Can this please be the final straw at last?

Very unlikely. The rest of the world has bigger fish to fry than a few more brown people getting killed. Americans have a president who seems like he wants world war 3, Europe is dealing with energy problems and the fact that a potential enemy, Russia, holds the only current solution, Asia is either China or worried about China, Africa and South America are dealing with their own shit and generally can’t be bothered.

Not to mention Israel is one of the few if only Western culture nations in the area, making them a strategic military ally for most of the western world. And the rest of the developed world has significant trade and technology connections to Israel.

Point is, Israel is useful, and if the cost of doing business is not getting involved when IDF shoots a few families, then so be it.

If this gets any sort of publicity, I am sure it will be blamed on some kind of misunderstanding or bad intel or tragic accident. The appropriate public relations words will be said and that will be the end of it.

Welcome to the world of electronic gadgets. You’re right there’s nowhere near $100 worth of hardware in this thing. I’d also love a color touchscreen. But I’d rather a color touchscreen that I could integrate in HA than one running some proprietary cloud connected ThermostatOS.

You could do that yourself- put an old tablet on the wall, run power to it, then get something like a zooz zen16 multi-relay or an ESPHome relay board to drive the hvac. Then the thermostat becomes a totally software defined virtual thing in Home Assistant that pulls data from a temp sensor in the room and controls the HVAC as appropriate.

https://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-Home-TH6320ZW2007-Programmable-Touchscreen/dp/B0BHTQF8NL

That is the one you want. Honeywell t6 pro Z-Wave version, specifically that link which is the newer Smart start version.

Z-Wave is 100% local, not Wi-Fi, and secure.

I use these in my house and couldn’t be happier.

We used to be. The rules changed about 10 years ago.

I’d rather have 120v wiring I can do myself than 240v wiring that I have to pay someone $hundreds just to replace a light switch.

A lot of big appliances require higher power. Dishwashers, clothes dryers, fridges.

Here in US dishwashers and fridges run on <1500w. A fridge should only use a few hundred watts tops unless it’s horribly inefficient. A dishwasher needs power for the heating element but ours do okay on 1500w, although yours probably heat up faster. We use a different plug for clothes dryers, usually a NEMA 10-30 or NEMA 14-30 (30A at 240v), sometimes NEMA 14-50 (50A at 240v) for really big stuff like EV chargers.
Our power is split phase (two 120v legs, 180° out of phase, so either phase against neutral/ground is 120v, phase A against phase B is 240v). So with those plugs you either get both legs and ground or both legs plus neutral plus ground.

Some powers tools, drill press, plainer

Almost all US power tools run on 120v 15A.
There’s a few really big ones, mostly designed for professional shops, that need some flavor of 240v, usually with a NEMA 6-15 outlet (like normal US outlet but pins are horizontal rather than vertical). These outlets are uncommon outside of wood shops.

I never worry about load splitting,.

The only time I’ve ever even considered this is a. charging my Tesla on 120v, or b. running a space heater and a hair dryer at the same time in the bathroom. :)

Bottom line- yeah NZ system has higher power density but I don’t think the benefits outweigh the loss of ability to work on it yourself.

Okay but that’s more talking about the benefit of a 240v system. The question here was the benefit of the giant UK plug. Personally I would argue that 240v to every receptacle is not a major benefit, because very few devices require 3kw+. And in exchange you get a somewhat more hazardous system.
I am curious if homeowners in NZ are allowed to work on their own wiring? Here in the US you are…

Your understanding is correct. It’s actually a very simple calculation: volts x amps = watts. Watts is the amount of total work done. So to use a water pipe analogy, imagine you have a pressure washer. Volts is the pressure in PSI. Amps in the flow rate in gallons per minute. Watts is how quickly it cleans your sidewalk. Thus, the 500 PSI pressure washer that can put out 2 gallons per minute does about the same amount of cleaning as the 1,000 PSI pressure washer that puts out one gallon per minute. However, as long as the hose can withstand the pressure, pushing out 2 gallons per minute requires a larger diameter hose.

It’s the same way with wiring. The capacity of a wire is measured in amps. So if a device needs say 1200 watts, feeding it was 240v instead of 120v means you can use thinner wires everywhere. Including in the transformer that powers it.

However, this type of gain only really makes a big difference when you get into very high power consumption devices. An electric kettle that takes 1500 w, in the US you are almost maxing out a single 15 amp outlet. In the UK the same kettle is using less than half of the outlets capacity. (Of course they just make a kettle that has twice as much output, because the Brits don’t want to wait for their tea). Amusingly, that 3 kilowatt tea kettle is one of the only places where you get a real perceptible advantage from a 240v system.

… How is that the case? You’re multiple loads end up with a cubic foot of plugs and receptacles. Like imagine I want to plug in a computer, two monitors, a printer, a desk lamp, a cell phone charger, and a laptop plug. None of these devices use more than 100 watts. In UK you need seven of those ridiculous giant plugs for all this. Even with a power strip it would be physically huge.

