This is a blanket statement that doesn’t really hold up.

Commercial off the shelf cloud service based smart home = control over you.

Fully self hosted smart home = control over your house.

Oh it’s definitely easier if it’s on Wi-Fi. I mean, ask 20 people on the street if they even know what zigby is and you’re gonna get 20 blank stares.

But for people who are into this type of thing either to regain control of their networks, to optimize their networks, or both - it’s objectively the better choice in most ways other than easy mode adoption.

Personally I have a TON of small Wi-Fi devices that are constantly transmitting (cheap interior cameras for keeping an eye on pets all over the house - all my security cameras are hard wired) so I try to limit new Wi-Fi traffic onto the net if I can help it.

It’s more about having fewer devices on Wi-Fi network IMO.

Until Wi-Fi 5, only one device could talk on Wi-Fi at a time, and even with 5+ the number of devices is limited by a ton of factors, so the more devices you have chattering the slower everything gets as devices wait their turn to speak, have collisions, time out, try to speak again, etc.

You can mitigate this through several different methods, but removing randomly transmitting devices will always be a benefit.

Zwave, zigby, all of those all operate in a different band so it’s better for your internet connection to wireless devices if you can offload stuff into those ranges.

I just don’t like paying that much to suck at something so hard

I can understand why it was polarizing. The game for sure broke a lot of norms in the franchise, and I too wasn’t happy about that at first, because it didn’t meet my initial expectations. But I think the weapon system is designed to encourage the player to explore the game mechanics, which if you just stick with one type of weapon you miss so much of, so I think it’s important to the game that they had it the way they did.

But yeah, I remember hating it at first so I definitely get it. My perspective changed but I totally understand if it never worked for you.

Stat/EXP loss on death.

Unskippable cut scenes, especially before a boss. I want to play on hard difficulty, which means I WILL die to bosses. Do not force me to watch that shit 5+ times or I’m out like trout.

Frustrating?

I dunno, my mind changed a bit on this once I played BotW. As long as weapons are significantly different enough and there’s always ways to be effective with each, and you get a non-stop slew of them to rotate through, it’s fun.

If you lose any of the above conditions though and you’re just constantly trying to repair your weapon set, needing to pack stupid numbers of repair kits or stop at the corner store in town or whatever to repair your only set, that’s a no from me dawg.

But it can be fun. When I first played BotW I was really frustrated about durability until I complained about it to my friend and he was like “dude who cares, just pick up one of the 20 weapons laying on the ground and keep moving” I realized that I no longer need to hoard all the best weapons and I could just send it, and the game got way more fun.

That being said, most games do it poorly and 90% of the time I agree with you. Looking at YOU dead Island 2

Lol. As a fan of the farming sim genre, I approve this message.

No. But they’re really inexpensive and link up to people’s Amazon accounts so it’s easy to manage your books, if you are a person who likes to use Amazon for that.

I’ve had two Kindles, the first was before they had touch screens, and I loved it (this was a long, long time ago). Even with the hard case eventually I broke the screen after many years of travel and use, and hated the one I replaced it with. Awful piece of garbage, I wanted to return it and get one with physical buttons but they didn’t make them any more and I was too lazy to do second hand searching. I’ve never used Amazon to buy e books but I got a lot of free ones over the years (mostly cookbooks) and it was handy to be able to just download them directly to the device, but I prefer to manage books over USB and that always worked fine.

E-ink is amazing. Battery life lasts for ages, which really is what you want for a dedicated reader. There’s other types on the market, but it’s hard to compete with Amazon’s prices and feature set - especially because they sell ones that are ad-supported and that REALLY drives the prices down for people that are willing to have their lock screen be an ad that goes away when they wake the device, which is an easy compromise for most.

My Kindle just collected dust now, I use a supernote as a note taker and I use it for ebooks also. It was about $500 USD - granted it does way, way more than a Kindle, but yeah. I could probably get an ad-supported Kindle for 1/10 the cost, maybe, not sure what their prices are these days. Not saying that competing dedicated readers are in that price range, they’re not, but Kindle dominates the market due to brand recognition, advertising, and as far as I know they were the first to really offer a product like it in the first place so they’ll always have a big piece of the market, like iPods did in the MP3 player space vs objectively superior competitors that came after it.

Probably my favorite in the thread. Congrats.

Thank you so much!

I have a Weller WLC 40w, I did a good bit of reading before I bought it but I might have missed the mark. I got a brass sponge that I stuck in an old metal canister, and some of those crappy plastic unpowered vacuum suckers off Amazon.

I did buy my solder on Amazon, I wonder if that’s been an issue. It’s this: Kester 24-6337-0010 44 Rosin Core Solder 63/37, and I don’t use flux with it.

The solder you have, is it regulated because of lead content? I can go buy a hunk of pure lead without question so it’s weird to me if that’s the case.

