TwiddleTwaddle

My partner and I have a trip planned in about 1.5 weeks, bur cat is unfortunately sickly right now. I'm tasked with setting up a couple of webcams in her favorite spots so we can check on her while we're away.

Currently we have 1 basic webcam, two functioning Linux desktops, a couple old hard drives i don't need, a domain name I have grand plans for but have never used, and enough experience with docker and self hosting to be dangerous.

If you were to set up a quick and dirty pet cam with a minimal budget and about a week to buy everything and get it all set up, how would you go about it? I really want a solution requires as little fiddling and config as possible.

I know I'll need at least one more webcam, and I've been researching NVR software all night only to arrive back at idk-what-I'm-doing after hours of reading. I could potentially stretch my budget up to something like a Qnap TS-216G (which is as close to a good solution as I've found) since I've been wanting to buy a NAS anyways. The QVR software suite seems like a nice solution for easy setup, but I really dont need any advanced AI features. Even basic stuff like motion detection and video storage I could do without, although they would be nice to have.

I've never made any services available from outside of my LAN either. From what I've read in the past, Tailscale may be the simplest solution for that, but idk if it's suitable for this type of application.

Edit: I guess I never should have brought up that our cat is sick. Most of y'all seem to think that I'm neglecting my animal or something because I didnt go into detail about all of the care plans that we have in place for her. Her illness is long term and managed by medications. She doesnt have flare-ups or any acute symptoms that are likely to cause an emergency. We have friends that she likes that will be visiting daily to feed and water her, spend time with her, and give her medicine. This camera solution is really just a little something extra to make my partner and I feel better about being away from her.

Alt text: a destroyed city filled with speach bubbles all saying "stop your bombs" and Kamala Harris in the foreground with "I'm speaking" in large text along the bottom.

Alt text: a screenshot of a microblog post with the text "you walking down an alleyway with a gram of weed in your pocket, who would you rather catch you?" Below are two pictures side by side. One of Kamala Harris and the other of Batman.

Thought I'd contribute something other than memes here.

I don't expect there's anything new in this article to most of the people here, but Margaret Killjoy's blog is always a joy to read.

First, some background -

I work in technical support for a Chinese manufacturer making (among other things) home monitoring devices. I'm our resident open source enthusiast in the North American market, not that any of my bosses know or care. My background is not in comp sci or networking, so the only applicable knowledge I have is from my meager experience with my own home lab.

We have a product (I'll refer to it here as the Brain) that communicates wirelessly with our other devices, takes the data from them, sends the data encrypted to our servers, and is available to our customers through our web portal or phone app.

We got a support ticket recently from a customer (and software developer) asking technical questions about the communication protocol from the Brain to our servers. This customer was trying to work on Home Assistant integration for our product stack, but was hitting some roadblock that I can't even pretend to understand. To my understanding, the integration would allow a Home Assistant server to locally gather the same information sent to our servers.

After escalating the issue to our HQ team and some back and forth there, eventually the answer was that the data transfer is encrypted and we aren't going to share any details about it. We don't officially support this type of integration and have no plans to. Our tech contact at HQ offered to sell API access to this customer, but obviously that isn't what he was hoping to hear.

The customer replied that this answer didn't surprise him, but that he would be happy to develop the Home Assistant integration if we made the necessary information available to him.

So, here's my questions - How can I advocate from within my company to open up this aspect of our platform for open source devs to integrate our products into Home Assistant and other open source IOT platforms? Has anyone successfully made a case for this kind of thing within their own companies? What talking points can I use that my higher ups will actually listen to and understand?

I'm considering reaching out to the customer privately to seek a better understanding of what he needs from our platform. Does that seem ill-advised to anyone here?

TLDR - My employer manufactures IOT devices and locks down the platform with proprietary networking protocols. A customer and developer is seeking to write an integration for our products to work locally with Home Assistant. My higher ups said that isn't possible and I want to convince them to make the changes necessary for it to work.

As the title says, I'm looking for a private tracker with a good sized library of 1080p AV1 encodes. I'm on LST.gg and there's a handful of uploaders and encoders there that have given me the opportunity to upgrade some of my library to AV1, but I keep hearing about how great AV1 is for anime and there isn't really any anime in AV1 there. An anime specific tracker would be great if they have a decent amount of AV1, but I'm also interested in general cartoons and live action TV/movies.

I have access to a MAM's invite forum and have a well established ratio on several trackers, so once I know where to go hopefully I'll be able to get in.

A picture of sexy Sonic the Hedgehog stepping out of the shower with text bubbles saying- "Are you frying chicken, baby? Haha just kidding" "You make a lot of noise when you pee. I like that." Sonic is very sexy.

There's hope, kids!

My favorite author posted this for May Day. I think its an important message in the midst of anti-genocide protests on college campuses and around the world.