Ubiquiti is a pretty good answer, but the airMax line is better for this sort of thing than UniFi. A pair of Nanobeams would be perfect, and standalone without need of an additional controller.

I’ve already been creating a unique email address for nearly every service, for many years. That probably complicates something like Incogni, which is a good point, thanks. It’s also amusing and telling when the phishing emails start coming into equifax@mydomain (true story).

This is a very helpful anecdote, thanks!

Yes! Read a book out loud, preferably to your kids, recording each chapter as a file. Then use m4b-tool to combine all the chapter files into a full audiobook.

They have updated it so that you don’t need to use your phone number as the identifier you share with other people so that they can message you. You can now give out a username and your new contact will not be able to learn your phone number.

As for Signal itself knowing what your phone number is, I don’t see that as much of a problem, because they intentionally don’t know anything useful about you. They publish redacted subpoenas and their responses so you can see just how little data they can provide. They don’t know who your contacts are so there’s no social graph to be drawn.

It’s about the exact combination of extensions you have installed, along with all of the other info that a nosy website can obtain from you (installed fonts, User Agent string including exact version numbers, etc). It doesn’t come down to any one particular piece of info, but every bit adds to the overall picture. Here is a good overview and their main page runs an active test on your browser.

I needed this, thanks! For the lazy, it’s here.

Second this, including buying from Costco. I don’t love the Lorex interface, but they’ve been around for a long time and can’t really compete on the modem Ring-style features so they’re now advertising the privacy benefits of their local storage.

PoE (Power over Ethernet) cameras are the way to go, connecting the camera wires directly to the NVR box, which doesn’t itself need to be connected to your network. The NVR box has a hard drive and an HDMI port. If you do optionally connect it to the network (but just don’t), then their app will facilitate connecting to your box either locally or over the internet so that you can stream your video directly from your hard drive, not their cloud.

If you want it protected against power outages, you just put the NVR on a UPS and you’re done.

Of course, if a burglar finds your NVR and takes it, then all of your footage is gone.

Why have you never been able to do it? I set up a full mail system years ago on a Xen/Linux VPS with stuff like Postfix, maildrop, Courier IMAP, a custom set of MySQL tables for aliases and such, and at one point migrated my TLS from CACert to LetsEncrypt. I enjoyed some aspects of the huge pain in the ass that all of that was, and having it work nicely was great. Spinning up a new email alias was easy and free, so I created a new one for damn near every site I interacted with, which later turned into a form of lock in having to continue running my server.

The continual server maintenance was a pain in the ass, requiring me to remember in substantial detail how it all worked so that I could appropriately integrate new things I had to learn like SPF and DMARC. I’m glad to have had some detailed sysadmin experience, but I was so glad in the end to finally migrate away from all that and just pay Fastmail instead.

I still have nearly the same flexibility with Fastmail and my custom domains, but they’re the ones that need to do all the maintenance. I can’t scale across unlimited domains for the same zero marginal cost, but I can make it work for a reasonable price with a few domains and scale arbitrarily within that. I’m sure there are other hosts out there that do a similarly good job, and Fastmail hasn’t been without its own troubles, but it’s been a net win for me.

I don’t recommend running your own server. I won’t do it again. I do recommend building an army of custom aliases all at your own custom domain(s).

Actually I’ll agree with you that a spreadsheet could do a lot, but that’s a niche solution. Building a good one requires a fair bit of technical know how, and even using one well requires a lot of understanding.

Why would you assume the cycle is regular? It’s a biological process that can vary quite a bit, which is part of why you would want to track it in the first place. There’s also much more to track that just the expected start date of your next cycle. The various tracking apps are quite a bit more involved than just a calendar.

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The article is very misleading. It says

The research paper…notes that the human body is particularly efficient at generating 40 MHz RF energy. Tapping into that through a ‘worn receiver’ provides power without using any invasive means.

