Buelldozer

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] Buelldozer 2 points 57 minutes ago

I have my smoke / CO detectors, KIdde Z-Wave units, tied to my Home Assistant setup. HA will push a notifier to my phone if the smoke or CO alarm goes off and it's able to track the battery life and let me know I need to change them before they start beeping.

[–] Buelldozer 10 points 1 day ago

"Bans ARs" but specifically exempts the Ruger Mini-14. πŸ˜‚

[–] Buelldozer 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Syncthing

That is a very cool project that I'd never heard of. Thanks for sharing!

[–] Buelldozer 39 points 1 day ago

I don't like this at all.

[–] Buelldozer 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There's overlap because of Federal Elections. You can have one set of rules for State / County / City level elections and another set for Federal.

[–] Buelldozer 1 points 1 day ago

Tesla could have just dumped paperwork on a less busy area and said file all this shit.

I wondered about that myself but I'm not familiar with how Tesla dealerships operate, especially since it's Canada.

[–] Buelldozer 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If I was this Judge I'd be requesting a 24x7 security detail from the US Marshals.

[–] Buelldozer 35 points 1 day ago

Well No Shit. Why would anyone want to buy into the hot mess we've got going right now?

[–] Buelldozer 3 points 1 day ago

but the sales numbers reported by some of the dealerships in question are nothing short of miraculous.

Eh, maybe. I appreciate your skepticism but as a former Sales Guy the ending of the iZEV program would have made sales, including fleet sales, pretty damn easy.

Let say you've had a company considering buying 50 EVs for their fleet and suddenly its in the news that the rebate program is ending. You now have 250,000 reasons to call the Dealership and get those vehicles under contract (Sale or Lease).

It works the other way around too. The Sales Schmuck from the dealership goes through his book of recent visitors to the dealership and calls them up. "Hey, I just wanted to let you know that the iZEV program is going to close down. So if you want to save $5,000 you should get down to the dealership right away." so the person who was interested runs down there and inks a deal.

Those scenarios aren't just plausible I've personally done them. The ending of a rebate program worth thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars is a powerful closing tool.

Also the sales numbers only appear "miraculous" if you assume that the transactions all happened in those two days when they almost certainly didn't. A couple hundred individuals buy cars in January meanwhile the phone is ringing off the hook with fleet sales and suddenly the paperwork is behind.

This looks and smells strongly of fraud.

Transport Canada has the paperwork, you can't file a rebate claim without it, so its just a matter of time until the truth comes out. If Tesla tried to defraud the Canadian Government then I hope they get crucified for it.

[–] Buelldozer 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

So I'm cruising through the rules surrounding Canada's iZEV program and contrary to all of the media coverage I can't find any requirement that the vehicle be "delivered".. It's even described on the official Transport Canada website as a "Point of Sale" program. Delivery at the time of sale doesn't seem to be a requirement.

Further if you look at the process, which also references this as a "Point of Sale or Lease" program, and the e-forms the end purchaser IS involved with this and consents to Transport Canada contacting them about their purchase.

The number of vehicles does seem high but only in the context of individuals however the iZEV program allows for Fleet Sales and some entities could claim up to 50 vehicles. Now all of a sudden what would need to be 8,000 individual sales could theoretically be as low as 160.

After reviewing the process and the forms it seems believable that Tesla slammed a bunch of legitimate sales into the system at the last minute. It's a LOT less believable that Tesla made up all of these sales as the documentation requirements mean they'd certainly be caught the minute anyone checked.

[–] Buelldozer 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

As a taxpayer I would like to know WTF the USAC is doing with 9 Billion dollars a year 'cuz were sure not seeing much of that investment.

I honestly can't figure out what Congress is doing with these kinds of programs. There's another one called BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment) that was created in 2021 that had yet to get a single household connected to the Internet as of September 2024 despite having already spent $20 BILLION dollars!

