My DVR and IP cameras are on a network with no internet access. My server has access to the camera network and I can connect to the server over a VPN for remote viewing. I definitely don’t trust the DVR or the IP cameras. They are constantly trying to connect to a bunch of different IP addresses, some of which are in China.

Nobody’s going to know what you’re printing at home unless you’re using one of those spyware filled, cloud connected printers.

They could also use treated waste water for cooling the data centers instead of dumping it in the ocean.

OPNsense doesn’t officially support ARM. You need an x86 PC for it unless you want to mess with an experimental build.

OpenWRT does support the Raspberry Pi though. You will want the Pi 5 for that since it has PCIe to connect an ethernet card to.

Do they need to play on a set top DVD player? If they are going to be played on a computer, you can reencode to a modern codec and burn them as data DVDs.

Backblaze personal doesn’t support Linux or BSD, so it would be useless for a NAS.

Mullvad doesn’t support port forwarding anymore. That means you will only be able to connect to people that do have port forwarding.

Nobody is going to be able to sell any 3D printers in California or Washington if these bills pass. It’s impossible to prevent them from being easily modified. Anyone can replace the controller board with an open source one.

I’ve just been using an old Plantronics Blackwire 300 since someone gave me several pairs of them. They are very lightweight and the audio is decent. The USB connection works fine on Linux. You can also disconnect the headset from the USB adapter and plug it into a 4 pin headset jack.

You have to set some upload and connection limits or it will slow down your internet for everything else. What you set those limits to will depend on your internet connection.

Hidden junk that a person wouldn’t see would likely be picked up by a screen reader. That would make the site much harder to use for a visually impaired person.

Mumble will do all of that except screen sharing. Only the server has to deal with NAT.

Don’t rely on the VPN kill switch for torrenting. It’s not fast enough to prevent your IP from leaking if the VPN disconnects. The torrent client needs to be bound to the VPN interface. Transmission doesn’t have an option to do that, so you would have to run it in a container instead.

It’s also most certainly against the terms of service for your ISP, VPN or VPS, so you could get your service terminated.

Running something like this will put a big target on your back. I hope you have your network locked down tight.

I’ve been using their access points for a long time. They have been working quite well. I do have an old WiFi 5 AP that’s starting to fail, but that’s not too surprising considering the age.

I’ve just been running the controller with a local account. Hopefully they won’t try to force me into using a cloud account.

The clock is only useful if the time is correct. They could at least put a small super capacitor in there to keep the time during short power outages.

I wish they didn’t even have clocks. The darn thing resets every time there’s a big gust of wind.

It still works in Firefox if you switch to the desktop site. You can also use uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock with it to get rid of the ads.

MeshCore runs at 2.73 kbps and it can send a short text message in a fraction of a second. The short turbo preset on Meshtastic is 21.88 kbps, but that’s still too slow for images. The higher speed reduces the range by quite a bit too.

For images, you would be better off using WiFi HaLow, which runs several mbps on 900 MHz.

If you have a ham license, there is HamWAN and ARDEN as well. They are fast enough to stream live video. They can work over long distances, but the high gain antennas have to be aimed carefully.