I want to clarify something that you hinted at in your post but I’ve seen in other posts too. This isn’t a cloud failure or remotely related to it, but a facet of a company’s security software suite causing crippling issues.

I apologize ahead of time, when I started typing this I didn’t think it would be this long. This is pretty important to me and I feel like this can help clarify a lot of misinformation about how IT and software works in an enterprise.

Crowdstrike is an EDR, or Endpoint Detection and Response software. Basically a fancy antivirus that isn’t file signature based but action monitoring based. Like all AVs, it receives regular definition updates around once an hour to anticipate possible threat actors using zero-day exploits. This is the part that failed, the hourly update channel pushed a bad update. Some computers escaped unscathed because they checked in either right before the bad update was pushed or right after it was pulled.
Another facet of AVs is how they work depends on monitoring every part of a computer. This requires specific drivers to integrate into the core OS, which were updated to accompany the definition update. Anything that integrates that closely can cause issues if it isn’t made right.

Before this incident, Crowdstrike was regarded as the best in its class of EDR software. This isn’t something companies would swap to willy nilly just because they feel like it. The scale of implementing a new security software for all systems in an org is a huge undertaking, one that I’ve been a part of several times. It sucks to not only rip out the old software but also integrate the new software and make sure it doesn’t mess up other parts of the server. Basically companies wouldn’t use CS unless they are too lazy to change away, or they think it’s really that good.
EDR software plays a huge role in securing a company’s systems. Companies need this tech for security but also because they risk failing critical audits or can’t qualify for cybersecurity insurance. Any similar software could have issues - Cylance, Palo Alto Cortex XDR, Trend Micro are all very strong players in the field too and are just as prone to having issues.
And it’s not just the EDR software that could cause issues, but lots of other tech. Anything that does regular definition or software updating can’t or shouldn’t be monitored because of the frequency or urgency of each update would be impractical to filter by an enterprise. Firewalls come to mind, but there could be a lot of systems at risk of failing due to a bad update. Of course, it should fall on the enterprise to provide the manpower to do this, but this is highly unlikely when most IT teams are already skeleton crews and subject to heavy budget cuts.

So with all that, you might ask “how is this mitigated?” It’s a very good question. The most obvious solution “don’t use one software on all systems” is more complicated and expensive than you think. Imagine bug testing your software for two separate web servers - one uses Crowdstrike, Tenable, Apache, Python, and Node.js, and the other uses TrendMicro, Qualys, nginx, PHP, and Rust. The amount of time wasted on replicating behavior would be astronomical, not to mention unlikely to have feature parity. At what point do you define the line of “having redundant tech stacks” to be too burdensome? That’s the risk a lot of companies take on when choosing a vendor.
On a more relatable scale, imagine you work at a company and desktop email clients are the most important part of your job. One half of the team uses Microsoft Office and the other half uses Mozilla Thunderbird. Neither software has feature parity with the other, and one will naturally be superior over the other. But because the org is afraid of everyone getting locked out of emails, you happen to be using “the bad” software. Not a very good experience for your team, even if it is overall more reliable.

A better solution is improved BCDR (business continuity disaster recovery) processes, most notably backup and restore testing. For my personal role in this incident, I only have a handful of servers affected by this crisis for which I am very grateful. I was able to recover 6 out of 7 affected servers, but the last is proving to be a little trickier. The best solution would be to restore this server to a former state and continue on, but in my haste to set up the env, I neglected to configure snapshotting and other backup processes. It won’t be the end of the world to recreate this server, but this could be even worse if this server had any critical software on it. I do plan on using this event to review all systems I have a hand in to assess redundancy in each facet - cloud, region, network, instance, and software level.
Laptops are trickier to fix because of how distributed they are by nature. However, they can still be improved by having regular backups taken of a user’s files and testing that Bitlocker is properly configured and curated.

All that said, I’m far from an expert on this, just an IT admin trying to do what I can with company resources. Here’s hoping Crowdstrike and other companies greatly improve their QA testing, and IT departments finally get the tooling approved to improve their backup and recovery strategies.

