I have no opinion about rsync.net. I’d check which services restic supports; there are several, and it is it supports rsync.net and that’s what you want to use, you’re golden. Or, use another backup tool that has encryption-by-default and does support rsync.net - there are a couple of options.

I would just never store any data that wasn’t meant for public consumption unencrypted on someone else’s servers. I make an exception for my VPS, but that’s only because I’m more paranoid about exposing my LAN that putting my email on a VPS.

restic, and other backup tools, are generally not always on. You run them; they back up. If you run them only one a month, that’s how often they run. The remote mounting is just a nice feature when you want to grab a single file from one of the backups.

What you’re describing is a classic backup use-case. I’m recommending the easiest, cheapest, most reliable offsite solution I’ve used. restic has been around for years, and has a lot of users and a lot of eyeballs look at it, and it’s OSS. There are even GUIs for it, if you’re not comfortable with the CLI. B2 is generally well-regarded, is fairly easy to figure out, and has also been around for ages. Together, they make a solid combo. I also backup with restic to a local disk and use that for accessing history - B2 is just, as you say, in case of a fire, or theft, I suppose.

I wouldn’t.

Use a proper backup tool for this, like restic. BackBlaze has reasonable rates, especially of you’re mostly write-only, and restic has built-in support for B2 and encrypts everything by default. It also supports compression, but you won’t get much out of that on media files. restic is also cross-platform and a single executable, so you can throw binaries for OSX, Linux, and Windows on a USB stick and know you can get to your backups from anywhere. It also allows you to mount a remote repository like a filesystem (on Linux, at least), and browse a backup and get at individual files without having to restore everything. It’s super handy if you screw up a single file or directory.

Location services in Android are in-phone, and they’re definitely accurate and reporting to Google. I only clarified that your cell provider probably can’t locate you using triangulation via your cell Signal. Turn data off, and you’re fine; otherwise, Google is tracking you - and from what I’ve read, even if you have location services turned off.

They can’t, tho. There are two reasons for this.

Geolocating with cell towers requires trilateration, and needs special hardware on the cell towers. Companies used to install this hardware for emergency services, but stopped doing so as soon as they legally could as it’s very expensive. Cell towers can’t do triangulation by themselves as it requires even more expensive hardware to measure angles; trilateration doesn’t work without special equipment because wave propegation delays between the cellular antenna and the computers recording the signal are big enough to utterly throw off any estimate.

An additional factor in making trilateration (or even triangulation, in rural cases where they did sometimes install triangulation antenna arrays on the towers) is that, since the UMTS standard, cell chips work really hard to minimize their radio signal strength. They find the closest antenna and then reduce their power until they can just barely talk to the tower; and except in certain cases they only talk to one tower at a time. This means that, at any given point, only one tower is responsible for handling traffic for the phone, and for triangulation you need 3. In addition to saving battery power, it saves the cell companies money, because of traffic congestion: a single tower can only handle so much traffic, and they have to put in more antennas and computers if the mobile density gets too high.

The reason phones can use cellular signal to improve accuracy is because each phone can do its own triangulation, although it’s still not great and can be impossible because of power attenuation (being able to see only one tower - or maybe two - at a time); this is why Google and Apple use WiFi signals to improve accuracy, and why in-phone triangulation isn’t good enough: in any sufficiently dense urban or suburban environment, the combined informal of all the WiFi routers the phone can see, and the cell towers it can hear, can be enough to give a good, accurate position without having to turn on the GPS chip, obtain a satellite fix (which may be impossible indoors) and suck down power. But this is all done inside and from the phone - this isn’t something cell carriers can do themselves most of the time. Your phone has to send its location out somewhere.

TL;DR: Cell carriers usually can’t locate you with any real accuracy, without the help of your phone actively reporting its calculated location. This is largely because it’s very expensive for carriers to install the necessary hardware to get any accuracy of more than hundreds of meters; they are loath to spend that money, and legislation requiring them to do so no longer exists, or is no longer enforced.

Source: me. I worked for several years in a company that made all of the expensive equipment - hardware and software - and sold it to The Big Three carriers in the US. We also paid lobbyists to ensure that there were laws requiring cell providers to be able to locate phones for emergency services. We sent a bunch of our people and equipment to NYC on 9/11 and helped locate phones. I have no doubt law enforcement also used the capability, but that was between the cops and the cell providers. I know companies stopped doing this because we owned all of the patents on the technology and ruthlessly and successfully prosecuted the only one or two competitors in the market, and yet we still were going out of business at the end as, one by one, cell companies found ways to argue out of buying, installing, and maintaining all of this equipment. In the end, the competitors we couldn’t beat were Google and Apple, and the cell phones themselves.

Sure, I could do that, but not everyone can. But you still have the problem that many of these devices don’t function well unless they can phone home; they don’t very firmware upgrades, and they expect to be controlled by a bespoke app. If you filter out all the devices that are HA compatible without running through an external service, you shear the product choices in half.

This is good information. I had a complete failure with flashing Tasmota once, and bricked a $100 device.

