Six years ago, I began warning people when our supposed small government oriented Republican governor Ron DeSantis issued an executive order prohibiting evictions, and continued that order several times through October of that year, effectively depriving property owners of their property without compensation. It wasn’t just Florida, many states did the same, some of them for up to two years. This resulted in huge losses to many landlords.
Landlords have to be compensated for the increased risk of their investments. That’s how investing works- the higher the risk, the more the investment must yield or else no one will want to make the investment.
Then the Biden administration imported millions of illegal immigrants that increased housing demand. Even more pressure on housing prices.
Inflation isn’t the only thing that affects prices. Stop voting for retarded socialist policies.
As any of you who are regular readers here know, whenever I undertake a major project, I always debate, design, and document the dog doo-doo out of it. (Sorry, I just liked the alliteration in that sentence) Remember the solar project?
I had a cheap camera system in my old house. One of those where you run cables to the cameras and they save to a hard drive in a dedicated DVR. When I moved to this house two and a half years ago, we transitioned to Ring cameras. I regret that decision for the following reasons:
The cameras send their video to the cloud
The cloud is just a word meaning “someone else’s computer”
This means you don’t own the data, and Amazon does all sorts of stuff with it.
The quality of the pictures is only slightly better than filming with a potato
Even though none of the cameras were inside the house (when we went on vacation, we temporarily put cameras in the house), I still don’t like other people having my data or pictures of my house. Since I installed an entire network worthy of a small office building. Why not use that to increase surveillance?
Infrastructure
For those reasons, I wanted to get a new camera system that overcame these deficiencies. I wanted this system to have:
4k video
Enough storage for 30 days of video retention
Wired cameras, no wifi
What I decided on:
Ethernet cameras
recorded on the Synology RS1221+ that’s my network storage. That server holds 8 HDDs. I have it set up with a pair of RAIDs, one for my data, and one for recording camera video.
The camera RAID is composed of three 10 TB HDDs giving me about 18TB of storage space
That 18tb of space is enough for six 4k cameras recording 24/7 for about 60 days
Software is Surveillance Station, which allows 2 cameras before licenses need to be purchased for more
My plan is to have six cameras covering the property.
general surveillance camera covering the front of the house
another on the back porch
one viewing the back of the house and the pool
one that views the kitchen/living room
a PTZ camera on the front of the house. This camera will have a 25 or greater optical zoom to allow distance viewing without losing too much resolution.
Doorbell camera (this one will have to be WiFi)
Two of the cameras already had Ethernet wires running to them: the one on the back porch went in quickly with no issues. The one covering the front of the house did as well, but even though it was receiving POE power, no connection. I thought it was a faulty cable. It turns out the construction workers who installed the wire got the RJ45 jacks installed wrong. That was quickly taken care of. That gave me two cameras right away.
I went into the attic to run more ethernet cables and discovered that isn’t going to be possible. The header for the wall where the server is just isn’t accessible from up there. I do have an Ethernet cable run to both the front and back of the house that was put there when the house was built. I realized the best way to do this is to use those cables as a trunk that feeds a managed switch. These two switches will allow me to branch those trunk lines into an AP and a camera.
That’s exactly what I did.
This involved expanding my network. My network became a server cabinet that carries most of the Internet, but also required several edge switches to serve other clients. It looks like this:
From there, it is easy. Wire the cameras in, and instruct the local (edge) switch to place the camera in the surveillance VLAN, the AP in the management VLAN, etc.
The entire project of Internet and cameras has gotten larger and more expensive than I planned on. I’m going to sit here on just the two cameras until next month, then install the doorbell and pool cameras. The PTZ camera will be last, simply because it’s the most expensive of them. That means I am on sort of a hybrid system at the moment, with two of my own camera and several Ring cameras.
Work in progress.
