Lately there's been a rash of people ripping apart AC units on small business' so they can sell them for parts (mostly the copper). Tends to take days to months to discover, and by that time they're long gone and the police are rarely interested in it (in my experience even when you figure out who's actually buying stolen copper, or car parts....but i digress).

I was asked as a friend to help with this for a couple of small business locations that otherwise don't need normal security. To start it's just one large, 60x300', roof with a couple of units on it. They're willing to spend money, but also don't want to get scammed, so I've been looking into it for them.

They're getting a quote from one of the big security companies like ADT, but didn't feel they were getting it right since they just wanted a camera pointing at the access ladder, when it sure looks like the first time this happened it was someone who brought their own, so they really do need some good coverage and not just one camera pointed at a ladder while they pay for some 24/7 person to stare at the feed.

The rough requirements are:

1. Some decent weatherproofing, as this will be on a roof all day. We can put an enclosure around it but trying to keep this simple.

2. Easy remote access to footage, ideally with notifications that can be setup for things like human motion, or lost connection.

3. Ideally fewer cameras. Not exactly because of cost, but because of the difficulty of getting the power/network up there. Be a lot easier to do one drop in the middle of the roof than say a drop at every corner.

4. Probably not wifi cameras. I figure we need to run power up there anyways, so it might as well be POE if at all possible. Added bonus being that you don't need to worry as much about wifi signal and the rare enterprising criminal with a jammer/scrambler/whatever?

and the tricky one
5. No on site storage. Likely they'll want cloud.

My first thoughts:
I have ubiquiti at home, and this seemed fine for it as a nice in-between since they probably need 2-4 POE cameras max (was going to see if i could get away with 2 in the middle of the roof, one looking each way). Was going to mess around and see what level of alerts they give and make them a couple of accounts (basically one alert to the person who'd call the cops and one to the person who'd look at it if the feed went down).

The no on site storage thing however, complicates stuff....i think?

The short version is there's no way to do even a basic NVR there (i've been over this thoroughly, and it's more a drama thing than a business thing). I figured that wouldn't be an issue, they'd just have to pay extra for some cloud storage and host it there, and it would probably scale well for them if they liked the solution and rolled it out anywhere else. Rather than having a bunch of NVR's they could just have one cloud based one, neat.

buuuuut it seems ubiquiti doesn't really do that. The people i'm helping are somewhat technical but i'd like to keep this turnkey as possible. I don't think there's any clean/easy way to accomplish this with ubiquiti, or at least that I can find?

In theory I think there might be some clever network way to host the NVR at some other physical/central location (with less drama) and then route all the traffic there, but that's beyond my current ability, and i'm skeptical that even if I learn how, i can keep it simple enough that i'd feel comfortable suggesting it.

The followup research:
So there's huge professional companies like verkanda/axis. I did some basic pricing research and it looks like $2kish, minimum, a year for these things. That might be within their budget (i'm told the damage done was easily into the 5 figure territory), but it also feels like extreme overkill for something that should be easier to solve?

Another one i've come across before is Reolink, but I have 0 experience with it and haven't found much in either direction that makes me think it'd be a good solution or a terrible one.

I'm pretty against ring/nest just due to a mixture of "fuck em" and also feeling like you don't get what you pay for.

Overall-

Anyone have any experience or guidance with this sort of thing? I really feel like my own home network/camera setup has me right on the edge of being able to say "ah yeah here's what you need...." and yet i've fallen at the finish line. Is there some easy way to make ubiquiti work (seems to meet all the needs except the cloud storage)? Or some system you're familiar with that does have that feature?

I feel like i bump into these kinds of problems more and more where the options are "make it a second hobby/job" or "pay through the nose" when it feels like there should be a reasonable inbetween.

TL:DR: Need a remote desktop program that will let me get into my desktop from another network with no action required at the desktop itself.

Will be out of town for about two weeks, have a Windows 10 desktop and a Windows 10 tablet. Desktop stays home, tablet is going with me in case I need something from my desktop. Need a way to connect and access and control my desktop from the tablet (I'll have KBM with me) with no interaction at the desktop itself (most remote desktop programs require confirmation at the desktop to access and/or gain control).

Suggestions? FOSS preferred.

This is a bit of a round about story, but bear with me.

I like PowerPoint, I love using it, it's intuitive to me. Google slides is okay, (I never delved into OpenOffice or any other offshoot really), but when I have a choice, I like using PPT.

I consider myself a comfortable Apple user as well, I prefer it for most of my computing needs, but not all, so it's not like I am not capable of using the Apple ecosystem.

However, whenever I have tried Keynote or Pages or any of the "office" tools, I don't like them.

I cannot tell if this is because these products or projects were killed off because of lowspread adoption at their onset, and thus did not get any development or improvement. Apple often does not release things and then just let them die, it usually waits a long time before it releases something, so they don't release things with potential failure (maybe I'm wrong, my memory doesn't recall anything like that other than this very example lol, and I guess their camera, but I digress).