Schlage’s Zwave/Zigbee stuff works really well with Home Assistant. Ours have been hooked up since day 1 and don’t have any issues that I know of

I have been addicted to making ramen eggs (ajitama) for lunches lately. I eat one or two eggs over rice with some furikake or toasted seaweed and that’s all I need to power through the day. You could pair the dish with more veggies or a miso soup if you’re feeling fancy. The nice part is making half a dozen eggs squares me away for the week, so I hardly have to think about what to do.

Another dish I like is Korean steamed eggs (gyeranjjim). It takes not even 10 mins to cook on the stove. Making rice takes longer, and you can make a lot of rice to reheat later in the week. I would cook the eggs fresh each day though , I’m not sure how reheating them would go. The broth that goes with the eggs keeps me fuller than I ever expect.

Baba ghanoush is so tasty when you make it yourself. This requires more effort up front to roast the eggplant, but the dip is good all week. I eat it with carrots, cucumber, cauliflower, and some pita chips.

Regular tuna salad or this chickpea “tuna” salad is always easy to whip up. I always have celery, pickles, and bread on hand so if I’m feeling up for it, I crack open a can of tuna or chickpeas for an easy lunch.

If there’s an option on the AP to not permit link local routing within a vlan/ssid, that will force all traffic up to the firewall. Then you can block intrazone traffic at the firewall level for that vlan.
I’ve seen this in Meraki hardware where it’s referred to as “client isolation”. Ubiquiti might be able to do this too.

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Allagans secretly powering Home Assistant

In shorter terms to what the other comment said, your website won’t work in networks that use DNS served by your DC. The website is fine on the Internet, but less so at home or at an office/on a VPN if you’re an enterprise.
“I can’t go to example.com on the VPN!” was a semi common ticket at my last company 🙃

Not sure what temp and humidity levels a terrarium is expected to have, but Shelly makes a good device for monitoring both - https://www.shelly.com/en/products/shop/shelly-h-and-t-white.
Or one with a screen (still smart) - https://www.shelly.com/en-us/products/shop/shelly-h-and-t-gen3-1/
We use the latter in our bedroom which triggers the power outlet to a humidifier if it gets too dry when we’re sick.

It’s unlikely but if she wants Japanese riichi mahjong and not solitaire style, Kemono Mahjong is a really solid app. No ads or micro transactions (the only in app purchase is to optionally support the dev for $1/month), full feature, minimal to no tracking (email address for online game purposes). It’s not open source or free but it’s only $3 one time purchase.

I don’t have any suggestions for solitaire/tile matching mahjong, unfortunately. Microsoft’s app is not malware but will be datamine galore. It also has ads unless you pay per month. Anything else, id be leery of the security of the app and your data.

Short answer, likely yes. It’s not definitive, you could still slip by after sending enough mail, but you are also very likely to get whacked because that VPS IP doesn’t have an email sending reputation.

Longer answer, email gateways like Google, Microsoft, and Proofpoint don’t really care who owns what IP. Well, they might, but they’re more concerned about the sending habits of an IP. While you might send good mail from that IP, there’s no reputation for it, so you could be whacked for having a neutral reputation (the ol’ credit score dilemma but for email).
In order to have a good reputation, you have to send a large volume of messages very gradually over several weeks to “warm” your IP as a reputable sender. I went over this slightly more in detail in another reply, but this article is pretty concise on how an enterprise accomplishes this with a dedicated IP at a provider like SendGrid: https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/sending-email/warming-up-an-ip-address

It’s about sample size. Mail gateways won’t designate an IP as a reputable sending IP until it assesses a large volume of mail sent over a long period of time. You can’t send the quantity it wants all at once or even in a short window because then you’ll be designated as a spammer. So you start small with a few a day and gradually ramp up sending over multiple weeks or months to eventually send several thousands of messages in that period.

Spammers and malicious actors too often spin up new IPs for sending mail, so gateway patterns already implicitly mandate that email should come from IPs it’s already judged reputable.

You as an individual can’t reasonably warm your own IP. This is why services like Amazon SES or Sendgrid exist because they have huge IP pools that are ready to go. Plus, those services are very concerned with reputation and have bounce/complaint metrics defined to warn customers that abuse or poorly configure their sending habits.

