Yeah, I don’t have a good answer for that.

It’s quite possible that even with the SIM card removed, it’s still actively ending up in cell tower logs. At least here in the United States, if you dial 911 from any device, no matter whether it has a SIM card installed and no matter whether it has service or not, 911 is supposed to be able to answer, which means that it must be able to talk to the cell phone towers even without a SIM card installed. You might be able to avoid that by keeping it on airplane mode, but there’s no guarantee of that.

About that last sentence about software support determining the future of risc-v. It will overtake x86 (eventually) just due to the nature of OSS. At first OS platforms arent as good… Until suddenly they are. Ask Apple. When the iPhone first launched, it was a million times better than Android. And yet now they are totally on par with each other. And Android has the edge in a lot of cases.

I have not used mullvad myself, but i have heard from others that they are a good choice

I suggest keepassxc on desktop and keepassdx on android. If you are an iphone user keepassium is pretty good (mom approved).

As for whether you should be using Monero with Tor. You don’t have to, and it’s a lot slower if you do, but you do get some benefits if you do in certain scenarios.

I run my own local node which has a copy of the blockchain so that I don’t have to trust anyone except for myself and do not have access to a static IPv4 or IPv6 address and so I host my node as a Tor hidden service. By doing so, I can access my own personal node from anywhere in the world, no matter what network I’m on. And again, since I trust myself, I know that I’m getting correct data. By default, Monero.com and Cake Wallet use the Cake Wallet nodes and they are a rather trustworthy entity. So I would feel safe recommending just using them until you become more advanced and want to run your own. If you access the nodes through Tor, then obviously they won’t know your IP address. Whereas if you don’t access them through Tor, they would know your IP where you connect from. And it’s really up to you to determine whether that’s a problem for you or not. If you already use a VPN, you could just use that as well.

Hey, thanks so much. I am brand new to all of this, and so I really appreciate all the help. I’ve never even considered trying to do a smart home before because I want everything to be open source as much as I possibly can. Basically, everything I’ve ever seen is like Samsung this and Google that and cloud account this and Amazon account that and all that shit.

So far im thinking

• HA Green
• HA ZBT-1 (zigbee dongle)
• Reolink home hub (control wireless cams and recording storage)
• Reolink Argus 3E (camera)
• zigbee door/window sensors (of some sort)
• zigbee smoke alarm (future purchase)
• zigbee vibration sensor (washer/dryer running/stopped) (future purchase)

I’m not sure if I’ll need a motion sensor or not, because the cameras record when they detect motion, and so they might present a motion detection sensor to HA through the hub.

My goal here is to replace my ADT security system with something I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for and yet will be able to get the same functionality out of. I’m thinking I might need some sort of Zigbee buttons for arming and disarming the alarm and setting up those Zigbee buttons for a panic mode as well. I saw a YouTube video where in order to arm the alarm the guy had to press a Zigbee button twice and then had to press the same Zigbee button twice again within ten seconds or it wouldn’t do anything.

Edit: Something I ran across today that might also be cool is to put a light sensor inside the mailbox so that when the mailbox is opened, light will hit the sensor and trigger it. And so you can know that the mail has run.

The hub does not appear to require an account from everything I can tell, but I have also done limited research so far. Although according to the following post, the battery cameras will indeed work with Home Assistant with the hub as the bridge between them.

https://community.reolink.com/topic/13274/reolink-home-hub-supports-home-assistant. It also appears as though you can make the battery camera’s live stream too home assistant, but that obviously it drains battery quite fast while doing so. So you do not want to do so. In most cases you’ll want to use them in motion only detection mode. Are you able to stream the camera through the companion app on your smartphone with your wired cams?

What I’m looking to do is be able to live stream the camera from my smartphone when I’m not at home if I decide to. The vast majority of the time though, I would be using it in motion only mode so that I would receive a notification if there was motion and then could look at the camera.

I don’t see anything to indicate what it is. The sensors connect wirelessly to the panel that sits at the front door. But I see no branding on the sensors themselves unless maybe they’re on the back and I need to remove them to check. The system was installed in like 2023. The panel itself has no visible branding except for the ADT logo and it is currently not connected to my Wi-Fi network but it does apparently connect to ADT through cellular over I think it’s AT&T.

I am looking at the reolink battery cameras and the reolink hub would handle video recording. HA would be sending off notifications about motion detection and possibly used to live stream the video coming from the camera itself.