I like the project, though. My biggest complaint is that - at least for what I was trying to flash, the Linux support was iffy. I was trying to flash something for HA, and the instructions assumed I had access to the computer running HA (which is a headless device in a closet in the basement - entirely unpractical for doing fiddly pinning while trying to flash) or using a web browser with webUSB - which Firefox on Linux doesn’t. So eventually I found a completely unrelated set of instructions I could run from the CLI from my desktop over a cable connected to said desktop, and while it appeared successful, the device is bricked. I can’t even get it into flash mode anymore.

I don’t think any of this has to do with Tasmota, except that the Linux tooling seems either weak, or make assumes people are running Chrome; and if you’re security conscious enough to be flashing a device to run Tasmota, you’re not running Chrome.

So I’m not doing that again. It’s a hundred bucks and two days of digging around for tooling and instructions I’d like back.

Again, not Tasmota’s fault, but it’s not super accessible.

For my CLI homies, there’s syncedlyrics.

Be advised: several Subsonic servers (including gonic and Navidrome) do not support lyric files unless they’re embedded, and syncedlyrics will only put the lyrics in .lrc files. So getting lyrics in clients can be a two-step process: download the .lrc’s, then run a script to embed them in the song files. I’ve seen a script to do the latter, but I haven’t tried it. I’ll send a patch to gonic to read lrc files, during the Christmas holiday most likely.

Don’t worry; a bailout is coming in January.

I once owned a bunch of WiFi connected devices. One day I inspected my router logs and found out that they were all making calls to a bunch of services that weren’t the vendor - things like Google, and Facebook.

WiFi connected devices require connecting to a router; in most homes, this is going to be one that’s also connected to the internet - most people aren’t going to buy a second router just for their smart home, or set up a disconnected second LAN on their one router. And nearly all of these devices come with an app, which talks to the device through an external service (I’m looking at you, Honeywell, and you, Rainbird). This is a privacy shit-show. WiFi is a terrible option for smart home devices.

ZigBee, well, I haven’t had any luck with it - pairing problems which are certainly just a learning curve in my part and not an issue with the protocol. I chose ZWave myself because I read about the size and range limitations of ZigBee technology, versus ZWave, but honestly I could have gone either way. Back then, there was no appreciable price difference in devices. Most hubs support both, though, and I can’t see why I wouldn’t mix them (other than I need to figure out how to get ZigBee to work).

In any case, low-power BT, ZigBee, or Zwave are all options, whereas I will not allow more WiFi smart devices in my house. I’m stuck with Honeywell and Rainbird, for… reasons… but that’s it. I don’t need to be poking more holes in my LAN security.

Yeah, I kinda figured when the truck convoy started out there you guys had your own problems.

Oh, man. That’d be a book. Or maybe a chapter in an alternate version of Hitchhiker’s.

It always turns out to be the equivalent of a reality show host.

There’s a good chance for another major pandemic, and we’re passing the global warming point of no return.

For better or worse, the US was the biggest player on the planet; now that we’ve fumbled, I think the world is done for. Maybe China could have risen to take the US’s place, but they’re stumbling toward an economic catastrophe, India has their own problems, and Russia is exposed as a bit player. The EU could have been a shining beacon, but they’re struggling with their own rise in fascism. Who else is there? A South American country? They’re barely holding on to their own economies. Canada? Too small - I mean, big country, but not very big population (1/10th of the US). And the US is big enough that when we go down, we’re going to drag a lot of the planet with us. Shit, thanks to Russia and Israel, we’ve been edging into WWIII. Trump’s senile enough to press the button, I have no doubt, and he’ll be completely surrounded by moronic Yes-men this time, with no one to try to talk sense into him. Maybe a relatively quick, fiery end would be better than a painful spiral.

We’re done as a planet. Some creatures will survive, but humans have used up all the readily available low-tech surface resources - oils, coals, metals - so anything that evolves intelligence after us won’t make it past the stone age. And then, the sun will die.

At least we have more solid evidence to the answer to Fermi’s paradox. It’d be a bigger question if we weren’t rushing toward our own extinction.

If you figure it out, let me know. I’m flabbergasted, myself, and I’m here.

You can do it! I believe in you!

(Bring back Lembas)

I see a portal to Faerie.

OP should definitely crawl through the hole.

Sorry, but no. The people making the cutting decisions are not going to cut their own jobs; and they are always part of the problem. It’s why companies only get more shitty over time.

If Smell-o-Vision was a thing, everyone would think Trump smelled like pine trees and ocean spray, because that’s what he’d pay them to broadcast, or else refuse to allow himself to be broadcast on their networks.

The guy slathers on so much fake tan, he looks like he’s wearing black-face. His only genuine characteristic is his inability to stop the senility from coming out of his mouth.

Good thing Joe isn’t running, huh?

That’s composing quite an edifice of unprovable postulation to reverse engineer faith. “A” for effort!

Curse you. You stole my outtake.

“In other news, Carlson fell asleep ten minutes in to Oppenheimer, and Barbie made him uncomfortable.”