In the US the power strip that would run all that stuff is barely a foot long.

I have used power strips all my life and never once has one caught fire.

American here. I may be in the minority, but I think this plug design is absolutely stupid. I get that it has safety features, that you can put a fuse in the plug, that the outlets have switches, etc etc etc. But it is absolutely fucking huge. Ridiculously huge. And anywhere that you have multiple devices you want to plug in, it is totally impractical because it is so fucking huge.

The fact is, very very few devices need 240v 13A. Yes I get that it is useful to have this ridiculous amount of power so you can boil your tea kettle in 35 seconds, but other than that very few household appliances need anywhere near that amount of power.

So the result is a cell phone charger, which at the very outside is pulling 20 or 30 watts, is plugged into this giant ridiculous monstrosity capable of supplying 3000+ watts. And in reality the only appliances that use anywhere near that much are cooking appliances and space heaters.

Meanwhile the US NEMA 5-15 is good for 1800 watts, plenty to run almost every household appliance, with the longer ground pin and an appropriate outlet it supports tamper resistance shutters, the thin flat pins resist the insertion of foreign objects into the outlet, and you can fit many outlets in a small space.
And it doesn’t destroy your foot when you step on it, as a nice bonus.

All jokes aside, things like this are why China is beating us. I am absolutely not a fan of the Chinese government, but the simple fact is they get shit done.

I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.

And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.

I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.

This is the answer. Leave a hair dryer blowing at the thing for 5 or 10 minutes. It will heat the bowl, and also heat the air inside, which will expand.

Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?

I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.

But apparently it’s set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.

To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.

Oh of course. For them and their OEM partners too. Nobody else benefits from throwing 2-5 generations of perfectly functional hardware in the fucking trash.

That all said though, Microsoft has been one of the biggest pushes behind replacing passwords with more secure authentication. And TPM does play a role in that. Certainly not the driving factor for throwing away millions of perfectly good computers though.

I really wish there was something regulatory that could be done about this. There are millions of perfectly good fully working computers that are going to go in the fucking trash because of this. I understand the desire for a TPM on every machine. It makes sense in a way. But the pure environmental impact is just indefensible. All of those computers had a significant environmental footprint to build them and ship them and again to dispose of them plus building and shipping their replacements.
If Microsoft had such a hard-on for TPM, they should have worked with computer manufacturers to make some sort of retrofit system or way of easily determining if a TPM can be added to an existing computer

I’m in the same boat. Keep getting android popups like IMPORTANT ACCOUNT NOTIFICATION YOU HAVE TO ADD YOUR BIRTHDAY no I don’t fuck you swipe away.

Not sure about better but I can add a step. Fire up Microsoft word, then write a macro which outputs a shortcut that launches Internet explorer with a URL that loads and local HTML page which after 1 second redirects to a .exe. then click open instead of save as. That only works with really old school internet explorer of course not the modern edge version.

The beauty of self hosting is most of it doesn’t actually require that much compute power. Thus, it’s a perfect use for hardware that is otherwise considered absolutely shit. That hardware would otherwise go in the trash. But use it to self host, and in most cases it’s idle most of the time so it doesn’t use much power anyway.

I would return that UPS and for about the same price or not too much more you could get a cyberpower unit that puts out a real sine wave. Obviously your server does not like Riello’s fake sine wave, so why not feed it the good stuff rather than trying to force it to eat garbage?

My 2c-
It is well understood that China and USA need each other. And that has generally been seen as a desirable situation, if only to prevent the two of us from needlessly going to war over some stupid nonsense.
US has basically outsourced all manufacturing to China, to the point that it would take a decade or more to undo that. We depend on them, they depend on us too.

Most of this is just boilerplate recognition and encouragement of that fact. Stating in a great many words that China wants to continue to be a US ally. But it is also a warning, that China is not a third world nation that the US can boss around as it sees fit. So China is warning us to follow through on our word and generally be honest and do what we say.

The red line things are the real meat of that. This is an instruction / warning to Donald Trump and his incoming team. So the whole message basically says we will work with you and be friends but don’t fuck with us on these four issues.

Unfortunately, those are kind of four issues that we really should fuck with them on. USA should not turn a blind eye to human rights violations of any ally, regardless of our level of dependence on them.

And US should absolutely not support China taking over Taiwan. Not just for reasons of principle, but for our own ends- Taiwan produces an awful lot of the world’s computer chips. If China gains control of TSMC, that essentially puts them in control of the US economy because if TSMC stops sending us chips, the vast majority of the supply from Qualcomm, AMD, Apple, and others just goes away.

Our strategy so far has been to officially acknowledge the ‘One China’ policy that includes Taiwan as part of China, while simultaneously taking actions to help Taiwan stay independent. China is calling us out for that here.