Can you post a gear list? I got an iron a while ago and some crappy Amazon sucker tubes but I really think I’m missing some stuff because I’m either missing stuff or using crappy solder. I like to try and just take components off boards for practice but even that is a huge struggle. I’ve fixed a couple things but it’s rough work for sure.

I know it’s probably a skill issue, but I think some other tools might make certain things a bit easier as well, but without someone I know to ask questions I don’t want to just buy some random stuff.

First of all, get a sleep study done. Sleep paralysis can be a sign of underlying sleeping disorders such as apnea, which is incredibly unhealthy if untreated.

If you study checks out clean and you’re still looking for a way to manipulate something with your fingers then the only thing I can think of that you’d be able to DIY is some kind of Arduino-type button thingamajig that you could strap to a finger that sends a wireless signal to some kind of alarm in the room.

A D1 mini is small, cheap, and easy to configure. If you have no idea what I’m talking about you’ll need to do some homework and learn some stuff, but as far as projects go it’s pretty simple to set up. Hardest part would likely be rigging something that you could use that doesn’t get triggered inadvertently. Cockpit style toggle switch with a cover, maybe? Lol.

Dark Souls 2. A coworker gave me a steam code for it after I told him I wasn’t really a big fan of games where you just have to memorize opponent movesets. He said he’d gift it to me if I gave it an honest try, and I did.

And I didn’t like it. Didn’t understand the hype, didn’t have any idea what was going on with me dying and transforming or something, or why there were weird ghosts of other players all over the map. Maybe it makes sense if you know the genre but I didn’t like the gameplay and didn’t get any lore/story, so I ditched it.

I think it’s pretty well established through empirical observation that the universe is expanding, based on all our current understanding of the universe. We don’t know WHY, and we don’t understand how, but it’s not really under debate at this point as a fact.

What happens inside a black hole is entirely and utterly unknown, and it’s such a crazy mind bending concept that anything we theorize is as close to informed speculation as you might get.

I’d heavily take with a grain of salt anything that replaces something we know as well as you can observe with a theory that goes something like “well maybe we’re inside a black hole.”

I am not a mathematician so I am not able to well explain this concept, but there are different sizes infinities. “Infinity” is not one thing.

But there are infinite sets that contain infinite sets, so therefore there are infinities that are larger than other infinities.

It is possible that the infinite universe is expanding into another, larger, infinite space.

Or really anything is possible, we don’t know.

Numberphile has a pretty good video on different sized infinities. Newpipe is bugging out lately so I can’t dig up the video but if you’re interested you should be able to find it easily enough

I want to love FUTO keyboard but the swiping is SO bad. I gave up on it after a few weeks. Thought my thumb would learn but it was just too much.

Want to give it some time to ripen on the vine and hopefully improve in that area. Sad to hear it hasn’t changed since I put it down (probably around last August)

A radically different keyboard is thumb-key, available on F-Droid.

https://apt.izzysoft.de/packages/com.dessalines.thumbkey

I couldn’t stick with it long enough to develop the muscle memory but I see how it can be super good if you get quick with it. It’s VERY different. Designed specifically for thumb only typing, throws out QWERTY layout entirely, which was designed for two hands with 10 fingers to use effectively and has been ported over to a different device only due to familiarity amongst users, not because QWERTY is actually GOOD for devices that you text with one or two thumbs.

I encourage people to check it out. Privacy focused, designed for a single thumb and doesn’t rely on complex evaluation of swipe pattern recognition in order to be efficient. But you have to really force yourself to use it and I just didn’t have the discipline to beat the learning curve.

Bad password security is a human problem (can be back end bad practices also, but mostly human) whereas only using one auth factor is a security design problem. Again, MFA bad, single auth not good (but sometimes sufficient)

Also many people aren’t comfortable with auth apps yet and way less are comfortable with hardware tokens.

Passwords, while often implemented poorly by humans, aren’t something you can easily LOSE like your phone or a set of keys.

Many logins don’t really need very good security, like who cares if my lemmy login gets compromised I don’t want MFA here. Some might, I don’t. I still use a password manager but still, just a password is fine.

I dropped a credit union because they don’t allow MFA for online banking at ALL however, which is outrageous in 2025.

Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) : using multiple authentication factors to validate a user is who they say they are and grant access

Auth factors:

Something you know: is in your head. Password, PIN, etc

Something you have: credit card, hardware token (yubikey, mag stripe, etc), software token (auth, MS authenticator, etc)

Something you are: biometrics.

Somewhere you are: location based (IP, geo location, geo fence, etc)

Any one method is vulnerable to compromise. By using two separate FACTORS (aka MFA) you vastly reduce risk that you will be compromised.

Using a password and PIN is NOT MFA because they’re both the same auth factor.

Using just a token is NOT MFA because it’s only one auth factor.