[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 20 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

The far easier plan is to simply increase the size of the House of Representatives. All it needs is a change, or repeal, of the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929. Replace it with something like the Wyoming Rule and done.

Not only does that fix Presidential Elections it would also fix or substantially ease a pile of other problems like Gerrymandering by giving the denser population areas the Representation they should have.

The HoR being fixed at only 435 seats is at the core of so many problems in this country.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 4 points 22 hours ago

I didn't know about Canada and after thinking about it for a minute the United States does something similar for the States with .gov. Many, if not all, States have their own subdomain such as wyo.gov, montana.gov, and nebraska.gov.

Honestly it's always seemed wrong and somewhat confusing that non-country specific TLDs, such as .gov, are dedicated to the United States.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 34 points 1 day ago

What data does this app have that isn't freely available somewhere else?

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 0 points 1 day ago

The 2 percent of GDP target is imaginary.

The target was set so that no country would be able to join NATO and then just let everyone else pay for everything. You contribute to the common defense or you GTFO.

We can bicker about 2% being too high or too low and whether the target should have been adjusted Post Cold War but any argument that some target isn't necessary is just silliness.

No amount of NATO bombs or tanks would have stopped the invasion.

Oh I'm fairly certain that NATO military power would have stopped the invasion in the first 24 hours. A single flight of F-35s would have made those original Russian convoy's cease to exist à la the Highway of Death from 1991.

Even now NATO military power could substantially end the ground war in Ukraine before the end of the month.

It only would have fueled the flames and given legitimacy to Russia’s claimed insecurity.

So what? NATO didn't do it and there's STILL an ongoing war with a casualty toll well over a million and millions more displaced.

Economic power is much stronger than military sabre rattling.

Then the EU should have flexed them in 2014. They didn't and here we are.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 3 points 1 day ago

I fucking detest Trump, but there is a kernel of truth in his statements about Europe more or less just riding on the US’s coattails in terms of the balance of military power, instead of trying to be a meaningful and (taken together) a peer power to the US.

You don't have to point to Trump. Literally every United States President since Bill Clinton has publicly said it. Hell Bush Senior may have said it too. I'd have to go look it up.

It's been a sore spot for decades and has nothing to do with Trumperoni.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 23 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

What really grinds my gears is when shrinkflation happens to pre-packaged products that are used as ingredients because it throws recipes off. Here's three examples:

Campbell's pre-made soups like Cream of Mushroom or Creamy Tomato changed from 10.75oz down to 10.5oz. If your favorite casserole doesn't taste quite like it used to this is probably why.

Pre-packaged meats like bacon and tuna. For as long as I could remember pre-packaged bacon was always sold in some multiple of a pound, now you have to pay attention because often the bags are 10 or 12oz instead of 16. Growing up tuna was 6.5oz can and its now down to just 5.

The same thing has happened with canned vegetables like green beans or even canned mushrooms. Once you're done adjusting the amount of Cream of Mushroom in that Green Bean Casserole you're going to have to circle back and fix the amount of green beans in it.

When you bust out Grandma's recipe card you need to be careful because her "can" or "jar" of something was almost certainly bigger than what you have!

Oh, and if you are trying to make older recipes it's not just the volume / amount of things that changed it's also the formulation. Almost everything that is pre-processed has been re-formulated over the past 20 years so it no longer cooks or tastes the same as it used to.

Some old recipes are damn difficult to make correctly these days because the ingredients aren't the same type or size. It's frustrating.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 10 points 1 day ago

The Russians couldn't, or chose not too, afford to build their own and they've been paying for that mistake since they started this damn War.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 33 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I have to be misunderstanding this

You're not.

How fucking dumb are these people?

Yes it's dumber than a bucket of hair but you have to reflect on how they ended up here. Russia started a 21st Century war with a 20th Century Soviet built military. Back then a field radio was the size of your damn chest and they weren't even issued at the platoon level. That shit obviously isn't going to work on the modern battlefield where they have to control drones, guided artillery, distribute real time high resolution satellite imagery, and the battle lines shift by the hour instead of monthly.

The Soviet's didn't need these things and because they hadn't been invented yet Russia showed up without them and promptly got cock-slapped by Western backed Ukrainian forces who were vastly more prepared because The West, including both military and private companies, spent literally Trillions of dollars investing in a robust and secure communications infrastructure.

The Russian Army absolutely required this kind of communications infrastructure to function on a modern battlefield but it didn't exist so they did what they always do and applied their "Ingenuity" to the problem. They came up with using things like private Discord rooms, piggybacking on Ukraine's cellular infrastructure, and hijacking Starlink; basically using the same Western tech that Ukraine was using.

So in the contest of not have anything at all and using tech that was subject to Western spying the Russian Military, at least at some level, chose the latter.

