A long, long time ago, at a helpdesk far, far away I “revived” a couple hard drives with a short drop. Never actually fixed them, but it’s gotten a few to spin just long enough to retrieve some important emails or documents.

I wouldn’t recommend it, but sometimes you just gotta persuade stuff…

Jitsi was a pain for me to get working the way I needed it, but I have to say I’m a fan so far. I haven’t used it too much yet (mainly just testing with myself from various networks/devices), but from what I can tell it’ll work for my use (replacing Google Meet for my family chat uses).

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Check out Avenue 5, hearing him switch between accents constantly is odd but fun.

Well there was that one part where he turned off his laptop after (not wanting to drop what he did here as the article was pulled), but I could totally see a company freaking out and going nuclear. That being said, I’m just looking through the FreedomGoggles that recently saw a “hacker” using F12 to compromise a bunch of teacher data. You know, their important sensitive data that was definitely not sent to their device where it could be seen by right clicking and hitting view source.

They also have electric ones. They use a UV bulb and some titanium compound that releases CO2 when hit by UV, pretty neat and work decently once you interrupt the breeding cycle. Dynatrap is the popular brand I think.

I’m still using my PRS-505 I bought in 2009, it’s amazing and l don’t think I’ll ever give it up.

I still find myself using Plex for its native DVR functions. NextDVR alway seemed a little bit buggier, after finally getting an IPTV source working in Plex I went back (at least for DVR stuff).

Edit: forgot to add, Plexamp and the way Plex does its sonic analysis is worth the lifetime subscription cost to me.

I used to frequent a thrift shop that gave books away for free, I saw a copy of Cloud Atlas and thought it would be a good read (it was). I accidentally for the dust cover a little then looked at the title page, signed first edition. Not worth much, but cool nonetheless.

Don’t give up too easily friend. I’ve been slowly moving some of my hone systems away from Window’s, and much like you, I’ve spent close to 20 years as a Windows admin. I have the advantage of using Linux on my always ancient laptops over the years and it is my personal opinion that Debian is the way to go.

Give LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) a go, it is very familiar to navigate coming from Windows and isn’t going to have constant updates breaking stuff (looking at you Arch).

First thing after installing run apt-get update, then add the Nvidia drivers (add the source to your sources and install, if you need help, post back and we’ve got you!) and reboot.

My goal is to move to nice IP cams one day but for now I have analog cameras and a DVR in the closet hooked to a cheap monitor that’s paid for.

Try the app IPCamViewer by Robert Chou (here is a link to the lite version, I think there is an iOS one as well https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rcreations.ipcamviewer). It can view damn near any brand DVR, that at least let me view stuff remotely.

If you want to up it another level, if your old school DVR supports RTSP, you can probably feed that into something like Frigate for real time alerts and object detection.