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Geek, entrepreneur and tinkerer.
More about me here: http://vpetersson.com
If you like this stuff, you should check out what the guys at Mythic Beasts are doing. They’re squeezing a ton of Raspberry Pi’s into racks. They also host the Raspberry Pi website on pi’s.
We used them for a while and there are some photos here https://www.screenly.io/blog/2023/05/25/updated-qc-rig/
Sure, it's possible. But how is this different than the SEO landscape of the last 15 years? If anything, the bar is higher to succeed here as you need to trick multiple LLM/algos rather than just gamify your Google SEO game.
But what really disappoints me and leaves me feeling hopeless for the future is how people like the author are either completely oblivious (or worse, don’t care) about the possibility and probability of such blatant manipulation.
That's a rather naive narrative. ChatGPT (in particular o3/o3-pro) is great at product research. I've found great deals on products that beats what I would find using a regular search engine.
Google research are largely SEO bloat these days. LLMs are pretty good at looking past that. Yes, sometimes it get it wrong, but more often than not it gets it right. In my research I did manually spot check things and found it to be on track.
Could I have found a better camera (and possibly a better price) if I poured hours of my time into research? Possibly. Is it worth my time? No. Just the same reason as I go to Amazon for my purchases rather than spending hours navigating shitty e-commerce sites (which btw ChatGPT will do for me).
All things considered, the agentic web will indeed change the landscape, but I for the better.
I wouldn't trust any of the baby monitors. Even some of the "best" ones, like the Owlet are questionable. You might want to get one of the smaller Unifi cameras and use their Protect product to access it remotely. Cloud accessible but all stored locally.
Shameless self-plug: I had Ken Munro from PTP on my podcast [1] in the episode 'Hacking airplanes, ships and IoT devices with Ken Munro' where we dove into GPS hacking and spoofing at length.
Oh nice! Thanks. Will give that a try.
+1 for "full immutable system image update"
People who suggest updating individual packages (or even worse, individual deb packages for instance) have never deployed any large scale IoT/Embedded projects. These devices are very different than servers/desktops and will break in ways you can't imagine. We started out using deb packages at Screenly before moving to Ubuntu Core, and the amount of error/recovery logic we had written to recover from broken deb package state was insane at that point.
That’s neat!
I would look at Balena if you are already using Raspberry Pi’s and docker. Alternatively maybe look into ROAC but don’t know if it supports docker. The SD cards will be your biggest failure point, so select them wisely.
I’ve deployed Ubuntu Core at scale. It’s great but does have its learning curve. Theirs is also somewhat of a lock in, even if you can run everting yourself. However, their security is really good.
Yeah that’s true. But if these are embedded devices, you probably want an A/B partition scheme with full transactional updates and rollback.
Yeah it definitely isn’t straight forward. But it is complicated for good reasons given how much more complicated stuff it does behind the scenes.
There’s an official docker image, which is what I’ve been using forever a long time.
Author here. You can use influx. That’s what I’m doing. It’s just that HA doesn’t use thet by default (which is sensible for most use cases tbh).
Author here. I just use Tailscale. I’ve documented my setup here: https://vpetersson.com/2022/12/23/securing-services-with-tai...
But tldr is that you don’t need any cloud VM or other service for remote access. Works great.
Author here. Yeah that's what I'm doing too. Except i use the IKEA hub rather than USB Zigbee.
As for lighting, I use "Circadian Lighting" which _does_ allow light groups, so I just specify the groups in yaml and it takes care of the group as a whole. I think it's probably lacking some functionality of the Adaptive Lighting plugin, but I haven't had to worry about differences in bulb types, I have a mix of Hue (80% of my bulbs) and IKEA (white only and colour).
Author here. Interesting. I wasn't able to make the groups work either with Flux or with Adaptive Lighting. Not sure why, but I didn't spend too many cycles on it tbh.
Also, good ideas on the heating. Will look at that.
Author here. The problem with SQLite is when you start having a lot of sensors. That's when SQLite failed to keep up on a Pi. Mind you, this was back on Pi 3s. It might be better today, and I know there has been performance improvements to SQLite, but for me moving to Influx for time series and MySQL for the database solved things.
Also, even on the best SD cards, you will eventually break them if you write this much.
@balloob -- author of post here. Would love to have you on my podcast to nerd out about Home Assistant (https://vpetersson.com/podcast/).
Yeah I did evaluate a used SuperMicro server, but couldn't find any available in the UK with the specs I wanted.
Another variable is the power draw. Commercial servers tend to have a lot larger power draw (in particular say Xeon based ones).
Good shout on pikvm. I did have a look at that some time ago, but largely forgot about it.
Nice! Yeah that's a good idea!
Right, which is essentially free compared to CC :)
It’s largely because of cost. A credit/debit card will cost the merchant ~1-4%, whereas Swish is essentially free.
It’s also important to point out that Swish is a collaboration between the major Swedish banks.
Yeah the built-in GPIO on the Raspberry Pi is nice indeed. You can get PCs with GPIO too tho. If you look for 'industrial gateways' you'll find a number of them, but they are a bit more pricey. Alternatively, you can use a GPIO over USB, but that comes with own set of challenges.
We consider anything that you can extract from the drive by removing it security theater. Root or not doesn’t matter.
You’re right that physical access is game over for content in general. This is more about extracting sensitive data (like credentials/tokens to 3rd party sites).
All backend communication is done using mTLS, where the private key never leaves the TPM (on x86).
Moreover, we’re encrypting all sensitive data we send to the device using the corresponding public key. Thus even if you rip the drive out of the device, you won’t have much luck.
Agree on the adoption of open standards. That’s a step in the right direction. But even with secure boot on the pi, it’s still missing a TPM for other cryptographic operations. We use a lot of Zero Trust stuff on x86 and you can’t do that on the Pi.
The Pi is fine for videos/images (less proper storage), but chokes on a lot of modern web assets.
Currently for displays, but with Edge Apps you will be able to run workloads that interfaces with sensors etc over GPIO (and USB/Serial).
Our customer don’t really care about power usage much as they are all connected to a TV which draws order of magnitude more power. For some use cases power usage is key, but not for our use case.
We’ve been running thousands of Pis in production for about a decade now. We’re beginning to shift to x86. The price/performance isn’t what it once was for the Pi. I gave a talk about our experience recently at State of Open Con here (https://youtu.be/vX-qK9mxKZI).
An open source audio/video podcast RSS Feed generator that can run in GitHub Actions (or any other CI) with content hosted on any static service (e.g. S3/GCS/R2).
Screenly [0] | Remote | Sr DevOps Engineer
We're building the the future of screens for developers. Think of it as a developer friendly platform for building everything from vending machines, to ATMs, to kiosks and more (see our TechCrunch coverage for more [2]).
We are hiring someone to help us scale our DevOps/IaC/Monitoring operations. The ideal candidate is excited about security, Zero Trust and scaling Nginx.
[0] https://www.screenly.io [1]: https://apply.workable.com/screenly/j/C982F19A76/ [2]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/30/screenly-makes-it-easier-t...