It seems that perhaps the Russian MoD has decided that the Western spying has become to pervasive and is shutting down these cobble-together communication and control systems but that's going to put the field level operations right back to where they were 2 years ago.

You can't win a 21st Century fight with 20th Century systems. It's like playing a game of Civilization where you've got Aircraft Carriers and the other player is attacking you with Canoes.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 9 points 1 day ago

I’m assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case

British Indian Ocean Territory, it was just shortened to .io so it would fit into the naming scheme.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That's a great question and the answer can be found in the wikipedia entry for the .uk domain.

In a nutshell the volunteer "Naming Committee" setup back in 1985 established a rule that entities needed to register into specific subdomains based on entity type such as .co, where the .co part stood for "Company". They did this to make managing registrations easier and to provide an "at a glance" way to see what kind of website you were visiting (commercial, government, charity, etc). The "Naming Committee" was extremely strict about ensuring that domains were registered to a specific entity and in the correct subdomain.

By the mid-90s the volunteer "Naming Committee" was entirely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of domains being registered so that volunteer group was replaced by Nominet UK. Nominet didn't open the .uk TLD to registration until 2014 and by then the subdomain thing (.co.uk) was so embedded into the United Kingdom's internet structure that it had become tradition and NOT using was confusing to many people.

There's more subdomains than just .co as well and both wikipedia articles I linked list them.

tl;dr .uk absolutely exists in the UK, it's just used differently than almost anywhere else in the world.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I’ve been using Linux since 2005

Okay, so as a n00b you can be somewhat forgiven. As someone who started with Slack in 1997 I don't have that excuse.

...and almost every time it turns out to be a problem that can’t be exploited on it’s own. but requires the use of other vulnerabilities.

Since when did chaining vulnerabilities make something not a problem? Are you claiming that the CUPS vulnerability announced in late September isn't an issue simply because it takes multiple steps?

The only exception I can recall is the zx util compression tool...

I don't mean to be an ass but were you asleep December 2021 through January 2022? Log4Shell was a 10 of 10 critical vulnerability!

What about CVE-2022-47939 from December 2022?

I can keep going if needed but I think my point is made. The vulnerabilities, even true kernel level stuff, are out there.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 1 points 6 days ago

You shouldn’t be doing anything interacting from a server anyways.

Ideally no but in the real world it happens, especially with with Windows Servers.

10

As originally conceived, the House was supposed to grow with every decennial census. George Washington spoke just once at the Constitutional Convention — and on its final day — to endorse an amendment lowering the ratio of constituents to members to 30,000.

Today, House members represent roughly 762,000 people each. That number is on track to reach 1 million by mid-century.

9
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by Buelldozer@lemmy.today to c/linuxmint@lemmy.ml

One of my computers is an HP Elitebook X360 1040 G8 (convertible) and I'm happy to report that in Laptop Mode both LM21 and LM22 work perfectly. There's full control of the normal hardware including the touch screen, good performance, and good battery life.

With a couple of exceptions Mint also handles the shift to tablet mode pretty damn well. The keyboard and trackpad are disabled, the keyboard backlight shuts off, and the screen easily changes orientation with rotation.

The exceptions though are so fundamental to touch screen use in general though that I feel like I must be missing something?!

First and foremost is an on screen keyboard. I know it can be enabled under accessibility settings but when I do that it splashes up a keyboard that permanently fills half the screen. If I close the keyboard window it goes away but I can't find a way to get it to come back except to unfold the machine and re-enable it again.

It may not be possible to make it launch predicatively, although Gnome itself does. but why isn't there an icon at the top or bottom of the screen that I can tap to bring it back on demand?

The second one is scrolling, especially in Firefox. I know that Grab and Drag is possible because you can do it with the regular Firefox scroll bar but the scroll bar can be difficult to get on because of it's size and even then the scrolling action is backwards of both iOS and Android. This should be fixable be enabling gestures but surprisingly gestures don't have any assignable scroll functionality.

I'm really confused by these two issues. They seem so fundamental to how a touchscreen is used, especially the on screen keyboard, that it seems impossible they weren't addressed year ago. It's far more probably that I'm missing something obvious, but what?

6
submitted 2 months ago by Buelldozer@lemmy.today to c/linuxmint@lemmy.ml

I've had at least one computer with regular Mint + Cinnamon installed since V19 and it's always worked well for me. I somehow only learned about LMDE last month and since I've previously run Debian I figured I'd give it a shot.

I took the drive with my LM22 installation out and installed a brand new 1TB NVME, put LMDE "Faye" on it and YIKES.

I'd forgotten how "raw" regular Debian is in nearly everything from Grub to package management and even Cinnamon is somehow less sharp and sort of lackluster on LMDE.