So for Fiscal Years 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 the US Federal Government according to official figures spent a combined total of 46 BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS ((9x4)+20) and has nearly nothing to show for it.

Yeah, the courts needs to be looking into this.

[–] Buelldozer 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Does Linux have a good alternative to ActiveDirectory?

Centralized IAM, managed updates, and all of the other "stuff" that AD does is available for at least some Linux distributions but it's not free to use, at least not commercially. You're going to be paying Red Hat, SUSE, etc for these kinds of features.

 

Great news for those of who are still carrying a torch for TES: IV

 

As originally conceived, the House was supposed to grow with every decennial census. George Washington spoke just once at the Constitutional Convention β€” and on its final day β€” to endorse an amendment lowering the ratio of constituents to members to 30,000.

Today, House members represent roughly 762,000 people each. That number is on track to reach 1 million by mid-century.

10
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by Buelldozer to c/linuxmint@lemmy.ml
 

One of my computers is an HP Elitebook X360 1040 G8 (convertible) and I'm happy to report that in Laptop Mode both LM21 and LM22 work perfectly. There's full control of the normal hardware including the touch screen, good performance, and good battery life.

With a couple of exceptions Mint also handles the shift to tablet mode pretty damn well. The keyboard and trackpad are disabled, the keyboard backlight shuts off, and the screen easily changes orientation with rotation.

The exceptions though are so fundamental to touch screen use in general though that I feel like I must be missing something?!

First and foremost is an on screen keyboard. I know it can be enabled under accessibility settings but when I do that it splashes up a keyboard that permanently fills half the screen. If I close the keyboard window it goes away but I can't find a way to get it to come back except to unfold the machine and re-enable it again.

It may not be possible to make it launch predicatively, although Gnome itself does. but why isn't there an icon at the top or bottom of the screen that I can tap to bring it back on demand?

The second one is scrolling, especially in Firefox. I know that Grab and Drag is possible because you can do it with the regular Firefox scroll bar but the scroll bar can be difficult to get on because of it's size and even then the scrolling action is backwards of both iOS and Android. This should be fixable be enabling gestures but surprisingly gestures don't have any assignable scroll functionality.

I'm really confused by these two issues. They seem so fundamental to how a touchscreen is used, especially the on screen keyboard, that it seems impossible they weren't addressed year ago. It's far more probably that I'm missing something obvious, but what?

6
I tried LMDE "Faye". (self.linuxmint)
 

I've had at least one computer with regular Mint + Cinnamon installed since V19 and it's always worked well for me. I somehow only learned about LMDE last month and since I've previously run Debian I figured I'd give it a shot.

I took the drive with my LM22 installation out and installed a brand new 1TB NVME, put LMDE "Faye" on it and YIKES.

I'd forgotten how "raw" regular Debian is in nearly everything from Grub to package management and even Cinnamon is somehow less sharp and sort of lackluster on LMDE.

The first boot up went okay but trying to swap the nouveau drivers for the Nvidia drivers did not go well at all and somehow ended up with all the fonts and icons broken.

I couldn't figure out how to fix it and decided to simply re-install LMDE from scratch, no big deal.

On the 2nd install I started getting AER errors on boot and every time I rebooted I got more of them. At one point the DE locked up entirely and I had to manually power cycle the machine. I couldn't get to the desktop after because of an endless string of AER errors.

In between reboots, while I could still get into the desktop, I was installing updates and while that process was pretty much the same as regular Mint it was also slower, even after changing over to the fastest repositories available. The update manager also didn't work as well. For instance the first update run said it was complete and wanted a reboot but before I could do that the update manager automatically ran again and it showed me all the updates it had just installed as needing installed again. WTF?

After frustrations with the Nvidia drivers, the weirdness of updating, broken desktop environment, and the AER errors I decided to see what would happen if I installed regular LM22.

With LM22 on that exact same hardware, including the new NVME, everything works perfectly. No errors, Nvidia drivers installed without issue, updates worked as expected and Cinnamon looks and behaves just like you'd expect.

