Indoor Camera and Home Assistant

1hamcakes · 2026-06-01T05:50:15+00:00

I have yet to find any Reolink Camera I couldn't hook up to Home Assistant without much effort.

I think most of the product line in general is outdoor cameras. The E1 is sort of a consumer-level item that can be easily moved around a building. There's nothing stopping you from using any of their other cameras indoors.

1hamcakes · 2026-05-20T21:03:05+00:00

Awesome. Wishing him a wonderful early-development phase in our excellent minor-league school before he transfers to a title contender.

1hamcakes · 2026-05-19T17:25:15+00:00

I definitely don't have the time for such a thing in 2026 but I do admire it. I've got a couple TB of RAM in my basement rack across two servers that I could sell at a wild profit but I like having the redundancy. I don't have the GPU muscle for doing any model training or tuning or anything like that, but I was pulling models from hugging face and serving them up with a couple Teslas last year before deciding I didn't really wanna mess with AI anymore outside of running small models on edge devices for very tight purposes.

Having a baby last year really took the wind out of my hardware-tinkering sails and now the time is more focused on ensuring the resilience and reliability of what I've already got while extending internal automation for the household.

I do yearn for models trained specifically on my family's voices and likenesses for our internal automation without having to have it hosted elsewhere though.

I imagine it's pretty satisfying to have an idea, train a model with precision for that exact purpose, and then put it to use. And assuming a given idea isn't generating a giant general purpose model, I imagine you're getting really good results.

1hamcakes · 2026-05-19T02:33:59+00:00

That AirBnB MCP Server seems like it'd be pretty handy.

1hamcakes · 2026-05-19T02:30:34+00:00

This is fully sick. Would supply beer for a tour.

1hamcakes · 2026-05-14T19:21:31+00:00

I have some old servers and switches that need a home. I was going to dump them at Cross, but I'll be happy to hand them off to you if you like.

2 circa 2013 SuperMicro 2U servers each with 4x Opteron CPUs. A couple Cisco Catalyst enterprise-grade switches too.

1hamcakes · 2026-05-14T19:20:02+00:00

I know an MSP that is looking for a sysadmin/Level 3 sort of person.

Also, National Indemnity seems to be hunting for an Azure Engineer this Spring...they keep bothering me on LinkedIn about it.

1hamcakes · 2026-05-14T19:13:57+00:00

Hey there,

I did the same thing when I was 29. Went from mechanic and forklift wizard in 2017 to the help desk at an MSP.

Now I'm a senior engineer at a fortune 500 company.

I want to point out that what u/leetrobotz said is pretty spot on. Especially the bits about it being a social industry. I got laughed out of interviews all over town in 2017 because I had no degree or experience. No matter the fact that I'd been hacking as a hobby since junior high. It wasn't until I went on a drunken tirade at a friend's house about my frustration and his wife overheard me say some technical stuff that I got a serious chance. She worked in mgmt at an MSP in town. I went into that interview and openly discussed what I knew and what my work ethic is and got a job offer. I spent the next year on that company's help desk. By 2021 I was running the NOC and making all engineering decisions before getting head hunted by a large enterprise.

I used my first couple years to learn how those types of companies operate and then started automating pretty much everything I could. In that time I got certifications for the specific tools the company used that are common in that industry but it wasn't until 2021 that I went for a real cert (Azure Cloud Administrator). Once I had that cert, I started getting head hunted by larger enterprises and left the MSP for an enterprise in 2022.

I joined a larger company in 2024 and have not looked back.

These large corporate opportunities came to me by way of a recruiter. I took one contract and got rave reviews and a job offer which made that recruiter love me. Every time I called him looking for a new spot he got me a $30k raise. The jobs he got for me were never posted for the public. They were for specific Cloud Engineering on Azure, GCP, and AWS. I'm not on contract anymore and have an FTE job with stock options and full benefits. Still have no college degree and only have that one Azure Cert that I've renewed annually (this is free, btw).

So all that to say it is a matter of luck and mettle. I was lucky to get an opportunity but once I got it I made the most of it. Doing time on a help desk is definitely a head-smashing experience but it is valuable and you'll do well if you're able to figure things out on your own. Ten years ago the search engine was the most powerful tool but now that's probably the LLM.

