And X-windows. There’s a few server tasks that I just find easier with gui, and they feel kind of laggy over 1G. Not to mention an old Windows program running in WINE over Xwin. All kind of things you can do, internally, to eat up bandwidth.

Also, at least for the Yubi implementation, fixable in software, firmware >= 5.7 not vulnerable. Also not upgradeable, so replace keys if you’re worried about nation-state attacks.

University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.

Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.

I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.

I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for ‘eggs’, ‘yogurt’, ‘steak’, etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven ‘recipe of the week’ type thing.

You’d need some way to cache that video, though, because it’d take 24 hours to write 8TB at SD card speeds of 80 MB/s.

2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.

I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it’s cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.

I came to MySQL and Apache because they were the backend for other services I wanted to start,. Later, when I wanted to build my own, I already had Apache running, so why would I add nginx? I did let other services add sqlite, but have (in most cases) figured out how to switch those to MySQL.

All of that has been running for 20 years. I’m sure it would be good for my dementia-risk to learn how to start ngnix and migrate all those services, but it’s far more attractive not to mess with what works.

The CO2 sensor calibration thing is inherent in the technology. They drift, a lot, and without occasional reference to a known standard, there’s no way to know whether “1000” is really 1000, or 500, or 2000, but exactly how that gets implemented seems to vary a lot. I have an SCD30 board from Adafruit, which internally records CO2 minima and, over the course of week or so, adjusts its calibration so that minimum is 420. That means no special calibration procedure, but it does have to be somewhere that it gets periodic fresh air exposure.

There’s a newer, photoacoustic sensor technology that doesn’t seem to require continuous recalibration, but (at least this one: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/22956 ) require an extensive initial calibration.

My CO2 sensor has dramatically changed my routines. My space isn’t small - maybe 1200 square feet/100 sq m - but it must be pretty well sealed, because I can easily see my own breathing add to CO2. Nevermind cooking on the gas stove. Treadmill time adds 500+ ppm.

Now, I open windows every chance I get (which isn’t super often, because the dewpoint is 70 oF/20 oC in Atlanta), and I’ve shifted a lot of my cooking to an electric tea kettle, hot plate, and toaster oven.

I have isc-bind running behind pihole so network clients can register their own hostnames, and as near as I can tell, that’s outside the scope of pihole’s DHCP and dnsmasq. Pihole alone is probably fine if you only want to name static hosts, but (I understand) Unbound doesn’t support ddns, either.

pihole, in front of my own DNS, because it’s easier to have them to domain filtering.

mythtv/kodi, because I’d rather buy DVDs than stream; rather stream than pirate; but still like to watch the local news.

LAMP stack, because I like watching some local sensor data, including fitness equipment, and it’s a convenient place to keep recipes and links to things I buy regularly but rarely (like furnace filters).

Homeassistant, because they already have interfaces to some sensors that I didn’t want to sort out, and it’s useful to have some lights on timers.

I also host, internally, a fake version of quicken.com, because it lets me update stock quotes in Quicken2012 and has saved me having to upgrade or learn a new platform.

If you email to people on gmail or outlook, won’t Google and Microsoft still end up with copies of most of your mail?

Ditto on hardware raid. Adding a hardware controller just inserts a potentially catastrophic point of failure. With software raid and raid-likes, you can probably recover/rebuild, and it’s not like the overhead is the big burden it was back in the 90s.

Once you have a microcontroller running things, adding new features is just a matter of software. Doesn’t add to the BOM, doesn’t complication production in any way. There’s almost no marginal cost to techify everything, and the people who don’t want those features can just not use them. The small minority of people who want a repairable car that they can understand and maintain in their own garage are undesirable customers who reduce after-market revenue.

In the US, plug-in hybrid is a decent way to cover the breadth of consumer desires. Get a battery big enough for 50 miles of daily commuting, but have the ICE for 500 mile holiday trips. More complicated, having both power systems, and you still have the tie to gasoline, but you don’t have to lug a massively oversized battery pack everywhere you go and you still get most of your transportation energy from the electric grid.

If you’re trying to avoid a whole zigbee or zwave network, Govee makes some inexpensive battery-powered bluetooth thermometer/hygrometers, and have a HA integration, but bluetooth can be tricky to get running on Pis. I feel like most of the actual wifi devices are phone-home type setups. My govee thermometers have pretty good range - one of them even reads from inside the refrigerator.

It’s even easier with digital broadcast. I finally had to give up my PCI tuner, because who puts PCI slots on a modern mobo? $25 will get you a USB TV tuner capable of getting all the OTA and cable channels. I used to get, like, 7 analog OTA channels - ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and a regional independent - but I get 30 digital. All the majors have added 3-5 channels of SD reruns or other filler. I mean, it’s mostly shit, and the only thing I actually watch is local news, but for a one-time $25 cost, it’s a great supplement to streaming.

My biggest problem with MythTV is it doesn’t interface with streaming, so I use Kodi on the frontend to source from mythtv, netflix, hbo, or whatever.

Coffee all morning, because sleep. Iced tea all afternoon, because Atlanta.

I just don’t like my logs filling up with scripted login attempts. Even with fail2ban, for a while there I was getting 100+ login attempts every day, and it upset my sense of order.