Swapped out the NVME for the original drive that had LM22 on it and it too works just like I'd expect.

I'm not running weird-o hardware either; it's a Gigabyte motherboard and an Intel i5 10700k with 32G of RAM and an Nvidia 2060. No overclocking or performance tweaks.

I have no idea what I did wrong, if anything, or why LMDE seems to hate my hardware but for me on that system LMDE is not at parity with regular Linux Mint.

17
Well Hello There! (self.announcements)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Buelldozer to c/announcements
 

Yes I am actually an OG Star Wars nerd. I saw the release of "New Hope" in the theater on opening weekend with my Dad. We've actually seen every SW movie in the theater together. Yes all of them.

Anyway I'm a new Admin here at lemmy.today and @mrmanager@lemmy.today asked me to introduce myself so here goes.

As a GenX my 'online' experience started back in the mid-80s using my Commodore to dial into BBSs then it was BBSs on my custom built 286 (Computer Shopper FTW!) By the early-90s I was running rampant on CompuServ using my Tandy 386, in the mid '90s it was AOL on my IBM Aptiva, and by the late 90s it was ISP connections on my custom built Pentium II PCs.

Along the way I've participated in the rise, fall, and replacement of all the Operating Systems, Applications, Forums, and Aggregators that the last four decades have had to offer. (Dammit I'm old!)

Like many Lemmy users I ~~left~~ escaped Reddit last summer when they started seriously enshittifying the site in the IPO runup. I was actully on lemmy.world first but ended up here after they had too much downtime and too many defederations. I like it here, it's a fast and fairly open instance with very little drama.

Speaking of admin / mod styles mine is "Digital Janitor" and I really try to be as no/low drama as possible in that role. I'm here to to keep this instance functional, federated, and the content in line with whatever policies mrmanger or a community sets for itself. I clean up after spammers, remove objectionable or illegal content, and help with user management. That's pretty much it. I'm simply not interested in the power tripping rot that seems to infect so many Admins / Mods.

I ended up as Admin through an offer to help mrmanager when some other instances were threatening to defederate us due to spam and content problems. In the thread where it was being discussed I offered to lend a hand and the next thing I knew I had a red "A" next to my name! (I'm joking, they did actually ask me first and I took a couple of days to think about it before I agreed.)

I'm around quite a bit so if you run into something that needs attention feel free to reach out. πŸ™‚

 

New York may become the first state to bar gun companies from selling pistols that can easily be converted into machine guns.

14
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Buelldozer to c/protonprivacy@lemmy.world
 

I read the sidebar and didn't see anything about asking questions so apologies in advance if this post breaks a rule.

I'm in the U.S. and wanting to knowif Proton Family is a good choice for my use case.

Two decades ago I got tired of changing email addresses whenever my ISP changed so I registered my surname as a .net vanity domain and started running my own email server at home. When Google started offering Google for Organizations for free if you had less than 10 users I folded up my personal email server and shifted everything over. We use it for e-mail and basic family calendaring.

Last month when going through bills my wife and I were once again frustrated by coordination required to sign into various accounts. "Hey what's the password for $CreditCard?" or "What's the MFA you just got for $BankAccount?" or "What's the password for Disney"?"

That got me started looking for a family password manager so we could easily share and keep this stuff up to date.

At the same time we realized that were paying for YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, two YouTube Music, and an Amazon Music subscription. Whoops.

Well, no problem. We'll just "family share" the YTTV and YTP subscriptions so everyone has everything and we save some money.

Nope. G-Suite doesn't allow family sharing. So we're all going to have to create seperate @gmail.com addresses to make this work. Oh, and I'll have to shift the YTTV subscription from my vanity domain to a regular @gmail as well. Which breaks the entire idea behind the vanity domain in the first place.

