The same idiots upset about the inflation that was largely caused by record corporate profits voted for a felon who has promised to jack prices up by $3,000+ per year for the average family by slapping tariffs on everything. Women questioned about their Trump vote said they voted for him because he’d preserve their right to choose. Others were asking Google whether Biden dropped out the day before the election.

Abject idiocy is absolutely accurate.

That is correct.

Trump, speaking about Nancy Pelosi asked a crowd of supporters, “How’s her husband doing by the way?” and saying a “wall around her house” didn’t do a “good job” of protecting her 82-year-old husband from an intruder who fractured his skull with a hammer during a break-in last year—prompting laughter from the crowd.

There need to be extraordinary penalties for threatening election workers, intimidating voters, or destroying ballots. How about a minimum 20 year sentence to start?

I wonder how safe Musk feels standing next to a hotel room window.

Not so unusual these days and way more than a few. We’ve got most of a political party that is perfectly willing to line up behind a fascist and cheer him on.

The Republicans are all for states rights as long as those states do exactly as they say.

The Senate Intelligence report on Russian election interference details Russian manipulation and misinformation regarding the 2016 election and Trump’s involvement. Volume 5 is well worth at least skimming. When you look at the evidence it is clear that the following excerpt is accurate:

The Committee’s bipartisan Report unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected. It recounts efforts by Trump and his team to obtain dirt on their opponent from operatives acting on behalf of the Russian government. It reveals the extraordinary lengths by which Trump and his associates actively_sought to enable the Russian interference operation by amplifying its electoral impact and rewarding its perpetrators - even after being warned of its Russian origins. And it presents, for the first time, concerning evidence that the head of the Trump Campaign was directly connected to the Russian meddling through his communications with an individual found to be a Russian intelligence officer.

That is the Democrat’s conclusion and it overwhelmingly supported by the details in the report. The GOP members pretend it’s all a misunderstanding and an attempt by Trump to improve relations.

IMO the only reason Trump and his organization weren’t found to be illegally colluding with Russia is that the GOP chose party over country yet again. Republicans are willing to commit insurrection, treason and burn the country to the ground to maintain power.

Seems that blocking my robot vac’s Internet access when it’s not in use is not so paranoid after all.

Health Net is one of Centene’s companies and they pull this crap and worse every single day.

Health Net’s provider lists includes a huge number of ghost providers. In my case even the ones that were real were the wrong kind of specialists. Heath Net insisted I go to these providers despite the fact they couldn’t help me and refused to see me.

I ended up having to regularly make a 220 mile trip to get the healthcare I needed.

It gets worse. Health Net regularly refused payment for services that were covered under their policy. I easily spent 10 hours a week on the phone trying to get legitimate claims paid by this horrible company. The first 45 minutes of the calls were spent trying to get past their first line “customer service” people to someone who could actually deal with the problem. Health Net repeatedly refused coverage on DME that they had previously paid for and said the previous approvals were a mistake. They weren’t.

Health Net even refused payment for a visit to specialist after they had provided pre-approval for the visit in writing. It took seven months and probably 20 hours on the phone before the crooks paid the bill.

Centene and their subsidiaries should be shut down and their executives should be in prison.

With billions of batteries in use there are going to be plenty of complaints about issues. My specific experience is with an ancient Dell Venue convertible that’s been in regular use for 9 years with charge limiting applied that entire time. The battery still looks new and for what it’s worth, Dell’s UEFI reports it’s in excellent condition. This while the rest of the system including the charging port is completely worn out and at the end of its useful life. That computer is running Debian 12, HA and Frigate with only 4gb of ram and (outside the physical problems of a very old, heavily used laptop) is working fine.

Are the computers you have bought from Aliexpress UL listed, or do they have a European safety listing? I’ve read reports of some equipment and appliances sold by Chinese companies on various sites (including Amazon) causing fires. Not that those mean that much though. Even my UL listed Cyberpower UPS has had reports of internal shorts and fires.

There are literally billions of lithium batteries in use and you have a better chance of being struck by lightning that having a lithium battery fire. Your concern about the battery life isn’t realistic either. These batteries last for many years when the charge is limited to less than 100% and can be replaced when they finally wear out. If you run a UPS you’ll eventually need to replace those batteries too and your backup time will be usually be measured in minutes rather than hours.

As far as the ram limitation is concerned, it’s plenty for a supported Home Assistant installation and that’s exactly what this post is about.

Every machine has advantages and disadvantages, but I’m not sure why having a screen and a battery fall into the disadvantage category. The Aliexpress machines have some serious disadvantages including fans and an almost complete lack of support for most of them. And long-term support is a fantasy.

Dell sucks in many ways, but their support is in English and they produce firmware updates for several years after a product is released, especially for machines used by enterprise customers like this one.

Besides, if you add a UPS (and they all have batteries) to any of those Aliexpress mini PC’s you’re well over the price for this machine even with a gigabit Ethernet adapter.

For me $70 extra for a silent system with display, keyboard, UPS, a real warranty, and long-term support is a bargain.

Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!

I’ve found it to be simpler. Booting off a USB SSD allows full disk cloning to that same SSD without worrying about mounted partitions or using a separate USB thumb drive for Clonezilla. Once booted I can access the machine through SSH or NoMachine to create the backup and it is far faster than backing up to a network drive. For incremental backups Timeshift works fine.

The screen and keyboard are invaluable for backups. I have a portable SSD with Ubuntu installed for creating backups, but I often have to manually set the boot device on startup to get it to work. Setting a USB SSD for the first boot device in the BIOS/UEFI doesn’t seem to work reliably on any of my systems.

The point of a UPS or equivalent is to protect the SSD during a power failure. I’ve lost Raspberry Pi configurations several times due to power failures when I’m away from the house. It has been a major PITA and time consuming to recover from.

The one I have draws about 6 watts when running Home Assistant which means at $0.25 per KWH it would cost $1.10 per month to run. Just adding a UPS to any other platform is going to cost more per month and have a much shorter run time.

I just checked and Reddit did the same with my account. I spent hours editing and ultimately deleting my posts and comments, and the Spez Gestapo just undeleted years worth of content. I’m going to go through them again and this time I’ll leave the gibberish.

Not the first time. I thought a Windows 10 update wiped grub, but Microsoft actually deleted my entire Linux partition. Others have experienced the same thing.

Windows is required for a couple of apps I need with no alternatives, but the only way it runs on any of my computers is in a VM.

I have mine behind a Pihole too. It blocked all the ads at first but Roku seems to actively varying the ad servers and they’ve started showing up again. I haven’t had a chance to see if I can block them again.