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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Based on a very brief glance at this it looks like I would be reliant on self hosting it to circumvent the need for a BAA (although the hosting company may still need to provide one, unless I literally hosted it from my house or something?) not sure

    Will investigate further, had not heard of this


  • It is generally best to keep an entirely separate account for professional dealings so such things are segregated, at least that’s what I do

    Signal as a zoom replacement would be great but a big part of the deal would be the necessity for hipaa compliance. I would imagine a huge part of what keeps zoom alive is financial injections from telehealth provides like myself that need a platform that is hipaa compliant that patients understand. EMR software often comes with a telehealth platform built in nowadays but it tends to not work as well and confuses the tech illiterate who got trained on zoom during COVID years.

    I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff they have to do on their end to be hipaa compliant that I’m ignorant of but the primary thing is that they have to share a document called a business associate agreement (baa) with me that essentially says they will take meaningful steps to appropriately safeguard any protected health information and makes zoom liable if a breach of their systems exposes PHI.

    This is why telehealth can’t (technically, people still do it) occur over teams, skype, discord, facetime, hangouts, etc. google, apple, microsoft, etc have no interest in taking on that liability.

    The difficult piece will be challenging zooms pricing. They offer healthcare zoom for $15/mo with BAA. There are better deals though, doxy.me does it for free (they claim this is subsidized by paid account which I believe because they are substantially more than zoom starting at 35/mo).

    Would be a great way to get them a revenue stream too. I don’t know anyone who practices heavily telemedicine that relies on free solutions; the only ones I know that utilize the bundled emr components or the free doxy.me service are clinicians that mostly practice in person and only do a small handful of telehealth sessions a month, like under 10% of their total billing. For people like me where it’s 50-100% of their billing it’s almost always a paid subscription. more reliable, tax deduction, and access to support


  • I have a similar experience with the am6b+ and a similar sized library. Even on the stock android browsing my iptv provider which has 23,000+ channels has no issue

    But you mention cec - does the x4q+ power off and on with the original display remote? That’s my one nag about the am6b+. Ugoos locked the boot loader and refuses to unlock so cec power on doesn’t work, every other cec command does though.

    I just have it wake on lan by having homeassistant send it a packet when it notices my avr turns out as a workaround but this isn’t the most elegant solution and like 1:20 times it hiccups


  • How is the x4q plus? I frankly dont care about av1 (I’m a store everything in remux/flac person) but the x4q, theoretically, should have a faster processor than my aging am6b+

    One suggestion I would make is to copy your install of coreelec onto the emmc directly. In my experience that makes everything a bit “snappier”, it’s easy enough to do, and only takes a few minutes.

    “SSH into you device; then run ceemmc -x; type in Y; then type in 1. Once the process is complete, remove your external media and enjoy. To speed up CoreELEC installed on the eMMC on Ugoos devices, go to Settings-> CoreELEC → Hardware → eMMC Speed Mode and change it to HS200/HS400”


  • ugoos box with coreelec. I use the am6b+. Only format it can’t play is av1

    stock runs a stripped down version of android with 0 ads that is very barebones so if you just want streaming apps this is for you. I use this part for my IPTV client but basically any streaming app available on the play store or that can be side loaded with an apk works

    You can also flash coreelec and run kodi natively. You can just use the android build of kodi but using the coreelec build has many advantages; it can boot directly to kodi, it’s much snappier within the ui, and most importantly there are far less (basically no) issues with content playback. This option can basically play any file you throw at it natively. You can also set it up to stream files from a pc/nas with jellyfin/plex/emby but this is really the setup for weirdos like me that refuse to subscribe to streaming services (aside from an iptv provider).

    Notably the ugoos is the only device, currently, that is licensed to playback Dolby vision content and actually does so properly.

    Literally every other option, amazon stuff, shield, chromecast, appletv, pc directly connected to tv, the internal players of TVs, etc don’t play back Dolby vision content correctly in some way. Either they fail at playing certain profiles, they have issues with color accuracy, they flicker, etc. obviously this depends on your setup though, if you have a Samsung dv is meaningless unless you plan to get an oled at some point. That said even if dv is pointless for you it still does hdr/hdr10+ and all the lossless audio stuff/audio pass through

    If Dolby vision and av1 are important to you the coreelec team have extended their work to other devices that have av1 support. Do research though because not all of them are fully supported, like some you need a usb Ethernet/wifi adapter which is dumb

    Downsides are that it’s tough to set up, like you should be a tinker type person. This is a bit more of a pain than an apple tv or a shield. Also it’s not the easiest thing to get support

    But if you’re like me and you’re super paranoid about streaming services harvesting your watch data and selling it, plus super frustrated that they continually fragment and want yet another $17 to access another library that you only want 3 shows of while increasing prices every year and still shoving an excessive amount of advertising in despite having you pay for the service, I would highly recommend just pirating media and using kodi/jellyfin to locally stream.

