If you are just looking to repurpose an old device for around the house use and it won’t ever be leaving your home network, then the simplest method is to set a static IP address on the device and leave the default gateway empty. That will prevent it from reaching anything other than the local subnet.

If you have multiple subnets that the device needs to access you will need a proper firewall. Make sure that the device has a DHCP reservation or a static IP and then block outgoing traffic to the WAN from that IP while still allowing traffic to your local subnets.

If it is a phone who knows what that modem might be doing if there isn’t a hardware switch for it. You can’t expect much privacy when that modem is active. But like the other poster mentiond a private DNS server that only has records from your local services would at least prevent apps from reaching out as long as they aren’t smart enough to fall back to an IP address if DNS fails.

A VPN for your phone with firewall rules on your router that prevent your VPN clients from reaching the WAN would hopefully prevent any sort of fallback like that.

If you are accessing your files through dolphin on your Linux device this change has no effect on you. In that case Synology is just sharing files and it doesn’t know or care what kind of files they are.

This change is mostly for people who were using the Synology videos app to stream videos. I assume Plex is much more common on Synology and I don’t believe anything changed with Plex’s h265 support.

If you were using the built in Synology videos app and have objections to Plex give Jellyfin a try. It should handle h265 and doesn’t require a purchase like Plex does to unlock features like mobile apps.

Linux isn’t dropping any codecs and should be able to handle almost any media you throw at it. Codec support depends on what app you are using, and most Linux apps use ffmpeg to do that decoding. As far as I know Debian hasn’t dropped support for h265, but even if they did you could always compile your own ffmpeg libraries with it re-enabled.

How can I most easily search my NAS for files needing the removed codecs

The mediainfo command is one of the easiest ways to do this on the command line. It can tell you what video/audio codecs are used in a file.

With Linux and Synology DSM both dropping codecs, I am considering just taking the storage hit to convert to h.264 or another format. What would you recommend?

To answer this you need to know the least common denominator of supported codecs on everything you want to play back on. If you are only worried about playing this back on your Linux machine with your 1080s then you fully support h265 already and you should not convert anything. Any conversion between codecs is lossy so it is best to leave them as they are or else you will lose quality.

If you have other hardware that can’t support h265, h264 is probably the next best. Almost any hardware in the last 15 years should easily handle h264.

When it comes to thumbnails for a remote filesystem like this are they generated and stored on my PC or will the PC save them to the folder on the NAS where other programs could use them.

Yes they are generated locally, and Dolphin stores them in ~/.cache/thumbnails on your local system.

Add a -f to your umount and you can clear up those blocked processes. Sometimes you need to do it multiple times (seems like it maybe only unblocks one stuck process at a time).

When you mount your NFS share you can add the “soft” option which will let those stuck calls timeout on their own.

North Dakota like many states has a renters refund for those with lower incomes which is designed to at least partially offset that. Limits look to be a bit low but every little bit helps.

We should move away from income taxes. Consider a progressive income tax system, where the first 15k is not taxed, and the next 15k is taxed at a rate of 10%. Start here. Why are we taxing income at these levels?

That is already exactly what we do today. Your personal standard deduction means that the first $10k you earn is not taxed. Everything over that starts in the lowest tax bracket and is only taxed at that level, filling each progressively higher bracket as you go up. Additional dependents increase the starting point of when you get taxed.

When you do your taxes they give you charts to handle this calculation which gives you your “effective tax rate”, but those charts are based on this progressive system.

Trade is good when it’s taking advantage of geographic advantages in a healthy way: I will trade you maple syrup for lemons. But not when a developed country is just exporting their exploitation: I have health, labour, environmental rules and you don’t let’s trade… A tarrif to equalize here makes sense.

Very true but it isn’t entirely about labor/environmental rules. I think capitalism likes to tell us to blame their failings entirely on those things.

In reality they have a few advantages that our capitalists don’t want you thinking about. When you have a billion people in your country you are working with scales that are considerably different. Also countries like China seem to be fine with giant vertically integrated monopolies (probably because they know they have the power to keep their corporations in line) which lets them reduce the middlemen taking their cuts along the way. And of course their giant government subsidies.

And if we have industries that are so important and add enough overhead in cost to our other industries (such that they can’t be competitive with overseas monopolies), maybe the government should take those over so they aren’t running to make profit instead of adding tariffs that just tax the people. That could put all the other businesses in the country dependent on those base things (power/steel/batteries/etc) on at least a little more level ground.

Tariffs may still be required but let’s not blame the entire situation on missing labor/environmental laws when uncontrolled capitalism is taking a big bite out of our end.

Lastly developed economies should tax corporations on revenue (not income), this makes sense once they get to a certain size or share of the market. At the point where they are no longer adding value and instead just using size to hold market position through uncompetitive practices.