The first boot up went okay but trying to swap the nouveau drivers for the Nvidia drivers did not go well at all and somehow ended up with all the fonts and icons broken.

I couldn't figure out how to fix it and decided to simply re-install LMDE from scratch, no big deal.

On the 2nd install I started getting AER errors on boot and every time I rebooted I got more of them. At one point the DE locked up entirely and I had to manually power cycle the machine. I couldn't get to the desktop after because of an endless string of AER errors.

In between reboots, while I could still get into the desktop, I was installing updates and while that process was pretty much the same as regular Mint it was also slower, even after changing over to the fastest repositories available. The update manager also didn't work as well. For instance the first update run said it was complete and wanted a reboot but before I could do that the update manager automatically ran again and it showed me all the updates it had just installed as needing installed again. WTF?

After frustrations with the Nvidia drivers, the weirdness of updating, broken desktop environment, and the AER errors I decided to see what would happen if I installed regular LM22.

With LM22 on that exact same hardware, including the new NVME, everything works perfectly. No errors, Nvidia drivers installed without issue, updates worked as expected and Cinnamon looks and behaves just like you'd expect.

Swapped out the NVME for the original drive that had LM22 on it and it too works just like I'd expect.

I'm not running weird-o hardware either; it's a Gigabyte motherboard and an Intel i5 10700k with 32G of RAM and an Nvidia 2060. No overclocking or performance tweaks.

I have no idea what I did wrong, if anything, or why LMDE seems to hate my hardware but for me on that system LMDE is not at parity with regular Linux Mint.

20
submitted 5 months ago by Buelldozer@lemmy.today to c/guns@lemmy.world

New York may become the first state to bar gun companies from selling pistols that can easily be converted into machine guns.

14
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by Buelldozer@lemmy.today to c/protonprivacy@lemmy.world

I read the sidebar and didn't see anything about asking questions so apologies in advance if this post breaks a rule.

I'm in the U.S. and wanting to knowif Proton Family is a good choice for my use case.

Two decades ago I got tired of changing email addresses whenever my ISP changed so I registered my surname as a .net vanity domain and started running my own email server at home. When Google started offering Google for Organizations for free if you had less than 10 users I folded up my personal email server and shifted everything over. We use it for e-mail and basic family calendaring.

Last month when going through bills my wife and I were once again frustrated by coordination required to sign into various accounts. "Hey what's the password for $CreditCard?" or "What's the MFA you just got for $BankAccount?" or "What's the password for Disney"?"

That got me started looking for a family password manager so we could easily share and keep this stuff up to date.

At the same time we realized that were paying for YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, two YouTube Music, and an Amazon Music subscription. Whoops.

Well, no problem. We'll just "family share" the YTTV and YTP subscriptions so everyone has everything and we save some money.

Nope. G-Suite doesn't allow family sharing. So we're all going to have to create seperate @gmail.com addresses to make this work. Oh, and I'll have to shift the YTTV subscription from my vanity domain to a regular @gmail as well. Which breaks the entire idea behind the vanity domain in the first place.

While I researching a Family Password Manager of course I found Proton Pass. While I was looking at the pricing for it I realized that they also have a "Family" setup for email which looks interesting.

So now I'm considering porting my vanity domain and all it's email out of G-Suite and over to Proton Family. At nearly $300 a year it's not exactly inexpensive, since I'd basically be paying it until I die, and it will be a fair bit of work to switch everything over so I don't want to do it unless it's going to work.

So would Proton Family be a good choice? Are there any significant technical challenges to migrating a custom domain and email out of G-Suite and into Proton?

Edit: This post was rambly and unclear. The TL;DR is that I’m increasingly annoyed with G-Suite and since I’m looking at Proton Pass anyway I'm wondering about Proton Suite (which includes Email, Calendar, and Pass).

17
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by Buelldozer@lemmy.today to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

Always surprises me when I go to do something in HA and realize that I can't figure out how.

This time its lights, specifically making sure that they don't get left on.

Until now I've simply been creating an automation for each light switch so that if it changes state from Off to On and when it's 30 minutes after sunrise it's starts a 15 minute wait and then changes the state of the switch to off.

This approach mostly works but it's less than ideal.

First I'm having to create an automation for each device. How do I do it by Area, or list / group of devices, instead?

Second if a device is turned on too early there's no state change for the automation to catch and it never fires. I could fix this by creating another automation that checks for it but then I'll have even more of them to manage.

Third this doesn't work very well if you want different things to happen on the weekends as opposed to during the weekday. For instance on a Saturday I may WANT that closet light to stay on longer because I'm putting away clothes.

