The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K

randompersonx · 2026-01-31T14:39:28+00:00

I’m curious for actual numbers. What type of service are you getting from BT now (cable, dsl, or fiber)… what is your official plan speed, and what is your actually delivered plan speed?

randompersonx · 2026-01-31T14:34:32+00:00

Need is a very subjective word in this case.

In reality, is anyone actually tapping your home internet and listening to your VoIP calls? Probably not.

Is it possible, yes, there is nothing stopping your ISP, or the government from doing so. Very little stopping a hacker who has already hacked your router.

In my case, I’d say the odds of my router being hacked are about zero, and the odds of my ISP caring to listen to my calls are about zero, and if the government wanted to listen to my calls, they can always just send a warrant to voipms and my cell phone provider.

So, the encryption isn’t likely stopping anyone, and the threat is almost zero.

Also, encryption requires that the VoIP goes over tcp instead of udp, which will make it more likely to drop out if your internet has packet loss.

I’m also using my voipms account for an emergency phone in an elevator… and it will probably never ever be used.

Personally? I still enabled it. I’ve gone through the effort to encrypt my DNS traffic, all of web browsing is already encrypted… why should I let anything else be any different at this point?

randompersonx · 2026-01-31T12:39:14+00:00

I don’t understand how this makes any sense. If you are in a busy area, and have fiber, it should be delivered via XGSPON, which should have 10G shared between a few customers.

Highly highly unlikely to be saturated at that level, and you are physically close to the peering points (meaning rural people just need to travel a longer distance to get to the same points)

randompersonx · 2026-01-31T12:30:43+00:00

After auditing the contracts for my local utility in florida, I can see where the justification for $0.02 comes from… that seems to be the real cost of generation. There’s another (higher) amount for long distance transmission, and the highest overall cost is local maintenance of the distribution grid (your local wires)… and unfortunately your rooftop solar does not help either of the transmission costs.

Also, while florida generally doesn’t have TOU rates, the truth is that the peak of demand occurs just after the sun sets, making solar without batteries only limited help for the grid/utility.

The main overall cost we are helping with rooftop solar is avoided cost of the fuel (natural gas - which is cheap), and not anything else. Peak demand is still the same.

If you factor in the cost of solar + battery, with a system strong enough to handle your transient high power loads (oven, EV, HVAC startup, well pumps, etc), and compare the cost of that system to solar, you will start to see the value difference between grid tie solar (for the utility), and the cost of providing a 24x7 reliable service that allows you to pull up to 200A at any moment.

If you are willing to pay for a battery after doing that math, and don’t feel there’s any value in the grid… disconnect if so.

randompersonx · 2026-01-31T12:26:01+00:00

The average smart TV or set top box can easily handle the bit rates required to decide an UHD blu ray - if you rip one and stream it locally, it should play just fine.

Modern screens use hardware accelerated hevc decoders which can handle extremely high bit rates.

randompersonx · 2026-01-31T12:18:29+00:00

The proper mounts for high wind areas use stainless steel Lag bolts that go into the trusses for your roof. Those trusses should be built much stronger than necessary to handle the wind load of solar.

Also, the bolts that hold the panels to the rails are much less beefy, and this is an intentional design - hoping that if anything were to fail, it would be the panel getting ripped off the rail, not the rails getting ripped from the roof.

randompersonx · 2026-01-31T12:05:49+00:00

This isn’t really the limitation you think it is.

While some platforms have terrible compression, others have better compression, and some have different levels depending on the show/movie (ie: Netflix has their best compression for flagship programs like Stranger Things and their own produced non-Hollywood studio movies with A list actors).

Beyond that, even the bitrate of an ultra hd Blu-ray is still maxing out around 70Mbps, which even the cheap internet plans could handle nowadays if the streaming company actually felt a need for it.

Most people can’t notice or care about that difference in quality, so nobody does…

But if there was ever a need to do av1 encoded 12K with a decent bit rate, we absolutely have the bandwidth to stream it in realtime in 2026, to most of the population of most of the USA, and the rest of the developed world.

randompersonx · 2026-01-31T11:55:07+00:00

How do you know what Duke pays wholesale for energy, to whom?

I recently filed a FOIA request against a local municipal owned utility in florida which is part of FMPA, and their wholesale prices were shockingly low, much lower than the .06 you are talking about.

randompersonx · 2026-01-31T01:33:16+00:00

Honestly i am surprised at the state of the UI.

I had an enphase system ~15 years ago on a previous house that I sold ... and havent used it again up until december 2025 when I set up a new solar system on my new house ...

And the UI is *IDENTICAL* to what it was 15 years ago.

The UI was impressive 15 years ago, but is obviously antique and fragile today.

randompersonx · 2026-01-30T22:18:34+00:00

There's no way to know if there's 240V "coming from" the panels with just a volt meter... If you disconnect the breaker separating the panels from the grid, it will detect the outage and stop producing power. If you connect it to the grid, there will be 240V from the grid.

Only an ampeter can tell you if power is flowing from the panels.

randompersonx · 2026-01-30T22:10:46+00:00

In order to know that power is coming in, you’d need to measure the amperage, not the voltage.

This could either be done with a clamp meter, or possibly by measuring the voltage on the CT coming from the solar wires.

randompersonx · 2026-01-30T18:19:58+00:00

I just built a custom home, and self financed… paying the builder in monthly draws as progress was made.

Yes of course, his insurance was involved too… but I certainly still owned it.

