MAGA morons are going to be furious.

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.

Not the first time. I thought a Windows 10 update wiped grub, but Microsoft actually deleted my entire Linux partition. Others have experienced the same thing.

Windows is required for a couple of apps I need with no alternatives, but the only way it runs on any of my computers is in a VM.

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.

Could be a bad board. I have a Pi 3B+ that intermittently crashes and shows insufficient voltage no matter what power supply is used.

I’ve been using DD-WRT for many years and just moved to OpenWRT. Although there have been various generic vulnerabilities that effected all IP devices and needed to be patched on these platforms too, I can’t remember a single vulnerability that was specific to either DD-WRT or OpenWRT.

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.

These idiots are not only harming themselves and their children, they’re harming and sometimes killing others who are medically prevented from receiving vaccinations. These scumbags are literally spreading disease.

Likewise Trader Joe’s prices have shot up tremendously, like 50% on many items in less than a year. This while Aldi’s prices have not risen nearly as much. Meanwhile corporations are celebrating the highest profits in more than 70 years while simultaneously working overtime to convince us those runaway profits have nothing to do with inflation.

So we’re supposed to believe that the highest corporate profits in more than 70 years are not a primary driver of inflation? I don’t buy it and neither do all economists.

It is unlikely that either the extent of corporate greed or even the power of corporations generally has increased during the past two years. Instead, the already-excessive power of corporations has been channeled into raising prices rather than the more traditional form it has taken in recent decades: suppressing wages.

Corporations have such excessive power that they can even push the narrative that their historic profits don’t have anything to do with inflation. Some people actually believe the propaganda.

It’s obvious that my point is Brookings is deliberately ignoring the elephant in in the room. They are turning a blind eye to extreme corporate price gouging and record profits, in fact Brookings didn’t mention those things at all.

Thinking and critical analysis requires awareness of what is deliberately being omitted by a media source as well as what is being said. It has nothing to do with “somehow reading” the article wrong.

Right. The highest corporate profits in more than 70 years have nothing to do with it.

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I’m worried it would cause permanent tension between two friends.

Significant tension with our Mexican neighbors is exactly what Trump, Desantis and other weirdo’s rhetoric is causing. They’re just trying gin up more hatred from their bizarre, poorly educated, toxic supporters and they don’t get a fuck about anyone else.

Each time some GOP idiot talks about invading or bombing Mexico the news spreads like wildfire in Mexico while American news media ignores it almost completely. I repeatedly hear about bullshit the GOP freaks are spouting from my Mexican friends instead of reading about it in our own mainstream media.

How sad is it that I learned about Trump’s plan to bomb Mexico not from American news media, but from alarmed Mexican friends.

Manchin has as much chance of becoming the Democratic nominee as Pence did at being the GQP candidate.

Biden definitely learned something from watching the Republicans screw Obama again and again.