• 0 Posts
  • 84 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

help-circle

  • I use Raspberry Pi Zero W’s with the cheapest wide-angle USB cameras I can find. PS3 Eyes used to be (pre-covid) ridiculously cheap on eBay (like $6 each if you could find them in the bulk packaging). I dunno if you’re gonna find anything that cheap in 2025, but if you can find PS3 eyes on the cheap, they get the job done (but don’t work great in low light). Mine (about 8 total) have been running well for about 7 years now, some indoors, some outdoors (mounted strategically to avoid rain and heavy wind).

    You can install Raspberry Pi OS (or your lightweight distro of choice) on each Pi and then install the Motion package, which supports pretty much any USB camera out of the box, and lets you set up things like motion detection, image capture, live streaming, etc with a little configuration. If you’ve got HA running smoothly, I suspect you’ll be able to tackle setting up a few Motion configurations. You just SSH into each headless Pi and configure Motion to start in daemon mode so it’s always running whenever the Pi boots. You can then access the camera feed remotely from the Pi’s IP address with an address like http://<local.ip.address.>:8080

    A bit of work to set up (and maybe more expensive than cheap, cloud-based, AIO systems), but it’s incredibly worth it to have a wholly cloudless, entirely local security/nannycam solution.

    A finished Pi Zero W + camera unit has a pretty small footprint, and can be mounted just about anywhere within distance to a power outlet with some velcro if it can’t just be sat on a table or something. My units typically look like this:

    Though this one uses a Ubisoft camera (didn’t wanna take down a PS3 eye for this pic so I pulled my crappiest unused USB cam from the closet. This camera is awful, but I got it for free so I can’t complain, lol)





  • They don’t measure creativity, emotional depth, or moral worth - they simply measure a person’s ability to reason and solve problems relative to others.

    The frequent misunderstanding of what IQ means probably arises due to the vagueness of the term. “Intelligence quotient” is very non-specific, despite IQ measuring a very specific kind of intelligence. I wouldn’t even say IQ measures “a person’s ability to reason and solve problems relative to others.” The problems found on an IQ test are of a very specific nature. “Complete the following number sequence”, “Which of these shapes doesn’t belong”, etc.

    A problem that won’t be found on an IQ test is: “Jeff believes his manager has made an inappropriate remark toward one of his colleagues. What should he do?” This is a problem that needs a solution, but isn’t within the purview of IQ measuring. You mentioned that IQ tests don’t measure things like emotional depth, which is true, but emotional depth (or emotional intelligence) is still intelligence, so the term “intelligence quotient” only referring to certain kinds of intelligence seems like it will naturally be misunderstood by the masses.

    I guess my takeaway is that the term “IQ” could use re-branding to avoid this problem.




  • Yeah, I think I’ve only bought one or two PS5 exclusives since I got mine around October 2020. Demon Souls remake and Horizon Forbidden West (though the latter is now available on Steam).

    That said, I still think I’ve gotten a good amount of value out of the console by reaping the Patient Gamer™ rewards by picking up many of the major PS3/PS4 titles during good sales. I didn’t play many video games during the PS3/PS4 era, so I missed out on quite a few major releases. I’ve accumulated a pretty great digital library with some fantastic games for a relatively small amount of money (which, like my Steam library, I’ve only actually played a fraction of).

    As an aside, probably my favorite PS5 exclusive has just been the free Astro Bot game. The haptics in the DualSense controller are frankly cool as hell, and I hope more games utilize them going forward.










  • I’ll share my input, although it’s primarily speculation and a smidge of deductive reasoning.

    Given these three particular pieces of information:

    • Local network use is unaffected (for e.g. accessing SMB shares to a local server)
    • Happens with my current ISP (Leaptel), but also happened the previous ISP (Aussie Broadband)
    • Ping is unaffected and hovers around 12ms to geographically close remote servers, with no packet loss or jitter.

    My first instinct is the issue may be upstream (non-local) network congestion. Since it appears that connections are slowing to a crawl rather than dropping packets. Ping requests don’t seem to suffer, but they’re a lot smaller than loading content via CMMS, Reddit, etc. You mentioned it could happen twice or more in a 10 hour shift, or sometimes not at all; network congestion being highly variable could explain this.

    Are you in a remote area? If so, there may not be much nearby infrastructure (routers) to handle the big spikes in traffic when everyone in the immediate area clocks in to work at 9am, or gets back from lunch around 1pm, etc. If that’s the case, the local routers would get overwhelmed regularly by congestion and packet delivery times would suffer. This could also happen in more densely populated areas, depending on what the local infrastructure looks like.

    Though I’m not entirely sure how to explain speed tests not suffering if congestion is the issue; unless the particular routes to the geographically-close test servers aren’t congested (because large numbers of people are trying to connect to real services, not the speed tests, during these congestion times).

    The fact that some live services like Google & Facebook load while others like Reddit and Lemmy do not could be explained by the difference in those services’ respective high-availability (HA) solutions. Facebook and Google don’t typically drop below 99.95%-ish uptime because they scale their server infrastructure very aggressively to meet demand. But even huge services like Reddit have considerably more downtime than Facebook or Google (Reddit seems to have major outages several times a year, while Google and Facebook do not). Some upstream services having more servers to handle more requests more quickly could account for the inconsistent ability to load websites during this congestion.

    I’m not sure the best way to test this hypothesis, though. Given how much troubleshooting and information gathering you’ve already done, this is a tricky one.