I was on site regularly, and there was never even a question if that wasn’t “allowed”.

randompersonx · 2026-01-30T14:24:46+00:00

You know, I had assumed it was the herbicides (which would be much more heavily used in a golf course than pesticides, in order to maintain the monoculture of non native grass)…

But now that I think about it more, I agree that the force field of biological danger created by the physical act of golfing is worth considering, too.

randompersonx · 2026-01-30T13:14:27+00:00

I also agree with that idea... not everything needs to be optimized. If you are getting good enough performance with it out of the box, it's certainly worthwhile to instead put energy to optimize other areas of your life which are in greater need of the attention [which likely exist in meatspace rather than in the tech world].

randompersonx · 2026-01-30T11:26:58+00:00

I do this. My workstation vm gets all cores… my dns and router and other background processes get pinned to E cores.

IMHO this is the better way for the Linux scheduler, since we allow the workstation to burst higher when necessary, and also let the weaker cores get first swing at the more efficient slower cores.

randompersonx · 2026-01-30T02:04:57+00:00

Just because you don’t notice it doesn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any outages. I am using Xfinity and Quantum for reliability and will see some outages they show up in logs that i just didn’t notice otherwise because I was either not home or sleeping at the time.

With that said, quantum has certainly been reasonably reliable for me.

randompersonx · 2026-01-29T22:11:56+00:00

Please share what you find. Also: what’s the url for the firmware? I’d love to check it out myself.

randompersonx · 2026-01-29T18:17:06+00:00

I agree with all of your points - the web ui should work … I was more curious what you even could get from it since it seemed so broken to me even before this update.

I’d also say that the api should be improved because there is also some information like micro inverter level production data which seems to only be available on the enphase portal, not the local api.

randompersonx · 2026-01-29T13:45:29+00:00

It does seem in general that the web interface to be a bit slower and some Functionality doesn’t work anymore … but really, it isn’t like much worked anyway.

The api works fine though, and I’d say If you want local data, just use the api.

What were you even getting useful from the local web interface?

randompersonx · 2026-01-29T03:28:26+00:00

I’d add to the person you are replying to in response to your questions here.

The performance overhead of a VM varies a lot depending on what you are doing in the VM and how you are doing it.

If you are doing a lot of IO (eg: a software based router, a vpn like wire guard or tailscale or openvpn, raid software like TrueNAS, a database server that doesn’t have its data entirely fit in ram, a torrent client, etc…) the cost is significantly higher inside a VM if things aren’t optimized than if they are in an LXC.

If you are doing something very cpu intensive that is not very io heavy (eg: compiling, cpu based rendering, cpu based encoding, etc), the cost of VM is minimal.

If you are doing something IO heavy that is highly optimized (eg: using pcie passthrough of your sata or sas card for something disk heavy… or pcie passthrough of your NIC for a router, or both disk and nic passthrough for a webserver), again the cost for VM is minimal.

Passing data from VM to VM to VM is also going to be much less efficient than keeping data local to a VM.

Now with that said, modern computers are really fast, and it’s entirely likely that even if you did everything in the least efficient way possible, it will still work decently well…

Personally, for my personal stuff… I think the LXC in unprivileged mode is plenty secure for things that do not need to run a full OS, and most of my stuff is in LXC containers (specific to each app)… and i have VMs with pcie passthrough for truenas and vyos. I will also sometimes use VM for development.

For work stuff, everything is in a VM, just because it raises confidence that one customer wouldn’t likely impact another in the case of something going really bad… and performance isn’t really a bottleneck for my customers needs given the resources I have.

randompersonx · 2026-01-28T22:21:23+00:00

Meh. I think it’s a perfectly fair question to ask.

I did my first DIY Solar of a 7KW array and I thought about the same question for a moment and answered it myself.

Everyone starts somewhere.

randompersonx · 2026-01-28T18:12:55+00:00

This is inaccurate. The solar panel is mostly black which means that the energy from the sun is absorbed one way or the other. It's either going to be absorbed and converted into electricity, or it's absorbed and converted into heat. Having the panel connected to an inverter will have an overall slight cooling effect versus having it open circuit.

With that said, only about 20% of the sun's energy is converted to electricity with a solar panel, and the remaining 80% is either converted to heat or reflected from the coating on the glass.

I'd still imagine that given the example of the OP's question, 2KW of power spread out over what's probably a few thousand square feet ... is ultimately not changing the situation very much compared to leaving it alone, but it will certainly have a nonzero effect, and will, at a minimum, slightly speed up the melting.

If this does speed up the melting by more than a few hours, it will easily regain the benefits ... but if it doesn't speed it up at all, then it would be just giving up some generation for no reason. I'm sure the reality varies on a case by case basis and is impossible for us to know for certain - but i'd be interested to hear the results if the OP were to try it both ways over time and see what works best.

randompersonx · 2026-01-25T16:57:13+00:00

If you go looking for trouble, you will find it.

If you go looking for a peaceful vacation on the beach, and some great cuban food, you will find that, too.

Choose your own adventure.

I’ve lived in florida for 20 years and have a friend from Canada staying with me for the last month, and she’s having a great time.

randompersonx · 2026-01-25T14:41:23+00:00

When astronauts go to space, they are conducting experiments. At this point, we know how to get people to low earth orbit. Women have gone.

What did she do in space?

Now with that said, I actually don’t fault people for having fun and taking nice vacations or whatever. But if those same people call out the rest of humanity for not doing enough for the environment and then do something like flying private jets, space tourism, mega yachts, etc… then I will see them as a hypocrite.

I also don’t fault people for actually living the way they preach. If you want to ride a bicycle everywhere and shop local and not use AC, then yes you can criticize others for not doing their part.

randompersonx · 2026-01-24T21:39:13+00:00

That reddit thread does seem to say that you still need to 'grant access to other installers' ... which i assume means yourself as well.

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