While I researching a Family Password Manager of course I found Proton Pass. While I was looking at the pricing for it I realized that they also have a "Family" setup for email which looks interesting.

So now I'm considering porting my vanity domain and all it's email out of G-Suite and over to Proton Family. At nearly $300 a year it's not exactly inexpensive, since I'd basically be paying it until I die, and it will be a fair bit of work to switch everything over so I don't want to do it unless it's going to work.

So would Proton Family be a good choice? Are there any significant technical challenges to migrating a custom domain and email out of G-Suite and into Proton?

Edit: This post was rambly and unclear. The TL;DR is that I’m increasingly annoyed with G-Suite and since I’m looking at Proton Pass anyway I'm wondering about Proton Suite (which includes Email, Calendar, and Pass).

16
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Buelldozer to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
 

Always surprises me when I go to do something in HA and realize that I can't figure out how.

This time its lights, specifically making sure that they don't get left on.

Until now I've simply been creating an automation for each light switch so that if it changes state from Off to On and when it's 30 minutes after sunrise it's starts a 15 minute wait and then changes the state of the switch to off.

This approach mostly works but it's less than ideal.

First I'm having to create an automation for each device. How do I do it by Area, or list / group of devices, instead?

Second if a device is turned on too early there's no state change for the automation to catch and it never fires. I could fix this by creating another automation that checks for it but then I'll have even more of them to manage.

Third this doesn't work very well if you want different things to happen on the weekends as opposed to during the weekday. For instance on a Saturday I may WANT that closet light to stay on longer because I'm putting away clothes.

It'd be really nice if I could program HA like this 'On a weekday if you see any device on this list turn on 30 minutes after Sunrise I want you to turn whichever one(s) it was off again 15 minutes later.'.

I'm must be missing something here because surely HA can do this, right?

5
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Buelldozer to c/general
 

Both FireFox on PC and Connect on Android keep signing me out, throwing general "error" messages, and refusing to load the next page.

Liftoff on iOS can't even find lemmy.today in order to add it as an instance!

I'm not seeing any discussion of these kinds of problems elsewhere but they've been consistent since the .19 upgrade and they've persisted after the .19.1 update.

17
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Buelldozer to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
 

Shortly after the ratGDO v2.5 was released I ordered one and a couple of days later I ordered a case from Etsy to go with it.

Two days later the Etsy seller messages me asking if have the v2.5 or v2.5i because the cases are different. WTF? There's already a new version?! I tell the seller to make it the v2.5i because that's probably what I'll get.

So last week I received a very nice red case from the Etsy Seller HighTower3D out of the North Carolina. Seriously, this thing is nice. The build quality is high, it has magnets in the bottom for mounting, comes with allen screws (and the allen wrench you need) and a couple of little zip ties.

So this week my ratGDO shows up and...it's v2.52i! A quick check of the website shows that there's now a v2.53 and that makes four revisions in the last month!

You can't make this stuff up so all I can do is laugh...and give away the v2.5i case that I spent $26 on and doesn't fit the ratGDO version I ended up with.

I have no use for this case so I'm giving it away to someone who can; make sure you have a v2.5i though because this call will NOT fit any other version.

If you are in the United States and can use this case then leave a reply below. 😊

 

I ordered some sidewalk heating mats from HeatTrak and I want to automate them with HA so that they come on when it makes sense to do so based on the data from my Tempest Weather Station.

According to HeatTrack my mats will have a combined resistive load of 5A which is well within the spec of the Zooz ZEN05 or ZEN14, both rated for 15A resistive loads, but when I asked them about it they did not recommend using either of them with heated mats. They couldn't, or wouldn't, explain why and it doesn't make sense to me why this wouldn't work.

My next thought was to simply swap the outlet to something smart but this is an outdoor outlet so it needs to be GFCI and there's essentially no Z-Wave GFCI outlets made.

Do I really need to use something like an Enbrighten Z-Wave Plus 40-Amp contactor for this or am I missing something here?

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