DuckDuckGo just gave its browser a feature that a lot of people have been waiting for. The privacy-focused browser can now block most video ads on YouTube, letting users watch videos without sitting through the pre-roll and mid-roll interruptions that have become part of everyday life on the platform. The feature is already enabled by default for iPhone, Windows, and Mac users running the latest version of the browser. Android users can turn it on manually... with DuckDuckGo planning to enable it by default in a future update...
To make it work, DuckDuckGo relies on the same community-maintained filter lists used by uBlock Origin, along with some of its own compatibility rules. The company says you might notice a bit of extra buffering before a video starts, but once playback begins, most ads should be gone.
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli argues that the feature raises questions about how creators are compensated when ad revenue is bypassed.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
They're arguing for an environmental impact assessment for what could be 1 million satellites:
Earthjustice, acting on behalf of DarkSky International, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), filed a petition this week... The filing doesn't target any single company. Instead, it asks the regulator to put the entire emerging orbital datacenter sector on hold while it assesses the cumulative effects of proposals from SpaceX, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, and any similar applications that follow. According to the petition, those proposals collectively seek "well over a million datacenter satellites" in low Earth orbit.... " increasing the existing volume of satellites in low-earth orbit by multiple orders of magnitude."
The groups argue that the FCC is trying to apply licensing rules written for much smaller satellite constellations to an entirely new class of infrastructure. "If ever a situation warranted a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement [PEIS], it is this one," the petition says. It argues that a single review would allow the agency to examine "the risks, alternatives, needs, costs, and impacts of this sudden transformation of Earth's exosphere" before deciding whether any of the projects are in the public interest. The petition raises concerns about rocket launch emissions, pollutants released as satellites burn up during atmospheric reentry, depletion of the ozone layer, orbital debris, light pollution, impacts on wildlife, and interference with astronomy.
It also argues that the combined effects of these constellations cannot be understood by evaluating applications one at a time.... "It is difficult to imagine a better example of multiple projects presenting essentially identical impacts and risks that compound synergistically and cumulatively than the present proposals..." The petition argues that the FCC's current approach, which generally treats satellite licenses as categorically excluded from detailed environmental review, is no longer fit for proposals measured not in dozens or thousands of spacecraft but in hundreds of thousands and, potentially, millions.
If the FCC agrees, orbital datacenter operators will have a mountain of paperwork to clear before sending their hardware skyward.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Home Assistant Transplant
I have been running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4 for about five years now. A short while ago, homeassistant was suddenly no longer responding. Neither web ui nor a SSH login worked. So I cut the RPi's power and rebooted it. That seemed to have fixed it and I didn't think about it.
Then this weekend I wanted to update Home Assistant and create a backup as usual beforehand. But somehow this backup always failed with
failed to perform the action update/install. Error creating backup: Backup failed: [{'type': 'HomeAssistantBackupError', 'message': “Preparing backup of Home Assistant Core failed. Failed to inform HA Core: Unsuccessful websocket message - {'id': 232, 'type': 'result', 'success': False, 'error': {'code': 'pre_backup_actions_failed', 'message': 'Error during pre-backup: Could not lock database within 30 seconds.'}}.”, 'stage': 'home_assistant', 'error_key': None, 'extra_fields': None}]
Looking at the logs I saw
The system could not validate that the sqlite3 database at //config/home-assistant_v2.db was shutdown cleanly
Apparantly my sudden reboot had corrupted one of the sqlite databases.
I tried to follow this blog post to recover the database but it didn't work. Home Assistant did not like the restored version.
So my only chance was to restore the database from a backup. Unfortunately the same issue had also influenced the automatic backups. The latest usable one was from 28th of June. So about two weeks of historical sensor data is lost.
Since I hade to restore a backup anyway. I decided to do what I had planned for a long time: move HA off the Raspberry and thus an SD card, to a “proper” system with a SSD.
I still had an old Celeron 3855U based Mini-PC, that I had used a home lab Docker server until I set up my new NAS. It has 32gigs of RAM and a 500GB SSD – more than enough for Home Assistant.
I followed the official guide to set up Home Assistant OS from a Ubuntu Live image. To avoid having to connect a monitor and peripherals during setup, I used my Nano KVM - worked like a charm.
The rest was pleasantly simple. Once Home Assistant is up, you simply upload the backup during the onboarding phase – it takes a while to restore and then your Home Assistant is up and running as usual. The only thing I had to change, was the IP address (that made all my external integrations like MQTT and Grott work again) and switch the (no longer existing) RPi bluetooth adapter for the builtin one of the MiniPC.
I am glad my Home Assistant is working again. It has become an indespensible part of how my home works.
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