Hot take, I don’t mind it - my drawer of questionably compliant OEM cables is overflowing. Less plastic waste is a win, as long as everyone sticks to USB-C.

Is your favorite color purple?

Fair point! As far as I can tell, the temp sensors are just beacons - anyone can connect and see that somewhere in your house it’s 72 °F, but who cares ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re running on a Raspberry Pi, you can just use the onboard BT, whose drivers are updated regularly.

ZigBee ones get occasional updates automatically detected through HA, and have to be moved to somewhere near the controller to update. I assume, as temperature and humidity sensing hasn’t changed, that these are security patches.

BT ones get no updates, which either means their security goes unpatched, or it really doesn’t matter when all they do is shout out measurements into the void.

Of course! From an end-user the experience between Bluetooth and ZigBee sensors is basically indistinguishable, except for range.

I have a detached garage, on the opposite end of my property from my HA controller, so the Bluetooth sensor out there specifically was a little flaky. The BT sensor is rated for ~160 ft but realistically it’s 50-100 ft if your home has walls.

Swapping that one sensor to ZigBee so it could tie into my mesh network solved the problem. All other BT sensors have had zero issues, and their AA batteries unsurprisingly last longer than the 3R ZigBee AAAs, but both last at least 6mo.

Some Shelly devices can be used as “Bluetooth repeaters” but I’m unsure of the specifics of how that works.

If the screen isn’t important, Third Reality makes a slightly cheaper version with no screen that also takes AAA - conveniently on sale now

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0D2NVJTS3

I have a mix of those and an old version of these Govee Bluetooth sensors that are also fully offline, take AA batteries, and pair well with HA

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07Y36FWTT

Not strictly ZigBee, but cheaper, just as accurate as the 3R, and fully offline

Beginner question here - does HA even take sub-second polling?

Not excusing the ignorance, but if you click the link to the vendor’s page from a US IP it offers to redirect you to their US page, which is completely flooded with Fender X Teufel co-branded products:

https://us.teufelaudio.com/?delivery_country=US

There’s literally nothing but Fender co-branded products in the US. Kinda sad actually because I want this open source speaker

I think SD card failure rates are way overblown if you’re buying from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk, Samsung). I’m sure they do occasionally fail, but I’ve never experienced one.

You’re right, for really intensive tasks the costs can climb, but I see people asking for ideas for what to do with a junk laptop and the top suggestion is always something like pi-hole or a bookmark manager that could run on a potato.

Like with most things in life, it depends.

Laptop performance when closed is quite variable, but depending on where you live, each 10W of idle consumption 24/7/365 could cost you somewhere around $20/yr (assumes @$0.20/kWh, YMMV). This isn’t overwhelming on it’s own, but it is “cost difference between a junked laptop and a Raspberry Pi” kinda money.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5629233/

Instead of Firefox we need hundreds of stripped down browsers some first year CS students cobbled together in their basement for browsing the web.

Or something like that, I didn’t quite follow either.

The VPN speeds will be throttled pretty substantially, and low ram will result in some instability seeding, but it should run. Good thing about torrents is they’re built for unreliable.

I’ve run a torrent box like described on pretty much every pi generation, and the pi4 was the first one where VPN speed was no longer the bottleneck.

Sounds like the app worked as intended and she found the mushrooms she was after.

The fact that you posted a link to this video from YouTube not peer tube says a lot.

Use it? The US invented it. The US has historically funded it as part of their human rights initiatives. Like I said:

Also many of the sponsored projects help people circumvent authoritarian government overreach, which is something that until recently has been considered “good” for the US. The more freely information can flow the harder it is for authoritarian regimes to exert control.

Given the nature of the Tor network, it’s likely any “official” use within the US government would probably involve things like communicating with people working undercover / informants, etc., and not be something broadly discussed.

If US uses FOSS software in its operations (it does, everyone does) it has a vested interest in keeping these projects alive.

Also many of the sponsored projects help people circumvent authoritarian government overreach, which is something that until recently has been considered “good” for the US. The more freely information can flow the harder it is for authoritarian regimes to exert control.

Certain other content crosses boarders. Mastadon especially. Whenever you see people replying to messages and it starts with some sort of @user@lemmy.verse tagging, you’re probably eavesdropping on a Mastadon thread and you don’t even know it.

Yes, it absolutely can, it’s super easy! Just swap your Minecraft .jar with Paper and it’ll do the rest. It’s a tiny bit harder to go back, but only marginally.

Out of the box, aside from huge performance benefits, Paper is virtually indistinguishable from vanilla, but it also opens the door to a whole world of easy-to-use server-side plugins.

Edit: (you should still make a backup before swapping, just in case)

CPU intensive servers like Minecraft are where you start to run into problems with older hardware. If it’s just you on there, a 10 year old CPU is fine, but if you’ve got a few friends, the server may start to struggle to keep up.

Not sure how recently you ran this, or what all your were running, but in the past couple of years Paper has hit some pretty major milestones in unlocking threaded processing. Barring some sort of spammy 0-tick redstone nonsense or over the top plugins, I’d wager a Raspberry Pi 4 could handle up to about 5 or 6 friends without seeing any TPS dips. Its really remarkable how far they’ve pushed performance recently.

Could I get a larg HDD and ad it in an enclosure to the Mini PC to handle the media volume?

Like an external USB drive? Absolutely.