    As an added bonus you get a noticeably higher image quality if you download stuff sourced from physical media because most (tbf not all) streaming networks have shit quality, much less likely to have issues with buffering or the stream dropping from 4k to 480p because the bandwidth wasn’t there for 4 seconds, often can get much better subtitles that are timed and syncd (and in the case of anime like animated and shit), etc. plus no ads, ever, no data harvesting (disconnect your tv from the internet so it doesn’t use brightness patterns and power usage to determine what you’re watching!), no corporate censorship (my collection has Daria with the original music and not the “soundalikes” because mtv couldn’t be bothered to relicense the music. It also has all the blackface episodes of various shows like community and it’s always sunny because I can decide whether something is offensive or satire for myself without netflix or disney to act as a nanny)


  • the answer is basically all TVs are subsidized to some degree. A list is somewhat pointless because they all do some sketchy shit and as lg has recently shown they reserve the right to change the terms years after the fact with firmware updates, even if you buy a flagship model that cost 3-5k

    Basically you need to use it intelligently. Either don’t connect it to the internet at all, only connect it to an intranet/isolated vlan, or (least effective) block every suspicious outgoing request with your router or a dns thing like adguard/pihole.

    The alternatives are to buy a non consumer display (eg something for signage or for like a meeting room in an office) which are usually more durable but also often far more expensive (no ad subsidies), the panel quality is generally noticeably worse (unless you’re buying a mediocre tv), and you lose out on enthusiast features (earc, vrr, etc). Or you can get a solid projector; the cheap projectors are usually kind of junk but nice ones are quite nice and often (but not always, they’re increasingly “smart”) have barebones ui/os. This can be pretty impractical for your living situation though



  • A school district spends $180,000 (hyperbole, I don’t know actual numbers) of taxpayer money deploying this system between the actual hardware costs, maintenance costs to install the hardware, it costs to implement it into their network, and probably an ongoing contact with this dummy’s company. Maybe only for support but with the way things are now I’m sure they built this app to phone home to their servers (introducing a huge potential security risk over simply running it locally on the schools existing network infrastructure in a docker or something), calling it “cloud based”, and charging the district 1k/month to run the devices the district now owns and should be able to operate without the company. The company then talks about how they’ll back up records and safeguard data so you don’t have to worry about that (that it dept you pay is pointless!)

    Three months after deployment it turns out the sensors can be tripped by many things not related to vaping, maybe increases in heat, mouthwash breath, etc. the false positives are due to a hardware flaw and cannot be fixed with a patch. Feel free to upgrade to sensor version 2.0, now with improved accuracy! (read: the problem still exists but isn’t as bad). Only another 40k to buy the new hardware, rip out the old hardware (which is now worthless), install the new stuff, and configure the software for everything (again, maintenance and IT costs)

    9 months after deployment the company is doing poorly because their product is stupid and only a few idiots actually bought it (way to go idiot). There’s concerns because they sent a new Eula that outlines data sharing policies. They are potentially finding ways to harvest the data they agreed to safely store to try and create a new revenue stream to right their sinking ship. District counsel says fighting the Eula change will be expensive and there’s not much precedent for it, plus they state they will anonymize data before sharing so it’s not a ferpa violation, technically. It feels scummy but you can’t do anything about it. You also don’t really trust them to only sell anonymized data but you can’t prove they aren’t crossing that line so whatever, I guess

    15 months after deployment they get hacked because they’ve run out of vc cash, never could get an actual profit stream going (turns out they’re spending 750,000/yr on salaries for 5 people and they’re all kitted out with sick work computers for what is basically coding a web app, but I digress). security of their servers was one of the budgetary constraints they chose to make to right the ship (but had to keep the $1800 office chairs and the 15-20k/mo rent loft they use as an office in a hcol area). The contract says this may happen and they’re not responsible unless there’s gross negligence on their part, which you can’t prove, and that they do some bare minimum reactionary shit after the fact to mitigate damage. So they’re legally blameless and now you get to notify your community their children’s data was leaked to god knows who, whoops

    22 months after the fact they go out of business officially. You get a form email about the company’s journey and the difficult decision they had to make to stop fucking around on a dumb project that sucks because no dumbass vc will give them fun bucks anymore to keep playing tech bro billionaire. All the sensors stop working because they require a connection to the servers, which they shut off immediately without a sunset period. You’re reminded every day when you log in to the schools admin panel and get 350 “sensor not connected” error messages and your students bitch about the “sensor not connected: server not available” error pop up showing up on their classroom console. It takes IT a few days to remove their shit from the network and that costs you even more money in wasting your IT staff time when they should be fixing the broken computers in the computer lab or whatever.

