Mike’s Weather Page is a hobbyist page that aggregates a ton of info.

Yes, paid time off requests or advanced request to use leave (doctor appointment, or other) is typical for any planned absenced in the US.

It’s definitely tedious to track everything. I do like the import feature and it covers maybe 80% of day to day transactions but yeah it’s a pain to go and fix stuff. What your talking about with PayPal is what YNAB considers a transfer and payment and is usually part the 20% I have to fix. Bank to PayPal is a transfer transaction, PayPal to purchase is the payment. It can definitely get needlessly complicated and it sometimes automatically imports correctly, especially reoccurring payments or if the transfer is between two linked accounts.

So I’m not low low cost. Live on the east coast after moving from a high cost area of living so I could buy a home.

Median household income is ~$80,000 here or $40k per person

I spend ~$3300 a month for two people and pets living comfortably. I removed my mortgage and any car payments but that includes everything from auto insurance, home insurance, auto maintenance for two relatively new cars, groceries and utilities.

Home taxes are $1600/year and home insurance is $550 but average around here are closer to $800. Not included in the total above.

Home is ~1500 sqft

• ~$200 for electric, no gas so that’s mostly air conditioning/heat. Prices go up in summer, don’t get much snow here so Winter is mostly off.

• ~$50 Water includes sewer since we’re connected here. Other commenters can share about being on a well but if your buying off main sewer, expect to pay $$$ when it needs to be replaced. Set aside money as if you had a water payment and take care of it with maintenance.

• HOA includes trash at $70 a month.

• Internet, fiber is $50. Subscriptions are ~$45 on top. Phones are $60 for two lines. Most friends in more rural areas have cable/fiber but a few have satellite or just mobile phone Internet. About 2+ hours from nearest metropolitan city. Satellite is terrible and expensive so recommend checking https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/ before you buy if that’s important to you.

• Car insurance $200 for two cars covered 300/100. Gas is $200. Auto maintenance is $165 and includes taxes, and all the other fun stuff related to owning cars. – If your young, a guy, have accident history insurance will be higher. Don’t skip if you can’t afford to replace your car and don’t get budget insurance to save. Gas is probably going to depend on your commute. And maintenance is going to depend on your car. Taxes are $300-600 a year each car including property taxes, DMV registration, etc.

• Groceries, $400-600. Eating out $200. This is probably the biggest variable expense.

• $400 misc spending for two. Includes random shopping for the household and any fun money.

• $300 for various gifts birthdays, Christmas, and extra spending to host Christmas or other events. Half of this is just building up for winter where we spend a decent chunk. Sometimes this is used to fly home for the holidays.

• $400 home maintenance budget. Saving for big fixes or general repairs. This will be much higher there first two years. For reference I’ve got a few pending maintenance repairs that are likely to cost ~$6,000 each expected in the next 5-8 years. (HVAC, water heater, roof, landscaping to deal with erosion and eventually some remodeling). Budget also includes collecting tools.

• Pets $200. Food, litter, toys, etc.

• $130 Health related expenses. Doesn’t include insurance which is $400/month out of the paycheck.

And I’m going to plug YNAB which is why I have these numbers, it costs $120/yr which is included. Highly recommend doing some kind of budgeting even if it’s on paper in a notebook once a month because all these costs can creep up. If you want free electronic use a spreadsheet.

A term used derogatorily towards sympathisers of authoritarian communist regimes stemming from “send in the tanks” in 1956.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tankie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

Apparently you can save it to Google drive then download the Google drive program and make that folder available offline so it downloads it to the computer.

1. When you setup the Google Takeout export choose Save in a Google Drive folder

2. Install the Google Drive PC client (Drive for desktop)

3. It will create a new drive (i.e. G:) in your explorer. Right click on the takeout folder and select “Make available offline”. All files in that folder will be downloaded by the Google Drive Desktop in the background, and you will be able to copy to another location, as they will be local files.

Yes but the camera should be in a place that can’t be physically tampered with easily since someone could theoretically unplug the camera and plug into your home network and see all your computers or other devices as if they had stolen your WiFi password. A small risk but it’s better to hardwire it somewhere they would need a ladder to get to or get a camera system that connects to a central box inside the house.

If you haven’t played Enderal it’s worth a playthrough. It’s a free total conversion mod of Skyrim.