I would say it is difficult to make laws that can effectively do this especially since different sectors have different sizes/expected revenues. It would be better if Congress would just do their job to just break up those companies when they get to that point. Or if their portion of the market no longer can foster healthy competition maybe it is time to treat them like a utility.

It also doesn’t say that the line on the bottom is straight, so we have no idea if that middle vertex adds up to 180 degrees. I would say it is unsolvable.

I’ve got several full color Hue bulbs that are the most used lights in my house. I haven’t had a single failure in a decade.

I was more than a little annoyed when they decided to stop supporting my original controller for them though.

Gerrymandered districts are more in danger not less. Gerrymandering is about spreading out areas which are easy wins, and instead spreading those votes over multiple districts.

You gain more seats, but you make every race closer.

In any KDE app you can connect with SFTP in the open file dialog. Just type sftp://user@server/path and you can browse/open/edit files the remote server. ssh keys+agent make things a lot easier here obviously.

The switches don’t have to control the lights they are wired to. I have Inovelli z-wave switches, and on these you can disable the relay. So the switch can still send out commands/scenes on the network but the relay is always on.

Then you would put in a relay unit in the electrical box of the lights or if you have enough room in with the switches. Then setup the switches to control their respective sets of lights.

Might even be a switch out there that lets you disconnect the relay from the buttons on the switch but still control the relay which would cut down on the device count.

It might be the least effective especially for those not in swing states, but it certainly isn’t the least important.

And as far as “not a democracy” the NPVIC isn’t that many states away from effectively rendering the problems with the electoral college moot. Certainly a steep uphill battle though.

If voters actually turned out for primaries/elections there would be much better candidates. So your argument becomes “nobody else does it, and because of that the system is broken, and so I won’t do it either”.

It seems like people get caught up in the media hype on the presidential election and forget that some of the most important change needs to start from the bottom up, and a couple of. votes can make a huge difference in State levels, and congressional/senate elections. A president is worthless without a Congress/senate passing laws that actually matter.

Just look at what Minnesota has been able to with voter reform in the last year with their very narrow trifecta. I.e law went into effect this year that allows residents to sign up to automatically receive absentee ballots for every election/primary in their area. A minor improvement, but an important one. Guaranteed that there will be folks that wouldn’t bother to vote on non-presidential elections that will be now.

They also added a “right to be absent from work to vote” which gives Minnesotans the ability to vote without using any sort of vacation/leave time without losing pay. Full list of other rather import changes here

Things like that can snowball into a larger shift at the state level.

The state has no need for you to legitimize them. Even if the system is weighted against you every vote still has power, and the only thing that not voting accomplishes is sending a message that you are okay with the system as it is. There are plenty of politicians out there that want change to happen, and they can’t do it without enough votes behind them.

But those aren’t mutually exclusive things. Voting for the Dems doesn’t prevent you from doing those other things in the meantime.

If you only have two real choices that will affect the outcome and one of them is better than the other, voting for neither of them just makes things harder for those that would have made it slightly better. More compromises have to be made and that means the situation can’t improve.

I see constant posts about how Trump splitting their base is going to mean the end of the Republican party but that seems very short sighted. It is a simple matter of natural selection, and in a two party system only two parties will ever exist. It also inherently gravitates to very close races between those parties. Any split of the Republican party might cause a term or two of chaos, but it is just a matter of time before something fills the vacuum and balance is restored.

Each party would prefer to move further towards their end of the spectrum, but they are forced to move their values (or choose more centrist candidates) until they have enough of a majority to win.

Gerrymandering, the electoral college, what’s left of the judicial branch, apathetic voters, parasitic third parties, and wedge issues have allowed the Republicans to shift further right while maintaining their power. The only possible response to that from the Dems is to also shift right as well. If they didn’t the Republicans would just end up with trifectas or super majorities.

Trump was also able to shift racist/authoritarian/nationalist policies much further right by shifting his fiscal policies further left than what Republicans normally would do. His whole campaign was based on deficit spending (tax cuts without any real cost cutting, stimulus COVID spending, etc), public works (multi billion dollar worthless walls), and his focus on blue collar workers (not directly supporting unions but he pushed anti China + US manufacturing boosts).

Every vote for a third party is one less vote that the Republicans need to gain, which is a little more right that they can slide and maintain power, and since natural selection links the two parties it is also a little further right that the Democrats have to slide to maintain their power as well.

If you want to shift things left voting third-party won’t do it. Third parties have no power to make changes and never will in our current system.

Voting for the only party that has a chance of winning and is willing to make voting reforms to improve that system is the only hope of shifting the parties to the left where the actual political center of the country lies.

Voting for anyone else is illogical and won’t prevent this genocide. Protests, and organizations can maybe help in the short term to push the Democrats to change course but it also disenfranchises more voters to not show up, and pushes more to vote for third parties… And so the snowball tumbles down the hill to the right gaining momentum leaving us with frankly no good choice.