But I read much of the pdf linked at the bottom of that link, and there’s nothing about the human body generating energy at 40MHz. The trick is that skin is pretty effective (sort of) at conducting energy at that frequency, so the authors hooked up a power transmitter worn on the forearm, 5 or 15cm away from a receiver on the hand.

This isn’t about powering anything by body energy, it’s about strapping a battery-powered transmitter somewhere on your body and then having another device pick it up when strapped somewhere else on your body. No thanks.

Oh and it’s actually pretty inefficient and won’t provide much usable energy.

This is super cool and looks quite polished in the video. It’s awesome that we live in an era where it’s possible for one guy to create this as a solo hobby project. Too bad it’s Android only but that’s a me problem.

Well I’m already here, and clearly I chose sh.itjust.works. But my point is that for a lemmy (or any fediverse) newcomer it’s a little daunting and that added friction slows adoption.

Oh that’s interesting. Twitter never interested me, and I’ve never created a mastodon account either. I guess it makes sense that the best way to write a long post when microblogging is in a macroblog and then link sharing. Seems like massive irony there, highlighting the funny nature of microblogging.

That kind of verified identity management for particular users would be great!

The collective of federated servers is still a huge impediment to public growth, since Lemmy isn’t just one thing, and I expect it will continue to hamper growth here for a long time, as new users are confused about how to choose a home base.

I started out with local forums on 2400–9600 baud dial up BBSes with banks of only maybe half a dozen modems for simultaneous use, run by self-funded hobbyists (who has the time and knowledge for that?). Pre-internet, if you will, although really internet did exist then, just primarily with academic and DARPA users and not public ISPs. The pinnacle of software evolution there was MajorMUD (on MajorBBS), with great adventures and full ANSI-colored text and ASCII art, but the local forms were fun too. We even had an occasional IRL picnic since everyone was within a reasonable area (not to have long-distance phone charges). But it meant the niche topics were few and far between, lacking a sufficiently broad user base (hello Lemmy!).

Boy I really hated the mess of forums you described as one of the golden eras. It wasn’t just the fractured identity management. BBcode was functional, but damned ugly, and difficult to navigate.

I hope you’re right about the future. Reddit was far and away the best forum discussion ground I had ever used, until it wasn’t anymore. I particularly like the idea mentioned in another comment of a future where (journalism, academic, professional, etc.) organizations might provide identity services in the fediverse and we could interact with either known or anonymous users. Bots and AI training are ugly issues you don’t address at all though.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts about publishing a post like that on your blog and then publishing a link to it here in the fediverse. Obviously you expect the discussion to occur here rather than in the curiously-still-enabled Wordpress comments. Would it be better to post the original content on Lemmy, but you still feel tied to Wordpress and having an RSS feed? Does Lemmy still feel like an experiment that might end whereas the blog is more still your own content repository?

Meta: I’ve noticed a lot of VOA links on Lemmy lately, and I’d like to understand why. As I understand it, VOA is essentially a national propaganda news organization targeting an international audience (similar to RT). Why is that a good source for article sharing? Especially in the case of the article at hand, which is just a VOA republication of an Associated Press piece that could have been linked originally.

They don’t store anything about your association with other numbers; that stays on your devices. Your phone number is used as your identifier for account creation and originally for finding other people to talk with, but the only data Signal keeps associated with your number are registration timestamp and last connection timestamp. You can see that by reading the redacted subpoenas and responses that they publish.

They have recently introduced usernames so that you can avoid having to share your number to communicate with someone else.

I don’t have a good citation for this, but I believe the phone number registration requirement will remain indefinitely, likely to cut down on spam and bots. But there’s a difference between privacy and anonymity - I’m looking for privacy in my communications, not anonymity from my friends. State actors can know that you use it but not what you’re saying or to whom (unless, say, the NSA is specifically targeting you, but that compromise will be of your device as a whole rather than breaking Signal or getting data from them).