I’m using a commercial desktop with an i5 Sandy bridge. I maxed out to 32Gb of ram only because I’m running trueNAS, debian with containers, and home assistant. Most RAM goes to trueNAS and trueNAS doesn’t accurately report ram. For CPU, mostly just task limited but I don’t really think thats a proxmox issue. Obviously it’s not going to support an enterprise or even small business but it works for what I need of less than 4 users on my budget.

Proxmox doesn’t really ask for much but I probably would recommend docker for your arm devices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

Should cover any polite web crawlers but it is voluntary.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot

Might have to put it behind a captcha or other type to severely limit automated access.

It’s not realistic to assume it won’t get scraped eventually. Such as someone paying people to bypass capatcha or web crawlers that don’t respect robots.txt. I also don’t know if Google and Microsoft bundle their AI data collection that doesn’t also remove your site from web search.

Robocalls should be opt-in unless emergency broadcast. Examples for TTY or other systems typically via text/email for vision impaired.

There’s a website called privacy.com for US that lets you virtualized any debit card. I believe PayPal has the feature too.

Last I read IBM was one of the big companies pursuing R&D in quantum computers and such plus they have some software stuff like crimestat and the weather channel under their umbrella.

I keep everything behind a VPN so I don’t have to worry much about opening things up to the Internet. It’s not necessary about the fact that you’re probably fine but more so what the risk to you is if that device is compromised, ex: a NAS with important documents, or the idea that if that device is infected, what can that device access.

You could expose your media server and not worry too much about that device but having it in a “demilitarized zone”, ensuring all your firewall rules are correct and that that service is always updated is more difficult than just one VPN that is designed to be secure from the ground up.

Have you checked and enabled hardware acceleration?

Support and troubleshooting steps are dependent on your GPU and OS.

I steered away from replacing my router with a PC and got an ER-X and virtualized everything else including TrueNAS on an old office PC. Having PCI-E slots helps with stability a ton when virtualizing and my setup has 64gb DDR3 which was cheap.

Ubiquiti APs are typically the homeLab standard and work great especially with multiple APs. You can start with turning your existing router to AP mode and replace with APs later.

For stability, you can create a “test network” on the ER-X. This is an incredibly useful unofficial guide to setup ER-X with multiple lan networks, APs and more. Then create redundancy with docker containers on a Pi. (put DNS server on proxmox system and a second on the Pi so if one goes down, DNS works).

For your home assistant question, does the backups or copy/paste data folder not meet your needs?

I’m happy with proxmox in a non-production environment/homeLab. Stable and straightforward.

Just found out from your comment that windows is shutting the door completely on CPUs that don’t support POPCNT. There’s config settings to install Windows 11 on legacy hardware (old CPU, tpm chips, etc) but who knows when they’ll pull the plug on that.

If space isn’t an issue, getting a cheap office surplus machine like a Dell Optiplex SFF line for ~$100 US vs the USFF so that it supports low profile PCI-E for a hba card for more storage, or nvidia quadro p400 for better encoding at like $30-50.

It will probably use a bit more wattage, especially with more HDDs, but still should be around 50w idle for even the old systems.

Coming from someone who uses neither currently but has used Facebook before, I think it’s more to do with the fact that people are used to Facebook, Google and other companies collecting data. Facebook does a ton of lobbying to tell you just how much they value privacy.

Facebooks data policies are supposed to follow US law. As you already mentioned, I won’t go any further on that. With a foreign country that isn’t exactly super friendly with the US, they could use this same data against citizens. You have no real GDPR, or US privacy laws to protect you if China decides to target a diplomats family or whatever.

For most people, it’s probably not going to affect you either way, but because data is something we really don’t understand the full value of. As an Example, ethnic groups could be targeted and tiktok can be used as a data source.

With the whole Facebook being used to potentially manipulate elections, Tiktok could be as well and the US/other countries have even less they can do to stop it.

But a lot of the hate that you’re seeing on the news is playing into China bad and not really casting light that they are okay with US companies collecting the same data. See: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/17/brexit-voter-manipulation-eu-referendum-social-media

https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-censor-china-critical-content-uighur-uighurs-2020-11?op=1

Most are designed for the cover to move to the side when deployed but some are designed to split in some way that could cause the rhinestones to come free.