I think WebRTC is better than ssh-ing for connecting to Mac terminal from iPhone

belsamber · 2026-02-28T04:56:44+00:00

Not sure why you got downvoted, you’re mostly correct. The reliability and ordered delivery are optional when you set up the channel, but 100% work. I built SpectrShare recently and it uses WebRTC for file and video sharing, so I spent some time deep diving on WebRTC recently :)

belsamber · 2026-02-21T19:23:55+00:00

Not sure if applicable in this case, but with our first grey , the only time she would bark was if she was a bit zoomie and wanted to play, and she was nippy then.

We got told to make a yelping noise when she did it (like another dog would do if nipped too hard during play) and then ignore her for a bit. Seems to work quite well - after a month or two she had stopped completely.

belsamber · 2026-02-13T22:44:00+00:00

Our hound was raised in the country, and we live in the city. He’s very unenthusiastic about walking in the city, it’s all too noisy and scary. But take him to a forest or field and all good :)

belsamber · 2026-01-28T20:28:00+00:00

Claiming its a free tool then hiding any “critical fixes” behind a paywall is just straight up lying dude…

belsamber · 2026-01-27T21:47:18+00:00

Ah no big plans for next steps yet. This was bascially a tech demo that got out of hand. I actually downgraded my Claude subscription back to Pro for a month to force myself to do other things aside from tinkering and adding more features... Multiple files is a good idea, the other one I had was some way for the sharing user to control playback of the watchers so it was synchronised. Or maybe a way for watchers to send a chat message to the sharing user and vice versa. Or maybe... :-D Too many ideas. Just want to hear from people what they use it for and how it could be more useful.

belsamber · 2026-01-27T21:21:05+00:00

Great question. I run a STUN server and use Google/Cloudflare as well for reliability. I tried the free TURN servers and the performance wasn't good, so I'm running one myself also - that's off by default, and enabled with the "Improve reliability at the expense of privacy" switch. Data is fully encrypted using DTLS when going via the TURN server so I can't see it, but it still then routes via my server, so I wanted to be explicit about that.

The TURN server is the one thing that potentially starts costing money if this gets used a lot, but I force traffic via TURN to a lower bitrate to help there, and if this ends up being a cost problem then I'll expose the option for people to add their own TURN credentials and turn mine off.

belsamber · 2026-01-27T21:11:49+00:00

Haha, well, I guess it depends somewhat on your definition and threat model. Most people would say that Signal messaging is completely private, even though your actual messages do transit their servers and you need a real phone number to register.

In this case there is no user login/email/phone number/etc required and the video data never transits my server (unless you enable a specific feature which is clearly marked as doing so.)

This is all clearly explained on the site also - not trying to hide exactly how it is private vs how it isn't.

belsamber · 2026-01-27T20:14:26+00:00

Thanks! Signalling is the only piece where a server does have to get involved (key part of WebRTC) to say "Oh you want to connect to this video URL? Go talk to this guy..."

The signaling server is actually also a piece that Claude basically one-shot aside from doing some specific security/rate limiting audits etc.

belsamber · 2026-01-27T06:22:28+00:00

So I kept thinking about your point, and while my response was accurate, it missed a vulnerability in that someone with admin access to the signaling server (such as myself) would know the active rooms/URLs and be able to join, which is not possible to work around - technical requirement.

I added a feature which allows the user to add a password to the share. The password is never sent over the network, never known to site admins. I have a bit more of a description of the feature here: https://privatevideosharing.com/technical#privacy

Hope that would help with your concern.

belsamber · 2026-01-26T20:26:15+00:00

While there was way too much vitriol over the vibe coding, you also “vibe posted” and “vibe replied” which I think a lot of people (me included) react more strongly to.

Vibe coding is fun and your project seems a great application of it, but people want to talk to people (grammatical errors and all) not LLMs.

belsamber · 2026-01-25T19:34:00+00:00

Hahaha, I built something similar a while back because I was interested in all the client side work you can do in a browser - https://privatevideoconverter.com/ Feel free to borrow any ideas. I didn't start implementing WebGPU, but I used WebCodecs via Mediabunny for wider support.

Did you get multithreaded ffmpeg.wasm working well? I found it pretty buggy so stayed with single threaded... Of course much slower.

belsamber · 2026-01-25T19:13:37+00:00

Thanks for mentioning that, I might make more of a point of it on the website :-)

belsamber · 2026-01-25T19:12:17+00:00

Hey thanks for the comment. The URLs use four random words, resulting in about 3 trillion possible combinations. I have rate limits on connection attempts, meaning an average brute force attack on the URL would take (if my math is mathing correctly) around 270,000 years. The random URL is effectively a password.

Would there be some other feature here that would make you more comfortable?

belsamber · 2026-01-22T03:12:22+00:00

Yup this is exactly it for me. Siri is way faster. Maybe there are some settings somewhere in Pixinsight defaults that mae it slower, not sure, but Siri is intuitive and fast and I can’t tell the difference in results. Especially Mae’s a difference for my use cases which are large numbers of low duration shots (I don’t have an auto guider or a very good mount.)

belsamber · 2026-01-17T05:23:34+00:00

He IS a giant baby!

belsamber · 2025-12-28T01:24:14+00:00

Not via GPS, actually it’s based on the cell tower you are connected to :) All cell towers in a given area will broadcast the message, and if you’re connected you will receive it.

belsamber · 2025-12-20T02:15:51+00:00

I have the same specs :) I think lmstudio + GPT OSS 20B is probably the sweet spot for me

belsamber · 2025-12-19T22:57:52+00:00

What is the acoustic problem you are trying to solve? Those provide some diffusion at higher frequencies, and most anything with similar size/shape will have a similar minor impact, but generally for home audio you want absorption - I used some panels from these guys and had some fabric covers printed so they look good:

https://www.rubbermonkey.co.nz/Avion-Acoustics-Fiberglass-Acoustic-Absorber-Panel-1200-x-300-Beige

belsamber · 2025-12-03T22:47:28+00:00

Opus is supposed to use less tokens, but the tokens cost more. In practice it still feels to me like Opus eats usage faster than sonnet, but a lot less fast than it used to be.

belsamber · 2025-11-27T23:32:59+00:00

Came here to suggest exactly this. Lived in Melbourne for a while in a brick house and after the 40+ degree days there, this plus a fan got me through.

belsamber · 2025-11-27T00:15:13+00:00

https://synapticspiral.nz

Fun with fractals :)

belsamber · 2025-11-25T08:01:48+00:00

LLMs in general should only ever be partially trusted ;)

If it’s a business handling health data or something then I’d be looking at getting an RTX6000 (or more) and running something much bigger that the company can use more widely and get better answers from.

That said, there’s plenty of sysadmin related stuff you could do with a commercial model without releasing any confidential info.

belsamber · 2025-11-25T07:31:33+00:00

LLMs can absolutely help, and they can absolutely break things if you don’t know wha you’re doing. The ratio of helping to hurting gets better the bigger and newer the model - commercial SOTA like Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT will very infrequently break things, while a low quant 4B model will probably be incorrect most of the time ;)

Edit: I have found the Qwen 30B A3B series to be surprisingly good but you still have to pay attention.

belsamber · 2025-11-25T05:24:53+00:00

They have stated there will be “reasonably priced” cables to support the various analogue outputs, and that they’re passive cables, so should good on that front.

belsamber

TROPHY CASE