This next example is what I’m most familiar with, but I’m sure there are other services like this. If you’re a big enterprise and want your own dedicated sending IP because you’re concerned about using a shared pool, you could use something like Amazon Pinpoint which allocate IPs for your org to use in SES, but they have to be warmed before you switch your production workloads over to it full-time. It automates some of the gradual-ness of warming so you use a mix of SES plus your Pinpoint IPs to keep mail flowing for your product.

It looks like Sendgrid also does dedicated IP warming guard rails too. This article is pretty decent for understanding how it works - https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/sending-email/warming-up-an-ip-address The per-day warming limits give you an idea of what scale this kind of process is used for.

Definitely listen to this. IP Warming is a very real problem and you have to send thousands of messages at a very gradual rate for most email gateways to 1) mark you as a proper email sender, and 2) classify you as a reputable one that isn’t sending spam. Using a public/private cloud IP isn’t enough, it should be a service already used for mail sending.

If you self host sending email and ignore using a service for outbound, make sure it isn’t at home. ISPs often block SMTP traffic to keep people from spamming others from their home. A lot of IP blocklists also auto block home IPs so you may not ever get your messages delivered.

Make sure to set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC. At the very least SPF, DKIM if the platform supports it, and ideally all three or SPF+DMARC. It’s not that hard to configure if you do it as you go instead of years down the line after you have a dozen services sending mail as your domain.

Turo for sharing cars. It’s car rentals but weird since you’re borrowing other people’s cars.

Kyte is in a similar vein for on demand cars via app, but it functions similar to a traditional car rental in every other way. Though they’re a baby company so they might not be a good Uber comparison yet.
My personal experience has been pretty good and the prices are very competitive, but we’ll see how they survive when the VC money runs out.

We added a tilt sensor to our door that shows the state of the door for the most part. The threshold we have it at doesn’t detect if it’s partly open, but that’s okay for us because we never leave it cracked

Our solution that we set up years ago was to connect a Shelly to circuits on a normal, dumb door opener. The Shelly triggers open/closed itself and since the signal comes from the opener, there’s no crypto nonsense to figure out. It always works, no matter what MyQ/Chamberlain/LiftMaster do. Bonus, it also works if you have a very old opener.
We also supplemented this with a tilt sensor so we know the state of the garage door. The door can still be cracked and not registered as opened, but that’s a compromise we’re okay with since we never leave it intentionally cracked.

Yeah you’d need an L7 application layer filtering firewall to catch DoH since it would detect the SSL packet signature on port 53. Unfortunately that balloons the cost of the device past a reasonable level for a home aficionado.
A workaround for now would be to block known public servers that use DoH like Google DNS, since a lot of devices are adding features to enable DoH by default at the OS level

A group of friends and I jumped into a family plan and it’s far more manageable. For 6, it’s $3/month/person or $36/year/person if the owner pays yearly.
The value we’ve all gotten out of it is outstanding. Being able to push and pull certain websites in results is amazing in today’s era of AI generated website shit. And all of my technical searches have been 1000x better on Kagi than they have been on Google in recent years. Everyone in our group says the same thing, it’s that much better than what we’ve been enduring with Google.

Relevant: https://youtu.be/Aa0PSuUDxM0?si=GWefPCiX2HRNE-t6

Korean spicy seasoned cucumber (oi muchim) is awesome with any meal with rice. Other than gochugaru (hot pepper flakes), every other ingredient you can get at a typical grocery store. I always have gochugaru on hand so I make this pretty regularly with lunch

My only complaint is that coming from a networking background, Ubiquity’s OS is awful and makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out. Navigating the interface to find settings makes no sense, it’s not very granular in how you can configure certain filtering settings, dual wan setups are difficult to manually change over, and good luck looking at logs to troubleshoot any traffic flow issues (hint: you can’t).

For someone who just needs a firewall and a VPN endpoint, it’s great. If you need anything more than that, get opnsense/pfsense. Pairing one of those with Ubiquity APs (which are actually pretty terrific) is a really solid setup.