That looks like a cherry picked starting point. Read the whole thread for the full context.

fwiw, I don’t think anyone comes out looking particularly good. However, attempting to describe Frenck as infamous here and now is a bit rich. That minor disagreement all happened during the pandemic and I’m sure we have all passed a lot of water since then.

If the boy has a gaming rig, then he also has a CAD workstation.

I managed to get a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2 running on my 80286 with an 80287 maths co pro that I persuaded my parents to buy me for Chrimbo. Sadly, it was a bit shite. The next version of AutoCAD needed a 32 bit machine with 32 MB (yes MB) of RAM. That was way out of my league.

Depending on the age of the boy and given how long the little darlings are tending to hang around these days, a constructive bribery system in lieu of rent or pocket money enhancement might be in order 8)

I’ve just moved my work PC from a cast off from a customer - it had a BIOS date stamped 2012, and was a rather shag Lenovo with a … Intel Core something and four GB RAM. Cheap though, ie free. I did wedge in a SSD to make it usable.

I run KDE which isn’t known for being tiny and I have a Postgres DB and a few containers for experiments running. The new box is a i5 Intel G13 thingy - HP mini jobbie. Luxury

To ensure that I am as disadvantaged as everyone else, I run ESET Endpoint AV and full disc encryption on it. It boots EFI and Secure Boot is enabled. I will pass a Cyber Essentials Plus audit (UK standard) without having to employ any misdirection. I’ve also read up on the US standards. The STIG for Ubuntu 22.04 is doable but my desktop is running 23.04 and 24.04 has just come out.

I run my company and we have some customers who have some rather more stringent requirements than others. We also have our own standards.

My home and work ones both have Zigbee and Zwave. The modern ZwaveJS integration is amazing compared the old effort. Also: ESPHome, NUT, Mossie (MQTT), nginx proxy manager, MariaDB, nodered, Piper and that, Remote Backup, Terminal and SSH, DSS VoIP Notifier, VLC.

HACS with a fair few custom cards etc.

SO: Next door have got their lights up, why haven’t we? Me: (Enable NodeRed flows for gutter and pergola light strings that switches them on at dusk and off late evening) Right, that’s the missus pacified for a week or so. I should probably get BigTimer to sort that out itself.

Employee: I’ve got all the printers for monitored using an auto entries card. (Good skills) Me: (Installs an addon that can use VoIP to do text to speech to a phone) We warn off the customer and now they get a phone call from “things” that tells them what consumables to buy and also sends an email.

When I finally get around to sorting out my glasses so I can see what my soldering iron is up to, I’ll get many more gadgets installed. My computer room at work needs a tiny ESP8266 and four 1 wire Dallas SC temperature sensors, a bit of vero board, a resistor, power and probably a buck convertor and a case, which I’ll print.

I adore HA.

I only use Reolinks these days. RLC-410 - some dome and some bullet. Cheap and easy to setup. I’m a long term Zoneminder user which I get to watch the low res stream and record on the high res stream. My ZM is a VM on VMware with a cheap Nvidia GPU passed through for CUDA. This still works: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/GPU_passthrough_in_VMWare but I should probably bring the wiki page up to date.

I have a Reolink door bell too - I went for the PoE one. It’s a lot better than my old Doorbird but not as sturdy. The door bird could drive a chime too which was nice. The Reo can’t but it is a PoE powered unit with a UPS backing the switch. That’s pretty resilient.

They never get to see the internet. I fiddle DNS so that pool.ntp.com points at my ntp daemons but I run an IT company so that might be a bit excessive for most! I have three Pis with GPS hats and antennae.

As you say, they are well supported by HA too. If you have a Coral and Frigate then you have lots of options. Just keep them away from the internet if you are concerned about who is looking through them apart from you.

Noice