My employer has a pretty large presence in AWS. We finished migrating to Amazon’s Corretto (based on openjdk) months ago. It was pretty painless given we already use Amazon’s Linux distros.

Doesn’t prevent Amazon from occasionally sticking smaller packages in our mailbox…

My only problem is our driveway is 700 feet long, uphill & through trees. I seriously doubt my WiFi reaches it…

Our house has 5 heating & 2 AC zones that I installed Ecobee thermostats on. Three rooms also have skylights that can be opened. When we open the skylights the thermostats all turn off, and when closed they turn them back on to the mode they were previously set to.

Our house is set back in the woods on a long driveway. When either me or my wife arrives home after dark all the driveway / walkway lights turn on. And when we’re both away they all turn off.

I also have a “bedtime” button on my phone that turns off all the lights, locks the doors, turns off our WiFi speakers, puts all the Ecobees into sleep mode, etc.

Exactly. 25 years ago I helped manage a Sun cluster. 20 years ago I was on a team that managed roughly 3000 Linux servers in a data center. We racked them, monitored them, wrote tools to configure & manage them, etc. Ten years ago I helped manage Linux systems that were physically managed by a hosting provider, and we never actually saw/touched any of the hardware.

Today I help manage hundreds of AWS instances and also use tools/services from providers like Splunk, Akamai, and others. I haven’t seen/touched a physical server in years. It’s now all virtually managed via web portals, API’s, tools like terraform, etc.

Here’s the relevant part of one of my automations. It’s for a light sensor I have attached to my washing machine:

trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - binary_sensor.washer_light_sensor_sensor_state_any
    from: "on"
    to: "off"

I had a similar issue with other zwave sensors. With a little help I was able to refine my triggers so that my automations only run when they go from an “off” state to an “on” state. Before that they’d trigger from a “none” or “unknown” state, which is what happens when HA or zwave2js restarts.

Eh. The feds already have my fingerprints due to a background check…

It also doesn’t take into account the technological advances that scammers are using more and more. Get a phone call from your boss requesting something sensitive? How sure are you that it really is your boss and not an AI generated voice relying on data from LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. run through a ChatGPT style system to respond to all manner of small talk etc?

I can’t agree more with regards to career development. When I graduated from college way back in 1990 I wanted to do software development. It took me six months of job hunting that resulted in only 5 interviews and a single job offer to do telephone tech support for a business products software company.

I spent two years doing tech support and used that time to learn the internals of the product and even wrote some programs in C that demonstrated some of our platforms integrations for our business clients. I was eventually noticed by a couple senior software engineers who started mentoring me and helped me move from tech support to software development full time.

After a decade or so of software development I transitioned into a DevOps role in a similar manner - started doing some of that sort of work on my own, got noticed, then encouraged to change roles. I’ve been doing that for close to 20 years and am very happy where I am now.

Pretty much the same here, but in a linode vps that hosts a few other things as well.

Same exact boat here. My xs has served me well but it’s time for an upgrade.

They use a newer low-voltage Bluetooth radio that has a very limited range. When another Apple device like an iPhone, iPad, laptop, etc. is in range then that device will ping Apples servers with an updated location for the air tag in question.

Surprised they don’t offer it as a $20 up charge…

Take photos of your luggage before checking them. That way you can show the employees exactly what they’re looking for.

I use sudo on my Mac almost daily to edit my /etc/hosts file. My employer is a big user of Akamai, and this is the standard way of testing configuration changes on Akamai’s staging network prior to deploying them in production.

This is how we ensure that a seemingly trivial change, not to mention incredibly complex ones, don’t result in doing something like knocking an entire website offline.

As far as I know he’s the only one with his own theme song.

https://youtu.be/lFzRNWf7Gi0