dan
@dan@upvote.au
Aussie living in the USA. https://d.sb/
- Comment on What YouTube downloader are the kids using these days? 20 hours ago:
On Android, I use ytdlnis, which is a wrapper around yt-dlp. You can “share” a video from to YouTube app to ytdlnis and it’ll add it to the download queue.
- Comment on Unifi Protect - Wife Approval Factor? +HA integration 1 day ago:
How long do you want to store footage for? With 6 cameras at 8Mbps each, you’d get less than two days of video on a 1TB drive.
The Unifi cameras don’t support ONVIF, so you’re essentially locked into their ecosystem, and it’d be difficult to use them with a different NVR if you ever want to switch. Maybe that’s OK for your use case though.
For the doorbell, I’d use a proper doorbell cam that can use the existing wires for power.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 3 days ago:
Why would it need to be different for credit cards vs debit cards though?
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 4 days ago:
Their profile implies they want AI to train on it and start showing it to unsuspecting users
Imagine a world, a world in which LLMs trained wiþ content scraped from social media occasionally spit out þorns to unsuspecting users. Imagine…
It’s a beautiful dream.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 4 days ago:
Thanks for the info! The only two countries I’m familiar with (in terms of payment processing) are Australia and the US, so I didn’t want to make assumptions about other countries.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 4 days ago:
They have far fewer perks, so it’s not as common.
In Australia, most credit cards have an annual fee, and they pretty much all just offer frequent flyer miles. US cards have much better perks: Quite a few offer 2% cashback, cards with points offer more points than Aussie cards, they almost all include extended warranty and rental car coverage, some include mobile phone protection, etc.
Merchants pay the price for these perks, given the high fees to process credit cards. They can make merchants pay a 3% fee, pay 2% cashback to customers on some of their cards, and still make more money from card fees than they would in other countries. Visa and Mastercard used to require merchants in the US to not charge any extra fees for accepting credit cards, but after a big lawsuit, this is no longer the case. Stores are slowly becoming like Aussie stores - charging extra if you pay by card.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 4 days ago:
It’ll probably work how it works in Australia. Payment terminals accept both the local network (EFTPOS) as well as Visa, Mastercard, etc. Aussie debit cards are processed via EFTPOS, while international cards use Visa/MC/whatever.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 4 days ago:
We’ve had this in Australia since the 90s. All debit cards are dual network: They support both Visa/Mastercard, as well as the local network (called EFTPOS). EFTPOS is noticeably cheaper to process, and the profits stay in Australia rather than going to a US company.
That’s only for debit cards, though. EFTPOS doesn’t support credit cards.
- Comment on Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users 6 days ago:
I see it a lot, too. Reddit’s been around for 20 years, so all the good usernames are already taken.
- Comment on Looking for guidance on modernizing a high-traffic WordPress news site 1 week ago:
Since you’re using Hetzner, one option is to get a Hetzner storage box to store the media. 1TB space is $4/month (not sure about EU pricing).
On-disk cache prevents a “thundering herd” problem when you reboot - an in-memory cache would be empty on rebootz whereas an on-disk cache survives a reboot. Linux handles caching files in RAM automatically.
- Comment on Looking for guidance on modernizing a high-traffic WordPress news site 1 week ago:
they can be uploaded to S3 (object storage) where it is 10x cheaper to store them
This is heavily dependent on the VPS. Some of my VPSes are cheaper than object storage would be.
- Comment on Is H9me Assistant recommended? 1 week ago:
Companies are throwing away old hardware (like 8th/9th gen Core i5) that’s perfect for running Home Assistant. See if there’s an e-waste recycler near you - they might let you buy an old system for a nominal fee.
- Comment on Looking for guidance on modernizing a high-traffic WordPress news site 1 week ago:
Use a page caching plugin that writes HTML files to disk. I don’t do a lot with WordPress any more, but my preferred one was WP Super Cache. Then, you need to configure Nginx to serve pages directly from disk if they exist. By doing this, page loads don’t need to hit PHP and you effectively get the same performance as if it were a static site.
See how you go with just that, with no other changes. You shouldn’t need FastCGI caching. If you can get most page loads hitting static HTML files, you likely won’t need any other optimizations.
One issue you’ll hit is if there’s any highly dynamic content on the page. You’ll need to use JavaScript to load any dynamic bits.
- Comment on Australia said to grant US access to Australians’ biometric data 1 week ago:
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone… The five eyes (and nine eyes) nations all share data in the name of “stopping terrorism”.