It'd be really nice if I could program HA like this 'On a weekday if you see any device on this list turn on 30 minutes after Sunrise I want you to turn whichever one(s) it was off again 15 minutes later.'.

I'm must be missing something here because surely HA can do this, right?

1
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by Buelldozer@lemmy.today to c/general@lemmy.today

Both FireFox on PC and Connect on Android keep signing me out, throwing general "error" messages, and refusing to load the next page.

Liftoff on iOS can't even find lemmy.today in order to add it as an instance!

I'm not seeing any discussion of these kinds of problems elsewhere but they've been consistent since the .19 upgrade and they've persisted after the .19.1 update.

17
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Buelldozer@lemmy.today to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

Shortly after the ratGDO v2.5 was released I ordered one and a couple of days later I ordered a case from Etsy to go with it.

Two days later the Etsy seller messages me asking if have the v2.5 or v2.5i because the cases are different. WTF? There's already a new version?! I tell the seller to make it the v2.5i because that's probably what I'll get.

So last week I received a very nice red case from the Etsy Seller HighTower3D out of the North Carolina. Seriously, this thing is nice. The build quality is high, it has magnets in the bottom for mounting, comes with allen screws (and the allen wrench you need) and a couple of little zip ties.

So this week my ratGDO shows up and...it's v2.52i! A quick check of the website shows that there's now a v2.53 and that makes four revisions in the last month!

You can't make this stuff up so all I can do is laugh...and give away the v2.5i case that I spent $26 on and doesn't fit the ratGDO version I ended up with.

I have no use for this case so I'm giving it away to someone who can; make sure you have a v2.5i though because this call will NOT fit any other version.

If you are in the United States and can use this case then leave a reply below. 😊

16

I ordered some sidewalk heating mats from HeatTrak and I want to automate them with HA so that they come on when it makes sense to do so based on the data from my Tempest Weather Station.

According to HeatTrack my mats will have a combined resistive load of 5A which is well within the spec of the Zooz ZEN05 or ZEN14, both rated for 15A resistive loads, but when I asked them about it they did not recommend using either of them with heated mats. They couldn't, or wouldn't, explain why and it doesn't make sense to me why this wouldn't work.

My next thought was to simply swap the outlet to something smart but this is an outdoor outlet so it needs to be GFCI and there's essentially no Z-Wave GFCI outlets made.

Do I really need to use something like an Enbrighten Z-Wave Plus 40-Amp contactor for this or am I missing something here?

17

I have an automation that turns my driveway lights on when motion is detected. It normally works fairly well but it was windy last night and that caused the automation to trip endlessly as my trees and bushes were whipping around. Lights would come on, shut off 10 minutes later, then turn right back on again. It basically did this all night until I disabled the automation.

I'll do some fine tuning of the motion sensors which will help and I'm considering adding a condition to the automation where it won't trip if the wind speed is above a certain level but how can I add some kind of cool down timer to the automation to prevent it from endlessly engaging?

12

First the layout. My garage is setup similar to this one, although mine is attached, has three light fixtures, and my driveway is 4 cars wide.

The wife wants me to replace the three basic on / off fixtures that we have (they're getting rusty) and keep them all matching. If I'm going to do this I want to add a camera to the setup.

Functionally I'd like the lights to have or work like they have dual bright capability where they come on full bright at sunset then after a couple of hours they dim down unless they detect motion. If they detect motion then they come back to full bright for a period of time then dim back down again. They do this for a set period of hours, say 4, then they turn off completely unless they detect motion.

My current lights are already automated for on / off (but not dimming or motion) through the use of HA and a z-wave switch.

Where I'm getting stuck is that I can see at least three ways to do this but none of them are perfect.

  1. Replace my dumb carriage fixtures with new dumb fixtures then change the switch to a dimming version plus add a motion sensor and camera out front. Then setup HA for the functionality I want. The upside of doing it this way is that it's very easy to get matching fixtures. The downside is that the motion sensor and camera will not be well integrated visually.

  2. Replace my dumb fixtures with ones that have dual bright built in. It's easy to do, and I could even keep the HA Automation I have setup now, but again the camera setup is not going to integrate well visually. I'm also concerned that three motion sensors controlling three lights will cause trouble for the camera (or each other) because they will react to different things and turn themselves on and off independently.

  3. Replace my dumb fixtures with smarter ones. In the center position I'd use one that has an integrated motion sensor and camera. This Reolink seems like it would work pretty well. However RL doesn't make any fixtures that match it, which means my center fixture would look different than the other two.

I may just have to deal with mismatched fixtures but does anyone have any suggestions? Am I missing an option?

1

The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member for every 747,000 or so Americans. That’s by far the highest population-to-representative ratio among a peer group of industrialized democracies, and the highest it’s been in U.S. history.

view more: next ›

Buelldozer

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF