themselves into slavery even I’d they’re stupid enough to want to, for example.

We could do things like, say, entirely outlawing closed-source software in smart home tech, if our government weren’t usurped by oligarchs.

Honestly, if I were running a PC off it I’d go to the trouble of rewiring to bypass the switch.

The key benefit of smart home tech isn’t to control stuff with an app instead of a switch, it’s to automate it so you don’t have to do anything at all.

My smart plugs were carefully chosen so that I could immediately flash them with ESPHome, but that’s because I am not normal. It shouldn’t have to be that way.

Okay, the “must be understood” is the important part when discussing what’s good about the rule, and the “must originate from” is the important part when discussing what’s problematic about the rule.

I’ve tried to use ZeroTier because Tailscale still has centralized servers for starting the connection, but had trouble getting it to work. Maybe I should stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

My stuff is only accessible from my LAN (because I haven’t figured out how to set up a tunnel or reverse proxy yet).

Only buy bikes being sold at a fair (not suspiciously low) price* from sellers who can answer questions about specs/condition/history.

(* Being offered a bike for free from somebody who wants to get rid of it is an exception to this, obviously.)

But only if you do it in a car.

Public transit has nothing to do with protecting vulnerable road users like cyclists. By definition, they’re on a bike, not in a bus or train. The only thing that helps in this case is actual bike infrastructure.

The bad very much outweighs any good that these cameras are alleged to help with. Fucking traffic violations?

Okay, maybe tracking a murderer etc. might be a good use of the system, but the ratio of that happening, and what they are being used for is ridiculous.

I reject the notion that mass surveillance has any valid use whatsoever, even including tracking murderers. The mere existence of the system has chilling effects on the non-criminal citizenry that makes it absolutely categorically unacceptable regardless of what alleged benefits it tries to claim.

Couldn’t you just wire the GPIO to the solenoid (maybe through a relay if it needs higher voltage)?

(Or for that matter, use an ESP32 instead of wasting a whole Raspberry Pi on it?)

How much are used Indexes going for these days?

The other party losing rights shouldn’t be allowed to cancel their obligation to OP.

My home is very home assistanty, but I haven’t found a good doorbell chime.

Can you hook your smart doorbell up to an old analog actual chime?

If you already have one home server, you need two more to make a redundant cluster.

And then you need another set of three to live at a family member or friend’s house to receive your off-site backups.

I didn’t mean to discourage you! I just meant to point you to the right technology to learn about.