- Comment on Should I be using Debian? 1 week ago:
If your current setup works well for you, there’s no reason to change it.
You could try Debian in a VM (virtual machine) if you want to. If you’re running a desktop environment, GNOME Boxes makes it pretty easy to create VMs. It works even if you don’t use GNOME.
- Comment on FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled 1 week ago:
Even if you turned the phone off? It should be secure on a cold boot before entering the password, as nothing is unencrypted yet.
- Comment on A new quest appears... 1 week ago:
If you get a Zigbee smart switch (or smart bulb) and a Zigbee remote, you can pair the switch/bulb and remote directly so it works like you said, while still retaining the ability to control the light using Home Assistant (eg automatically turn it on or off based on something).
- Comment on Exploring Options to add NVR 1 week ago:
Blue Iris is by far the most capable NVR, but it’s Windows-only so you’d need a Windows or Windows Server VM. For a basic setup, Frigate is more than sufficient.
I’d say try Frigate on your ThinkCentre and see how well it runs. I wouldn’t buy new hardware prematurely.
Do I understand that I could then share the igpu between Jellyfin and Docker/Frigate?
I’m not sure about containers like LXC, but generally you need SR-IOV or GVT-g support to share a GPU across multiple VMs. I think your CPU supports GVT-g, so you should be able to find a guide on setting it up.
- Comment on My self hosted badges of honor 1 week ago:
It must be a lot of work to self-host DigitalOcean.
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 2 weeks ago:
I meant more if people wouldn’t have found your app without Apple. In that case, they’re essentially handling marketing for you.
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 2 weeks ago:
No other app store is allowed to operate on Apple devices
That’s only true outside of Europe. In the EU, they were forced to allow third-party app stores.
- Card companies take ~4%
- Patreon takes 10%
Does Patreon’s cut not include payment processing?
The other thing that’s ridiculous in the USA is how much credit card processing costs. Stripe is around 3%, while in countries it can be half of that (in Australia, it’s commonly around 1% for debit cards and 1.5% for credit cards).
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 2 weeks ago:
Apple is doing nothing in this particular case, not in general. There’s cases where the 30% is more justified.
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 2 weeks ago:
But you’re getting literally the same Patreon content.
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 2 weeks ago:
PWAs aren’t great on iPhone… They intentionally limit some functionality to push people towards the App Store.
Some people want everything as apps for some reason.
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 2 weeks ago:
Why does Apple feel they deserve a 30% cut? In cases like this, Apple aren’t providing any value at all.
- Comment on Supreme Court To Decide How 1988 Videotape Privacy Law Applies To Online Video 2 weeks ago:
Interesting case. If the plaintiff wins, I suspect this will mean that sites with videos won’t be able to use third-party analytics scripts (not just Meta pixel, but also things like Google Analytics), which would be a pretty large change.
I’d love to see first-party tracking become more popular again. I self-host Plausible for my sites, but I’ve considered switching to Swetrix.
- Comment on Microsoft gave FBI a set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops: Reports | TechCrunch 3 weeks ago:
uploads a copy of the key to their Microsoft Account
Microsoft added that feature because people kept losing their encryption keys and thus losing all their files if they need to have their computer replaced. They get complaints either way - privacy advocates complain when the key is backed up, and sysadmins/users complain when the key isn’t backed up.
- Comment on Ring Cameras Join Flock and Amazon to Now Create Direct Data Access for ICE 3 weeks ago:
Doesn’t Hikvision support RTSP?
- Comment on Ring Cameras Join Flock and Amazon to Now Create Direct Data Access for ICE 3 weeks ago:
Though, on the other hand, having the video saved offsite is useful because then anyone with physical access to your home can’t get rid of the video showing they’re there.
I have Blue Iris configured to send all alert videos to one of my storage VPSes via SFTP. As soon as someone is detected outside, the video clip is sent offsite.
The server and the PoE switch that powers the cameras are also on a UPS, which helps if the intruder tries to shut off the power at the main breaker (which, here in California, always needs to be located outside).
- Comment on Ring Cameras Join Flock and Amazon to Now Create Direct Data Access for ICE 3 weeks ago:
Reolink
Any cameras that can operate entirely offline are good. Dahua and Hikvision are good too. Just follow best practices - keep them isolated on a separate VLAN with no internet access. If you want remote access to your NVR, use a VPN like Tailscale.