    Now your school has a bunch of weird boxes on the wall. Sometimes people ask you about them and you go “oh those don’t do anything” and remember that they cost taxpayers in your community tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars and wasted hundreds of hours of your supports staffs time that they could’ve been using to improve the school

    But then you scroll on instagram and see there’s this new thing that will detect when kids are bullying each other. You just have to put a camera in each classroom. It’s okay, it won’t record. It will just use the power of AI and machine learning. You’re sold right there and the cycle starts again



  • Do you rent or own your place? If you have the ability to run Ethernet drops to camera points imo the best solution by far is to get poe cameras. Amcrest/reolink are good options. You’ll need a poe switch, this can be expensive but you can pick them up cheap used if you look for old ones sold as ewaste. I got mine for $40 and it has 24 ports which is far more cameras than I’ll ever need.

    Similarly, you can get a nvr, which is basically a poe switch with a built in management system and a slot for a hard drive. These can be a couple hundred. Or you can get an old ewaste pc, like literally an $50-$100 sff core i3 pc from an office off ebay. Thow a decent sized hard drive in this, the bigger it is the more recording you can do. I have this connected to my home server for storage so if you have a home server/NAS that’s also an option but not necessary, just gives you more record time and eliminates the need for buying a computer to act as a server.

    Then software to tie it all together: ZoneMinder Moonfire NVR Frigate MotionEyeOS OS-NVR Are all good options Also closed source options like shinobi, I spy, blueiris, and a ton of others

    Not revealing my specific setup for opsec

    This imo is the best possible setup. For one, it sounds expensive but ultimately costs just a bit more. You can get super expensive poe cameras but comparable poe cameras to wyze/eufy/etc are often a bit cheaper because they don’t have the WiFi nonsense built in. Of course, you pay that back with the switch and server.

    But the bigger thing is reliability and customization. Before this I had a eufy cam setup. They were wireless which was admittedly easier to setup, no fishing wires. But every couple days I’d get notifications “camera x is unavailable” for no reason. My home has a very solid mesh WiFi network with several APs. The cameras are just shit and drop connection randomly. Sometimes they’ll be on for 4 weeks straight, sometimes they’ll disconnect 20 times an day. If you have a setup with 10 cameras it means one is always doing it.

    Then eufy came out and was server siding thumbnail id images, despite claiming to never do this. Then they doubled down on this, and took away the guarantee that they wouldn’t “cloud” your shit. Essentially they would do “ai” facial recognition server side because their little base stations aren’t powerful enough. They’d then store thumbnails of recognized users for future id purposes. This caused me to sell the eufy cameras and go poe. The poe cameras work in an isolated vlan, eg the cameras and all their features work without a connection to the internet and I can tunnel to my server to view them remotely. You don’t need to have this setup but I’d recommend it if you can

    Finally going off the above with your own server and your own hardware you can do whatever. Eufy had ai recognition but it was shitty. I’m sure it’s improved a bit. I’ve found running the models locally appears to be better, more features like yard perimeters, object detection, etc. you can also separate the ai model from the nvr software, etc. frigate is an interesting potential here, still needs some growth wrt object detection but if they get it a bit more mature imo will be a serious contender


  • Or if you have an old machine and a enough money to by a few hard drives (which you should if you can afford a synology) throw the drives in the old machine and slap something on there. Truenas, Proxmox, unraid, etc. unraids probably the easiest but it costs money. All of them have some kind of docker/kubernetes so you can just run whatever open source version of the thing you want. Nextcloud, libreoffice, etc. you could just install some version of linux too, doesn’t need to be one of those, but those are much simpler to deploy and (most of them) are tailor made for the task

    Synology can do all of this too but isn’t as expandable. Want more power to run a jellyfin server and transcode 8 4k streams at once? Plop in a gpu or better yet upgrade to an intel with quicksync for low power usage. Want 8 more hard drives? Change the case and add an hba. Want 24 more? Add another hba and a disk shelf, as long as your motherboard has enough pci lanes. It doesn’t? Upgrade it. The trade off is usability, the synology stuff is easier to use. It’s also more expensive initially, you can make a basic nas with a $50 e waste pc that an office was throwing away (though tbf you’ll probably spend a bit adding disks to it just like you would with a synology)

    Depends on how much of a dork you are I guess