Seems that blocking my robot vac’s Internet access when it’s not in use is not so paranoid after all.

With billions of batteries in use there are going to be plenty of complaints about issues. My specific experience is with an ancient Dell Venue convertible that’s been in regular use for 9 years with charge limiting applied that entire time. The battery still looks new and for what it’s worth, Dell’s UEFI reports it’s in excellent condition. This while the rest of the system including the charging port is completely worn out and at the end of its useful life. That computer is running Debian 12, HA and Frigate with only 4gb of ram and (outside the physical problems of a very old, heavily used laptop) is working fine.

Are the computers you have bought from Aliexpress UL listed, or do they have a European safety listing? I’ve read reports of some equipment and appliances sold by Chinese companies on various sites (including Amazon) causing fires. Not that those mean that much though. Even my UL listed Cyberpower UPS has had reports of internal shorts and fires.

There are literally billions of lithium batteries in use and you have a better chance of being struck by lightning that having a lithium battery fire. Your concern about the battery life isn’t realistic either. These batteries last for many years when the charge is limited to less than 100% and can be replaced when they finally wear out. If you run a UPS you’ll eventually need to replace those batteries too and your backup time will be usually be measured in minutes rather than hours.

As far as the ram limitation is concerned, it’s plenty for a supported Home Assistant installation and that’s exactly what this post is about.

Every machine has advantages and disadvantages, but I’m not sure why having a screen and a battery fall into the disadvantage category. The Aliexpress machines have some serious disadvantages including fans and an almost complete lack of support for most of them. And long-term support is a fantasy.

Dell sucks in many ways, but their support is in English and they produce firmware updates for several years after a product is released, especially for machines used by enterprise customers like this one.

Besides, if you add a UPS (and they all have batteries) to any of those Aliexpress mini PC’s you’re well over the price for this machine even with a gigabit Ethernet adapter.

For me $70 extra for a silent system with display, keyboard, UPS, a real warranty, and long-term support is a bargain.

Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!

I’ve found it to be simpler. Booting off a USB SSD allows full disk cloning to that same SSD without worrying about mounted partitions or using a separate USB thumb drive for Clonezilla. Once booted I can access the machine through SSH or NoMachine to create the backup and it is far faster than backing up to a network drive. For incremental backups Timeshift works fine.

The screen and keyboard are invaluable for backups. I have a portable SSD with Ubuntu installed for creating backups, but I often have to manually set the boot device on startup to get it to work. Setting a USB SSD for the first boot device in the BIOS/UEFI doesn’t seem to work reliably on any of my systems.

The point of a UPS or equivalent is to protect the SSD during a power failure. I’ve lost Raspberry Pi configurations several times due to power failures when I’m away from the house. It has been a major PITA and time consuming to recover from.

The one I have draws about 6 watts when running Home Assistant which means at $0.25 per KWH it would cost $1.10 per month to run. Just adding a UPS to any other platform is going to cost more per month and have a much shorter run time.

I have mine behind a Pihole too. It blocked all the ads at first but Roku seems to actively varying the ad servers and they’ve started showing up again. I haven’t had a chance to see if I can block them again.

Roku is chocked full of ads too, and regularly sets the default for the “Select” button to open those ad sites or apps. Roku used to be great. It has now been completely enshittified.

I have a convertible laptop with a MicroSD slot. A 4TB card would be great for backups.

This would be of limited use for many people. Carriers lock people in by selling lots of phones that are missing frequency bands and cannot be used on their competitor’s networks. For instance, many of TMO’s phones cannot be used on AT&T and Verizon’s networks. My Oneplus 9Pro is a great phone, but if I wanted to switch to Spectrum (on Verizon’s network) or AT&T I would be forced to buy a new phone.

Some phones like the Iphone and Pixels are compatible with every U.S. network, but plenty of others are not.

Teamviewer has a history of lying about serious security breaches. The company’s networks have been breached before and they literally spent years denying it and blaming it on their customers: https://www.securityweek.com/teamviewer-confirms-it-was-hacked-2016/

HP has known the hinges are defective since they introduced them. There are so many people having problems a class action suit was filed about it.

Must depend on the model. I’ve been running Mint on that (repaired) X360 for years without significant problems outside crappy Realtek wireless module issues.

HP laptops are garbage. This is the hinge of my HP X360 laptop after 6 months of occasional use: https://i.imgur.com/LhZWBIt.jpg

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this doesn’t look like this has anything to do with Syncthing vulnerabilities. Instead it looks like a hack that uses a preconfigured Syncthing installation to transfer sensitive data. Disturbing nonetheless.

It’s also important to remember that Microsoft has no monetary incentive to force people to use Windows Recall.

With that in mind, there would be no reason for Microsoft to automatically enable Windows Recall in an update down the line. If it does happen, the user will be able to instantly tell thanks to that that visual indicator and turn it off again.

This article is nothing but propaganda. There is huge monetary incentive to force people to use Windows Recall and collect their data, and Microsoft routinely uses Windows Update to enable data collection. They began that practice years ago on Windows 7. It’s a ridiculously simple matter for MS to disable the visual indicator and force This Week’s Plan on their users to monetize their data.

Windows Central pretends to be critical of plans to enable a feature that can be made into malware by Microsoft in a couple of minutes, but then back peddles and says it can’t be done (utter BS) and if it could be, it wouldn’t be that bad.

I was using Z2M and found it had some weird, unresolvable device control quirks with a dimmer I’m using. Switched to ZHA and have had no problems at all.

A tomshardware.com article about how to bypass the account requirement from February of this year:

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-without-microsoft-account

It requires numerous steps to bypass the account requirement or the creation of special installation media. I ran into the Internet and account requirements when installing W11 on a VM in January.

Perhaps the screenshots you posted were accurate at some point or in some situations, but you need to do better research before accusing others of spreading misinformation, and it is you who needs to stop spreading misinformation.