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.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyVHrGLiTcc (46m20s)

Transcript: https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-maximizing-d11e648eb56f (10,314 words with footnotes and references)

Excerpt:

...for simple maximizers, its choices are just about numbers. That means its choices are in the numbers. Here, the choice between two desserts is just a choice between numbers. We could say its choice is already made. And that it has no responsibility, since it’s just following what the numbers say.

Reason-based maximizers don’t just see numbers, though, they also see values. Here, there’s a choice between two desserts — but it isn’t a choice between two numbers. See, it’s also a choice between two values. One option means being a seize-the-day, intensity kind of person. The other means being a foody, aristocratic, elegance kind of person.

My personal thoughts about this talk: it's a kind of strange, kind of dubious philosophical and multi-disciplinary reflection on metrics for organizations, especially metrics for tech companies, and on the pitfalls of optimizing for metrics in what the speaker argues is too "simple" a way.

I don't entirely trust the speaker or the argument, but there was enough in the talk to stimulate curiosity and reflection that I thought it was worth watching.

Oldest doesn't have to mean absolute age and can be relative to that tech's particular "lane" (e.g. your "old" cell phone might be newer than one of your game consoles, but it still "feels" old when compared to cell phones exclusively).

And "tech" can be, well, anything you think counts as "tech!"

I've tried DDG for some time, but I keep finding myself using !g to find better results. I read a comment on Reddit that you just need to get used to searching things differently, but I'm starting to think that DDG just isn't very good. Kagi works well and I use the free version a bit for academic stuff, but I don't see myself paying for a search engine. Anyone have long-term reviews of search engines like Brave, Qwant, etc.?

So this may be weird, I just got a new set of pixel buds pro 2 and they work great, except if I'm not playing audio on my phone they frequently disconnect and reconnect from my bluetooth - I can tell because I can hear the tones. But if I'm playing a podcast or YouTube video, no issue. Phone is a Pixel 7a and it doesn't do this with my old A buds, my car, etc. haven't tried pairing the buds to anything else yet.

I've updated firmware, restarted everything, checked settings, turned off the adaptive sound, with no change. Help?

eBay is updating its privacy policy, effective next month (2025-04-27). The major change is a new section about AI processing, accompanied by a new user setting with an opt-out checkbox for having your personal data feed their models.

While that page specifically references European areas, the privacy selection appears to be active and remembered between visits for non-Europe customers. It may not do anything for us at all. On the other hand, it seems nearly impossible to find that page from within account settings, so I thought I'd post a direct link.

I'm well aware that I'm anomalous for having read this to begin with, much less diffed it against the previous version. But since I already know that I'm weird, and this wouldn't be much of a discussion post without questions:

• How do you stay up to date with contract changes that might affect you, outside of widespread Internet outrage (such as recent Firefox news)?
• What's your threshold -- if any -- for deciding whether to quit a company over contract changes? Alternatively, have you ever walked away from a purchase, service, or other acquisition over the terms of the contracts?

Title kinda gives the gist of it all.

I have been wondering about a way to have a "full" desktop with just XR glasses, a phone, bluetooth keyboard, and an internet connection.

Not sure if this is easily doable, or if Windows VMs would be so expensive to make it pointless. Maybe something like WINE or w/e the not 20 year outdated current thing is to run Windows software.

The main use would be to run 1-2 browsers and trading software.

Just curious if this is a foolish idea or not.