EDITED TO ADD
In case you haven’t caught on, I try to do a major project each year to improve my position. The first summer we were in this house, we added solar and Powerwalls so we would have backup power. The second summer was the pool, screened in lanai, and hurricane hardening. This summer is a two-fer. One of the projects is the network/camera project, the other is one that makes me far less happy. More on that later.
In 2015, I began stocking a cabin in Maine as a BOL. I had cached weapons, a boat, and a buttload of supplies there. All we had to do was get there, and we had enough supplies to get by. That is no longer the case. The caretaker of the facility passed away last year, and his wife has remarried. The new husband is not nearly as reliable, and is also a liberal. I no longer consider that location to be viable as a BOL.
I am making plans to head up there to retrieve most of our supplies, and we have decided to sell the boat, rather than drive up there to haul it all the way back. It’s more economical to sell it there and perhaps purchase a replacement down here.
Steven Crowder has a great piece on the Anthony conviction. He says the people who say “Not all blacks” are ignoring the fact that more than 77% of blacks support reparations. I can’t argue with that. Here is the segment:
There are those who will accuse me of racism for the things I post here. I actually am not, I go where the evidence takes me. The facts are there, and they have proven out decade after decade:
A white man in a poor black neighborhood is 12 times more likely to be murdered than his black counterpart, and black man is safer in any white neighborhood than he is in a poor black one.
More than half of all murders in this country are committed by the 13% of the US population that is black.
60% of Black male high-school dropouts have been incarcerated by their mid-30s
By age 26, about 36% of young Black men have experienced probation and about 31% had experienced incarceration, with rates even higher among those from lower-education family backgrounds
Does that mean all blacks are criminals? No. However, even though the government doesn’t keep the statistics on this (it doesn’t fit the narrative), a black man between the ages of 13 and 30 is more likely to go to prison for a violent crime than he is to be in a successful career like doctor, lawyer, or accountant. In fact, without a college education, black men are statistically more likely to be violent felons than they are not.
That is just what the facts show. If you don’t ignore those facts, or scream about how they prove systemic racism, you are a racist. Following the facts is considered racism.
The problems with black culture that result in black crime, murder, and incarceration will never get fixed if we can’t even discuss the facts. However, we do have some serious race problems in this country. As Crowder points out, 74% of black people say that their race is central to their identity, while only 15% of whites do. That indicates a divide that is simply too wide to be bridged.
So what does that mean to us as a nation? There are too many factions for these States to stay United. The coming collapse is going to be violent, horrific, and involve the deaths of millions.
Zimmerman, Penny, and Chow were all found not guilty. Had this poster just left it at Chauvin and Guyger, the argument would be more valid. Including people who were found to be innocent just makes the poster look foolish. To call it racism is simply retarded.
Then there is this mental midget:
35 years on your first offense is over sentencing. Yea there has to be a retrial. This is blatant injustice.
Karmelo Anthony was found guilty after only three hours of deliberations. Of course, there are tons of his fellow blacks out there claiming he should get a new trial because his attorney was incompetent. or that he is going to win on appeal. That isn’t how it works, but then again, they don’t understand the law any better than they understand self defense.
This is a story of a patient from a year or so ago, while I still worked for my last employer.
A patient comes in because he has had increasing shortness of breath for about two weeks. He was walking down a small hill from where he parked his motorcycle and fell, tumbling down the small incline. He fell about 10 feet or so, he says. His vitals look fine. He is a bit of an overweight guy, typical 60-something man trying to recapture his youth by riding a Harley.
