• 26 Posts
  • 151 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Dahua (professional side of Amcrest) still sells their video doorbell through B&H Photo. According to a Q&A answer on the site it will power a wired chime.

    I have another wifi Dahua camera (also bought from B&H) and have been really impressed with it. It’s used with Frigate and Home Assistant. Be aware that B&H offers their own warranty for Dahua products. I looked at the fine print before my purchase and felt it was reasonable.

    EmpireTech sells rebranded Dahua products and they have a different model. The seller gets great reviews on ipcamtalk.com. Detailed user reviews here. EmpireTech also sells through Amazon.


  • My TV continues to chatter to random servers on the internet long after it has turned off. It transmits to a telemetry server on every single button press.

    What’s even more irritating to me are the random changes to the TV’s UI. Turn it off for a while and I come back to an entire new set of menu entries and ads!

    Home Assistant, OpenWRT and Adguard Home mostly fix those problems.

    When my TVs are powered off a Home Assistant automation enables a couple of OpenWRT firewall rules. Those rules block all TV Internet access. When the TVs are powered on the firewall rules are automatically disabled and the TVs work normally. That along with Adguard Home’s blocking of all UI ads makes my TVs almost user friendly.






  • Cities can refuse to provide services to venues who refuse to pay for them in most places. The city officials in every city that Trump screwed should have been demanding payment up front - they knew he routinely screws over everyone he deals with because he still has debts from 2016 that are unpaid. Those who haven’t been paid should have been making front page news by suing for what they are owed.

    47% of the people in Kent County voted for the felon. Even if the Grand Rapids numbers are lower, it’s not reasonable to suggest a significant percentage of those making city decisions aren’t Trump supporters.









  • I had 2 of these just this week. Disney+ sent an ESPN ad with no way to unsubscribe, despite my having all marketing emails turned off. Their chat rep laughably insisted it was not a marketing email, just a way to “help” people use their services. It’s very kind of Disney to be looking out for me.

    Best Buy sent me a marketing ad with a $5 coupon (lol) attached. All marketing emails were disabled with them too and again there was no way to unsubscribe.

    Both problems were easily solved by deleting my accounts.