Yup. I use credit a lot but also pay off my cards every pay period. I get that it sucks for merchants, but you know what sucks worse: getting cheated like this on a debit/cash transaction, or worse having your debit card skimmed.

A relative of mine had the latter and the bank froze her account for weeks while investigating. If it was a credit card they’d just freeze the transaction and maybe send you a replacement card with different #

This does seem like an important step. Like yeah, absolutely report this to the vendor but a theft also occurred so at least get a file going. Providing a police file # might have been enough to get them to refund as well

Or if you’re in Canada: London Drugs actually has decent service in their computer dept

You’re not the only one

I run backups to a USB drive which is way to grab in the event of an emergency. Just make sure you test them every more and again, and possibly only connect it when needed if you’re at all worried about malware (a cryptolocker will happily take out any attached storage if your machine is infected).

A lot of that stack looks similar to mine, though I’m running bigger hardware for various reasons. You might want to go with something with more cores than an i5 depending on how much you find yourself utilizing.

Have you considered Nextcloud for documents and syncing functionality? I went through a few ways of running it before ended up with the Snap package which has been fairly solid for over a year now (Docker was good for setup, but upgrading was problematic if not kept up with religiously)

Vaultwarden is Excellent.

Calibre-Web is good, especially if paired with the application to “extract” books, and an app like Moon+ on mobiles

Audiobookshelf is pretty solid. Pairs well with Libation.

HASS I initially ran on my server in a container but moved to dedicated hardware so updating and reboots didn’t break automatons. Got a HASS Yellow for the PoE and Zigbee.

If you’re looking for audio/video library management, JellyFin is pretty easy to get running and has apps for phones plus many TVs. Finamp is a good mobile app for the music part

You can also use a router that can run wireguard/openvpn and have that run the tunnel back to home for you. I’ve got a portable GL-Inet router with OpenWRT that I use for this when I’m on the road

Yeahhhhh. It used to be when we called the place McDick’s it was commentary on the food/service quality not the menu items

Or something more flammable, perhaps

A lot depends on the implementation rather than the idea itself. I’ve read plenty of stories of people stuck on hold with 9-1-1 - including deaths - as well as cases where they’ve been hung up on by shitty operators.

An AI system might be able to do some basic triage to prioritize calls for the human operators and actually result in faster access/response and saved lives. It might also be able to do things like transcribing information such as addresses or location for responders. If the AI is planned to be a replacement for humans rather than an augmentation though, lives will likely be lost

It’ll be interesting too as federations are a bit of a wild-west right now with some domains dropping off or being federated, while others may still be created in the future

Watching their recent coverage of LA and NY I was kinda astounded by the slant on it.

That sounds kinda cool. I’ll have to check it out. It’s kinda hard sometimes to push FOSS stuff in a largercorporate environment but this looks like something I could recommend/build for small-mid private SOHO clients.

Used to run OpenVPN. Tried Wireguard and the performance was much better, although lacking some of the features some might need/want fit credential-based logins etc

I didn’t really get the allure of it TBH. For most home-based nerds a simple Wireguard host (or OpnSense, OpenWRT etc running such) should be fine, and there are better options for commercial from better-known vendors in the network security space

Honestly other than a fingerprint lock, I’ve found the apps suck compared to just a browser on a PC anyhow. Half the apps could just be webpages, and a bunch of those are just wrappers to a web rendering layer anyhow

Hoping this includes a PC release that isn’t a year+ behind consoles

I think it very much depends on the type of and source of pain.

For me, Tylenol works for headaches and some cold/flu stuff but I’ve never really found it effective for strained muscles etc

The ones with fans would be “convection” ovens, which cost more this side of the pond

What apps are you using? It refuses to connect to my phone period of on globally, and won’t work with stuff like FinAmp if used app-specific