So I ordered a chest x-ray, started an IV, and did his intake paperwork. No doctor is signed on to his case yet. If the x-ray shows anything significant, the technician who takes it will normally give me a heads up. He didn’t in this case. The image of the x-ray came up on my computer, I took one look at it and immediately flagged down the first passing doctor and said, “Hey, I know that you’re busy and this isn’t your patient, but you need to see this now.” Here is what it looked like:
In case you don’t know what you are looking at, the dark section on the left is a relatively normal looking lung. The heart and trachea are supposed to be on the right side of the image and are being pushed into the other side by the large amount of blood that is collapsing his left lung (which appears on the right in this image). If you look closely at the film, you can see all of the structures that are supposed to be midline are being pushed over. This is called a hemothorax, and is a life-threatening medical emergency where a massive volume of blood rapidly accumulates in the pleural space (the area between the chest wall and the lung). This buildup compresses the lung and puts dangerous pressure on the main vein bringing blood to the heart (the vena cava) and the heart, leading to cardiovascular collapse, severe respiratory distress, and shock.
The doctor took one look at this and said “Holy shit! I’m signing up for him. Get me set up for a chest tube and some conscious sedation. Call respiratory and let’s get ready to send him to a trauma center.”
The patient had a rather chubby neck with a beard so it wasn’t readily apparent, but if you put the finger of one hand on his Adam’s apple, and a finger from the other hand in his sternal notch, you could see that his windpipe was deviating to the patient’s right. He was a good sport and didn’t even mind that I brought a couple of new nurses into the room to see what a tension hemothorax looked like. Of course, he had no lung sounds on the left, and his heart tones were distinctly muffled. His pulse pressure was a bit narrow.
There were not any other nurses or respiratory technicians available to help in time, so I grabbed a nursing assistant and the three of us (doctor, myself, and aide) rapidly initiated conscious sedation and inserted a chest tube. That’s a handful for one nurse and a doctor to handle (the nurses aid is pretty much there to hold this, and hand me that and isn’t much of a help)- I had to administer sedation, monitor and maintain his airway and breathing, and chart everything. For one nurse to do all of that without help is a major safety issue, and is one of the (many) reasons why I don’t work for that hospital any longer. That place is just understaffed to the point of compromising patient safety.
Once we got the tube in place, we sent him for a CT scan, and it turns out he had 4 ribs broken in two places- a classic flail chest. If you put your hands on his rib cage, you could feel the paradoxical motion of the chest wall. This is incredible, considering that he walked in to the ED and had been walking around like this for two weeks. The video below shows you what paradoxical motion looks like, but my patient’s wasn’t quite as pronounced as the video (and was located under his left armpit).
Anyhow, I pulled about 2 liters of blood from his chest cavity before we crimped off the tube because we didn’t want him losing too much blood. A helicopter came and took him to a trauma center, and the trauma surgeon was still pissed because we took out so much blood.
Who had a Florida earthquake on their 2026 BINGO card? I know I didn’t, but we had a bit of earth shaking yesterday just after 1400, as a 6.1 Richter earthquake struck off the coast of Cuba. I was working at the time and the doctor, who was sitting next to me, said “Was that an earthquake? Did you feel that? I even saw the water in your cup shaking.” I didn’t notice, but I was preoccupied at the time. Sure enough, it was.
Damage
I don’t know if it was related or not, but I returned home to find my closet system had fallen off the wall. It looks like one of the screws pulled out of the wall, and this caused a cascading failure of the other screws, which caused an entire wall of the system to fall to the ground. There was some damage to it, forcing me to order $500 worth of parts. I am going to reinstall a 3/4″ plywood backer board this time. That way, I can use more screws when I secure it to the wall. The parts won’t be here until next Monday, so I will spend the day today taking the old one apart and reclaiming any undamaged parts I can find.
Network Upgrades
The network hardware is installed. I setup a few VLANs, which allows me to split the home network into segments:
Infrastructure
IOT devices
Servers
Guests
Surveillance
Once that was done, I created rules that allow me to control traffic. As an example, the guest network can’t do anything but access the Internet and a printer. The cameras are in the surveillance network, and they can only contact the server that’s running the surveillance software. IOT devices can’t do anything but contact the Internet.
As time goes on, I will tighten up the rules to make things as secure as possible. For now, the system works and I have tested it to make sure the rules are operating as intended. Starting later this week, I will begin installing security cameras. There will be a post on that.
