Great news! Palestinian journalist & filmmaker Bisan Atef Owda has won an Emmy for her documentary “It’s Bisan From Gaza and I’m Still Alive.”

Hollywood tried hard to cancel her & strip her nomination. Victory is all the sweeter as a rebuke to their hate.
https://www.qasimrashid.com/p/when-hollywood-tries-to-cancel-palestinians

Okay, so let me tell you about my doorbell, from a #networking perspective.

When you push the button by the door, it sends a message over the #zigbee wireless mesh network in my house. It probably goes through a few hops, getting relayed along the way by the various Zigbee light switches and "smart outlets" I have.

Once it makes it to my utility closet, it's received by a Zigbee-to-USB dongle, through a USB hub (a simple tree network) plugged into an SFF PC. From there, it gets fed into zigbee2mqtt, which, as the name implies, publishes it to my local #mqtt broker.

The mqtt broker is in the small #kubernetes cluster of #raspberrypi nodes I run in my utility closet. To get in (via a couple of #ethernet switch hops), it goes through #metallb, which is basically a proxy-ARP type service that advertises the IP address for the mqtt endpoint to the rest of my network, then passes the traffic to the appropriate container via a #linux veth device.

I have #HomeAssistant, running in the same Kubernetes cluster, subscribed to these events. Within Kubernetes, the message goes through the CNI plugin that I use, #flannel. If the message has to pass between hosts, Flannel encapsulates it in VXLAN, so that it can be directed to the correct veth on the destination host.

Because I like #NodeRed for automation tasks more than HomeAssistant, your press of the doorbell takes another hop within the Kubernetes cluster (via a REST call) so that NodeRed can decide whether it's within the time of day I want the doorbell to ring, etc. If we're all good, NodeRed publishes an mqtt message (more VXLANs, veths, etc.)

(Oh and it also sends a notification to my phone, which means another trip through the HomeAssistant container, and leaving my home network involves another soup of acronyms including VLANs, PoE, QoS, PPPoE, NAT or IPv6, DoH, and GPON. And maybe it goes over 5G depending on where my phone is.)

Of course something's got to actually make the "ding dong" sound, and that's another Raspberry Pi that sits on top of my grandmother clock. So to get *there* the message hops through a couple Ethernet switches and my home WiFi, where it gets received by a little custom daemon I wrote that plays the sound via an attached #HiFiBerry board. Oh but wait! We're not quite done with networking, because the sound gets played through PulseAudio, which is done through a UNIX domain socket.

SO ANYWAY, that's why my doorbell rarely works and why you've been standing outside in the snow for five minutes.

You don't want to limit yourself to a single device category & want to use your TUXEDO flexibly?
The TUXEDO InfinityFlex 14 offers you three different modes: Laptop-, Monitor-, Tablet mode.

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-InfinityFlex-14-Gen1

#tuxedo #convertible #Flexibility #linux #modes

I think my philosophy when making software is that it should work for people with zero money or no bank account / credit card.

I know it's not a popular mindset to be in since money and profit is everything in the tech world.

I think it comes from growing up as a kid with no disposable income or access to anything but my shitty computer.

I'd rather support people with almost nothing than people with latest and greatest tech gizmos and spare cash for subscription services. 😅

Last week I mentioned the open source privilege. It has a big brother: the self-hosting privilege. Escaping surveillance is one valid motive to self-host, but not everyone can do it.

Let’s design tech that solves systemic problems. Let’s include the busy ones, the families, the elders, those who don’t know and those who can’t afford to care.

Let’s take care of society as a whole.

https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/01/18-escaping-surveillance-capitalism-at-scale/

#opensource #surveillance #privilege