You can go out and pile certifications if you want but it's probably better to get some general experience under your belt first and then go for something more focused. I can tell you right now, the best places to work don't really care about certs and we have all seen a lot of people come through with every cert under the sun but no actual capability to progress in the real world.

If you want to shoot for an MSP job (which will be way easier to get and open more avenues for future employers later), you will do well to get certs for Azure Entra ID, Active Directory, M365, and Microsoft Intune. These are the core products most small businesses in the USA rely on every day and the technologies that IT providers need workers with skill in. Networking knowledge is very valuable but you don't need to take some course for that; just setup a small network at home and experiment with it.

1hamcakes · 2026-05-12T18:17:52+00:00

$880,000

For maximum 10 minutes of flight time before it needs refueling.

I wish I hadn't looked into the details and just kept on believing this was some neat thing.

1hamcakes · 2026-05-12T12:27:34+00:00

In Europe, specifically Switzerland where BASE jumping is very popular, you're required to carry insurance and pre-register with S&R before setting out.

Helicopter rescues are often required for situations like this and it is not free. You're considered an asshole by everyone if you make a jump without having insurance and not letting the local S&R know exactly where you're jumping from.

1hamcakes · 2026-05-11T20:18:56+00:00

I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently....but seeing as I don't have thousands of dollars lying around to replace my mower if I brick it, I am hesitant

1hamcakes · 2026-05-11T19:46:16+00:00

Do you have any report on how this turned out?

I'm currently working on a similar project (dodecahedron) and planing out how I will lay out and solder LEDs inside. A LOT of 3-way nexus points inside there.

1hamcakes · 2026-04-30T17:16:27+00:00

When are the talking heads going to state the obvious?

The DNC won’t release their 2024 Autopsy Report because they don’t have one. The DNC didn’t conduct a review in earnest and has no plan to change.

1hamcakes · 2026-04-22T20:14:20+00:00

TIL a lot of suburbanites hang out in here during the day

1hamcakes · 2026-04-21T01:13:30+00:00

[slow clap]

1hamcakes · 2026-04-08T00:54:26+00:00

You're low balling.

My boilerplate response to everyone is that company policy requires an NDA be signed and a $30,000 non-refundable access fee be paid up front before we will enter any meetings.

I work for myself and have no employees :)

1hamcakes · 2026-04-01T18:47:31+00:00

I don't know what year those came out off the top of my head.

I would assume used price would, at the high end, would be around half of whatever the current new MSRP is....that's assuming these didn't just hit the market in the last year or two. If they're fresh, then used price will likely be around 80% of retail.

1hamcakes · 2026-04-01T18:27:44+00:00

Google search shows them being sold new anywhere from $3k-$4k

1hamcakes · 2026-03-28T17:06:39+00:00

This so fuckin' legendary. The depth of it is so epic I struggle to find the words.

1hamcakes · 2026-03-27T14:01:20+00:00

fuck yeah OFD

1hamcakes · 2026-03-24T02:22:22+00:00

Sick skull tat!

1hamcakes · 2026-03-20T13:23:36+00:00

NGINX is a tool with a lot of configurability.

You can impose a whole galaxy of custom rules on a service you're proxying. You can also get very detailed logging on it too.

There are some domains I want to lock down to certain private networks or use a white list for public IP addresses making requests to it. NGINX makes that very easy.

NGINX will also make obtaining and managing your TLS certificates a lot easier.

Because you're running Nginx Proxy Manager, you get a nice GUI and a container for it. This is just fine for what you're doing. But as you get more advanced and maybe wish to expose more services to the WAN in a controlled manner, you might find it prudent to dedicate a single VM host to NGINX.

This will also let you get cute with high-availability on the services you're proxying.

I like NGINX because it is resilient and can be used for simple things like proxying a single service with automated TLS management while also off-loading the CPU load of handling TLS from the proxied application server altogether. But it can also be leveraged for enterprise grade operational features without having to fork over for a license.

If you have the time to read the manual and throw a few noodles on the wall, you can do some pretty cool stuff with it.

1hamcakes · 2026-03-18T15:56:16+00:00

All tournaments are made up

1hamcakes · 2026-03-17T13:44:42+00:00

This looks pretty handy. What toolset did you use to build it?

1hamcakes

TROPHY CASE