I guess my rambling is, is PowerPoint just good and Keynote just bad or is there some more interesting story to it?

Tax time again!
I like to get this done as soon as possible to get it out of the way. I have all my tax documents at the ready, but several changes happened in my life last year (moved states, sold home, bought home, etc.) and the tax software I've been using over the last several years apparently "doesn't support" several of the tax forms (or even simply some of the boxes on the forms) I have for this year.

Trying to avoid the "Big Two" if possible.

Hey Tildes, I learned to touch type with ye olde Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing CD-ROM that came with my first home computer (I'm not quite THAT old -- what was what we could afford).

Can you recommend a better / newer / snazzier / rizzier typing program for a teen / child?

Online or offline are fine, paid is fine. What do you like about it and what didn't you like about it?

Edit: Side note: how did y'all learn to type? Anyone here doesn't touch type (eg, not using your eyes) and use some other kind of keyboard configure or other tech? For Cantonese Chinese language, more young people are starting to use alternative methods even beyond the numpad Q9 and go straight to "speech to text" using their phone software. Curious about your languages and input.

Very similar to how the recipe book in the game "Potion Craft" is organized. I essentially want to be able to mark pages and assign an icon, letter, symbol, or whatever to the tab. Clicking the tab brings you to that page. I also want the freedom to arrange these tabs around the perimeter of the book.

I'm not even sure what search terms to use to find a software like this. I'm not looking for anything robust, just a simple reader app with minimal page marking with intuitive visual organization.

Does anything like this exist?

I believe this is a interesting issue to post it here because it's very difficult to get writing tools outside the English language. That's exactly why I ended up starting this project. If it's not allowed, I apologise in advance.

I'm a linguist and technical writer (tech writer, dev writer, documenter, technical editor, etc.) and I've always used Hemingway for my English writing. The problem was that I'd never found a text editor capable of suggesting possible improvements to a text in Brazilian Portuguese.

Years passed, and this week I had time to create a fork of Techscriptor with some interface improvements and adapt it to Brazilian Portuguese. That's how version 0.1 of Verbalize was born.

What does it do?

In a basic and summarised way, you can upload a file from your computer (in md or txt, for now) and the editor, besides allowing you to actually edit, will give you hints on how to improve the text (long sentences, complex words, jargon, adjectives and other things we should avoid in texts, especially technical ones).

Once edited, you can download the file in md format.

Access

The application can be installed (Electron), accessed through the web, or you can download the code from GitHub and run it locally in your browser.

• Live version
• Source code

Improvements

I have a few 'next steps' in mind:

• Google Drive/Onedrive integration.
• Possibility to upload a custom rules file.
• Allow it to be used offline as well.
• Improve the GUI.

Has anyone used a free, offline, open-source, real-time speech-to-speech translation app on under-powered devices (i.e., older smart phones)? There are a few libraries that written that purportedly can do or help with local speech-to-speech:

• https://github.com/ictnlp/StreamSpeech
• https://github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx
• https://github.com/openai/whisper

I'm looking for a simple app that can listen for English, translate into Korean (and other languages), then perform speech synthesis on the translation. Although real-time would be great, a short delay would work.

RTranslator is awkward (couldn't get it to perform speech-to-speech using a single phone). 3PO sprouts errors like dandelions and requires an online connection.

Any suggestions?

So, got a new job. That's great. Pay bump, more / new responsibilities and all that jazz. It took until my first day on the job for it to like, REALLY sink in that it's my first job managing people. I want to be good at this, or at the very least, competent. I'm responsible for my team and I don't want to let them down. I'm already looking things up online, talking to my parents, friends in similar positions for more information, and figured it would be good to ask around on here.

I guess the other half of this is that I've gone from looking at code in the IDE to now being more responsible for higher level architectural decisions. Possibly company steering decisions. Not used to that yet either, or at least the feeling. I feel under-prepared, and am possibly verging on overwhelmed. Lots of new things happening at once here, also writing this to unpack it as I type it out.

What advice do you have for me? Anything that you've learned while in a managerial role that you haven't gotten to share? Tips and Tricks? Prayers? 🤣

One thing I really enjoy is being able to share my screen with family and friends to watch movies together or share gameplay. On Windows, you can do this trivially with Discord. On Mac, you can do this on Discord if you install some software they recommend. On Linux, I believe it's impossible with Discord unless you use a third party front end, which I'd rather not do. Zoom has screenshare with sound, but I don't know what the Linux support is like, and it's capped at 40 minutes unless you pay.

Are there other messaging services that have voice call and audio screenshare support on Linux, no unofficial front end necessary, that's also available on Windows and Mac? It's ok if it requires some setup. Ideally it would be a group chat as opposed to streamed publicly on a site like Twitch.