Looks like reolink may be the way to go. My question to you is are you using the home storage device or are you using the wired cameras directly with Home Assistant? I’m thinking about using the battery powered cameras. And from what I understand, they require the hub. So it would be camera to hub to home assistant. Correct?

Looks like Blink is owned by Amazon, so you would require an Amazon account, which is, for me at least, a non-starter. I saw a video and he’s like you can access the sync device without forwarding ports and I’m like how the hell is that working but if you have to have an Amazon account that would totally explain it

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m looking at those now.

A guy I trust uses blink cameras, but apparently they have some sort of local storage module that might allow the video to be stored locally instead of requiring cloud crap. I’m doing some preliminary research now to see what I can find out about it.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9HVYZR4

Edit: Oh, apparently you do require an Amazon account. I did not realize Blink was owned by Amazon. So reolink might still be the best choice

So the entire point of a password manager is to give each website a unique password so that if one password gets compromised, your passwords for every other site are not compromised. Based on current computing power, each password you have for an online service really should be about 20 characters and totally unique and random. And for a human, that’s basically impossible to accomplish. So what you do is have the password manager do that work for you and then you have one master password which accesses the password manager database. By doing so, you only have to remember two passwords. One password is to actually log into your system, such as your Linux login password, and the other is to log into your database on your password manager, which then has all of your other passwords. What I do for backing my password database up is that my primary computing device is my phone and so my password manager lives on my phone and once every three months I copy that password database to two separate flash drives in two separate physical locations. I then also copy it to my laptop. So I have two computing devices with the password manager file and two flash drives with the password manager file which are in separate locations. Even if someone were to steal the password manager database file off of one of my flash drives or something like that, they would still need the database password in order to access it. And I’ve made mine over 20 characters long, so no computer is going to be able to crack it unless it’s a quantum computer, which do not currently exist.

If you are able to manage online banking, then you will be able to manage Monero. The main difference between your online bank account and Monero is that if you lose your wallet seed phrase, it’s not recoverable. Unlike your bank account, where you can give them ID and your identification numbers and get your password reset. That is yet again another good reason to put your seed phrase in a password manager so that you can’t lose it. My personal suggestion would be the monero.com wallet made by cake wallet. Cake wallet offers multiple cryptos where monero.com only offers monero. Monero is digital cash. So you should get some and spend it on food and other such necessities and then get some more to replace it. Just like you would bills in your pocket. In terms of fiat currency, it will fluctuate because it is another currency. Just like how the euro will fluctuate in value against the US dollar, etc. In order to avoid that problem, it is best to fiat cost average where no matter what the current price says it is in your fiat currency, you’re always going to put X amount of fiat currency in it per month. So you might say, I’m always going to put $10 into it no matter what the price is. And that will help to smooth out the volatility compared to the fiat currency. You can also check out places like XMRbazaar.com, which offer goods and services for Monero, or even my store at https://xmrbazaar.com/user/AuroraGeneralStore where I sell items for Monero and keep the prices stable over long periods of time so that you know what to expect.

To the best of my knowledge, that’s the only one they have.

Maybe something like the seeedstudio sensecap indicator?

You’re well on your way to making some really good choices. I also have to ask, are you using a password manager already? And if so, which one are you using? I use keepassxc on linux and keepassdx (from fdroid) on android and sync the database with a flash drive. I don’t trust any clouds, and so I don’t have any of my files on clouds. Also, are you using Monero yet?

What you can do is download the Aurora store from fdroid, which will give you access to Google Play apps without needing the Google Play store, and then go in and disable Google Play services. That way, if something breaks that you absolutely can’t live without, you can go turn it back on again. What you will find is that most apps will no longer send you notifications because most apps use what’s called Google FCM to provide you notifications which requires Google Play services. So in most cases apps will no longer send you notifications. Some apps will give you warnings to the effect of this app may not work properly without Google Play services and give you an OK button and in most cases they will work alright. And some few apps will just absolutely refuse to work. I know for a fact that Uber and Lyft will refuse to work without Google Play services enabled. With uber at least you can visit m.uber.com.

As the person mentioned above, using open source apps as much as you can is a great step in the right direction as they don’t phone home nearly as much. If at all. Make fdroid your new best friend and maybe add the izzyondroid repo to it.

Another category of apps you may have trouble with is mobile banking. I used to have a Neo bank called Chime, and their app worked fine without Google Play services, but I wanted to not need the Aurora store anymore, and I could not transfer between accounts with the Chime website, and so I ended up switching banks entirely.

Yeah, i meant GB/s. Thanks for pointing that out.

Oh good point. 14.9GB/s

Run meshtastic on it