35 is also young enough you could be creating a horde of desperate, violent men.

I purchased a Chinese generic of the Leadingstar USB dongle. It should cost around $20 through Walmart.

No power consumption data for you, but... I just installed the RTL_433 addon with the config wide open and I pull in everything.

It all shows in the MQTT console with the mosquito_sub command. The challenge can be picking out your own stuff if there are a lot of devices in your vicinity.

Zigbee does mesh net, so you can plan your device placements to help with range. Though that only applies to line powered devices, so trying to chain the power-miser battery sensors won't work. I have a smart outlet I use to help some sensors that are at the edge of useful range from the hub.

I do kind of wish I'd initially chosen Z-Wave for my low-power encrypted wireless for the extra range, but Zigbee has been adequate for my uses so far and I like to keep things as homogeneous as possible, so I'm not switching any time soon.

No, they're morons.

I am overwhelmed by them, but not because I lack the ability to understand them. There are simply so many of them and they are dedicated not only to not adapting, but to holding everyone else back with them.

Morons. Maybe not by medical definition, but close enough that it is a descriptively useful term.

It's not morons.

It's people overwhelmed with multiple crisis scenarios that they can't handle. Most of us wish for a stable society and environment because it makes it easier to plan a future. You wouldn't build a house if you're not sure it's still going to be there in five years.

Calling people morons instead of understanding the actual problem is also a way to avoid looking at it too closely, probably because the complexity is overwhelming to you, too. Easier to just call people morons and be done with it.

Climate change is very much a social, cultural and political problem and the scientists have only looked at the meteorological and biological side of it.

We don't.

It's just not necessary in 90% of Europe. We didn't build mega-cities in near tropical climate. A week or two of really hot weather during the summer is not a problem and you wouldn't install an AC just for that.

Maybe some are, but both in my place and where my parents live (1200 km away, that's 750 miles for the metrically challenged) temperatures have plummeted to near freezing at night and single-digits during the day (in Celsius, that's the 35 to 45 range in Fahrenheit for the temperature scale challenged).

I don't doubt climate change at all. But shoddy journalism that creates headlines where those allegedly affected go "what? not at all, why are you lying?" only helps the deniers.

If you look at a weather map of Europe, like this one stuck in the early 2000s - https://www.weatheronline.co.u... - you'll see that at least right now only the very, very southern tips of Europe (in Spain and Greece, that's in the bottom-left corner and the bottom-right corner, no not the very corner that's already Africa, damn where were you in geography?) has temperatures above 20ÂC predicted for today, and that's not unusually hot for those regions.

We did have unusually hot weather 2-3 weeks ago, but they were unusual only for the season and still well below ordinary summer days.

Please get your reporting right, or you're only feeding the trolls that claim climate change is made up.

Globe is another brand you'll find on the discount shelves. Total garbage.

My general rule is to start with Zigbee devices for anything I want secured because they cannot route to the Internet. 433MHz devices for anything I'm OK sending data in the clear (like my weather station).

I fall back to WiFi if I must, a lot of that stuff you can get to work by configuring it with the manufacturer's app, THEN blocking it from further communications with the Internet. I don't like it, and I'm definitely boned if I have to reconfigure something and the manufacturer no longer supports it, but some devices are just only available with WiFi communications, or sometimes you need more range than you're going to get with Zigbee.

Look at how many people on Slashdot jump on these articles to post about how it's all a hoax or whatever. It's not just the wealthy, and I doubt they're all part of a paid social manipulation campaign. It's morons. We have hordes of useful idiots holding us back in addition to the much smaller number of elites with entrenched interests in the current state of affairs.

So many 'smart home' items are nice toys that only work if they can connect to the manufacturer's servers. With Home Assistant, you can build a home automation and security system that is entirely local if you like. It still takes a bit of work because you have to do your research when choosing new devices to add, but it works.

The voice assistant is adequate and rapidly improving, though the recommended hardware is listen-only - voice response is currently mainly available via a phone app.

Anyway, even if you have nothing to plug into it but have an old computer somewhere, it's worth downloading and playing with. Link it to the phone app and suddenly you have family tracking, common calendars, and a weather app. When my kids were in school, I added an RSS feed parser and had it telling me if buses were cancelled or not before we'd even had breakfast. Now I use it wake me up with a weather report and tell me if it's time to put out the garbage and recycling.

Add in a $20 SDR module and it can check your tire pressure for you, maybe pick up signals from a neighbour's weather station. Then you can start extending it with really inexpensive door sensors. This summer I'm adding a floating sensor to my pool to track the water chemistry and temperature and expecting to save a ton of money scheduling the filter pump (with a $20 smart light switch) to run just long enough during non-peak hours to cycle the water and keep it healthy.

I also route inexpensive cameras through it so I can check them from anywhere I want without having them connect to a server in China or wherever.

The universe gives not one shit for your doubts, not one law of nature will bend a single degree for them.

Cops are trained to an us vs them mindset and continually retrained that they always have to assume the public is out to kill them.

The mindset sticks, I picked up a bit of it by osmosis and it took a couple of years to decompress and become objective again. Luckily, I have no ethical concerns about any of the coding and systems support I did for them - I was never responsible for anything that would be used to erode rights, and I worked an awful lot on stuff that was meant for police oversight.

I worked with cops a lot for a while. I like to think the ones I worked with were good, or at least not bad. I still read about them from time to time in the news, and not in a good way.

A cop is a tool, you trust them when you have to, but always keep in mind they are people and not machines. They have their own motivations that may not align with your best interests or even the law, and sometimes those motivations overrule what they should do.

If you trust cops with a backdoor, it is only a matter of time before that backdoor is compromised.

I wish, and I would welcome it if they did.

However, as one of the foremost SELinux advocates in its early days, I doubt that the government of all places has the capability to do so. Few sysadmins can configure SELinux halfway decently (i.e. beyond the default policies) and the government (outside the military and secret services) isn't a good tech employer.

Also, MS is far more than the OS. With Office and a bunch of other tools, plus lots of custom software made only for Windows, the entrechnment is really, really deep.