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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As someone who is all-in on smart home kit, I tend to agree. Everyone who visits my home loves how it all works, but I have a strict rule that nothing is connected to the Internet: it’s either a local protocol (ZigBee, Matter) or connected to a local-only VLAN and is orchestrated by Home Assistant. It’s increasingly difficult to recommend products to people starting out that don’t involve some vague cloud service that can’t be relied on, and most people don’t want to go from zero to Home Assistant.






  • The reason they were called that is becaus a lot of early models use ultrasonic rather than infrared or radio so they made a loud clicking noise. My grandparents and aunts were familiar with those so they still called all remotes the clicker.

    The thing is, growing up we had a Bang & Olufsen TV remote that had clicky buttons - really, very satisfyingly clicky - even though it used RF, but I just assumed all remotes were like that and that’s why they were called clickers.


  • No, it’s nothing sinister. Most user-facing business workstations run Windows and have a Windows COA or, more recently, have the Windows product key baked into firmware, so it’s easy-peasy for the seller to install a fresh, working copy of Windows. The Dell WYSE PCs are Thin Clients, which are used to access Windows (or another OS) running on another PC or a server somewhere so the Thin Client doesn’t have or need a license; this means it’s not easy for the seller to install a hassle-free version of Windows since it will immediately start pestering the user for a license and for novices they’ll assume the computer is broken and return it. The lightweight Thin Client OS they use is neither use nor ornament outside an enterprise settings so they don’t bother reinstalling that. Obviously the seller could install Linux but the majority of people who are okay with Linux would probably sneer and say “ugh, Distro X? I only use Distro Y” and reinstall anyway, so it’s easier just to sell it without an OS. Ask me how I know all this.

    Edit to add: some thin clients do have strange architectures and use weird OSes but that’s not a concern here. Aside from size and specs, the only material difference between the WYSE 5070 and a “normal” PC is that the EFI will have limited configuration options, but unless you’re planning on installing Windows XP that’s probably not an issue.

    Edit to add to edit to add: I just found this https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/5070/. It’s a detailed breakdown of the device and mentions that it could be speced with an onboard SPF NIC? That’s crazy. It also shows someone modding a second NVMe drive into it.



  • It’s not a particularly nice way of doing things, but worst case: if you can add both your old and new accounts in, say, Thunderbird, you can literally drag your emails from your old mailbox and drop them into your new one.

    A better option might be to see if whatever software/host you’re looking at supports gathering email using IMAP - that way it can migrate all your existing emails autonomously and periodically scrape your old mailbox for new ones.