Go for it. I made the switch ~10 years ago and didn't regret it at all. First-class, rock solid ZFS integration. Saved my data on more than one occasion.
I think it's worth mentioning that, if you can, set these IP cameras up on a separate VLAN that doesn't have internet access (or access to the rest of your network), run an open source PVR, and use firewall rules to allow the PVR to access the local streams on the IP camera VLAN. I think this mitigates much of the risk of using Chinese OEM cameras.
> I think this mitigates much of the risk of using Chinese OEM cameras.
I see two major problems buying from these companies.
The first is the practical risk that they will deliberately spy on you or just (through poor software quality) make it possible for others to do so. And yeah, putting them in a (V)LAN that can't access the Internet seems more or less sufficient. In theory they could exploit your browser in some way but I don't worry about this too much.
The second is the moral injury from buying from a company that actively participates in the Uyghur genocide. Not just "making cameras that the Chinese government buys through a retailer" but "writing software specifically to identify Uyghur ethnic features" [1] and/or "contracting with the Chinese government to install cameras at internment camps". [2] And there's no simply VLAN configuration that will wipe the blood off your hands.
They're nice cameras especially for the price, and I still use some I bought before I knew about this, but I can't bring myself to buy more or recommend others do so.
fwiw, I'm not aware of any evidence Reolink has participated in this, despite being a Chinese company. I try to stay away from Dahua, Hikvision, and Uniview, which is harder to do than it sounds because they make cameras sold under many brand names.
I have never heard the fans on my 2021 16" MBP until I opened this website. GPU usage spiked to 65% when opening the site in Firefox, enough to trigger the fan on this otherwise silent machine.
Makes me curious of what kind of beast hardware the developer has in order not to notice the lag. Kind of interesting that a simple landing page takes more resources than many modern games.
Is it perfect? No. But I have one of them in a Pentium 200 MHz system that I use a front-facing CF card slot as the primary means of storage, and I very much appreciate the audible feedback for disk activity. I just wish there was some mechanism to simulate more accurate sounds, but I digress.
P.S., Depending on the CF card, this machine runs Windows 9.x, Red Hat 6.2, OPENSTEP 4.0, or Apple Rhapsody DR2 hehe
Good times. My first Linux distribution was a copy of RH 6.1 that my parents bought me from OfficeMax. They weren’t too thrilled when I nuked the MBR on our family’s Windows 98 box, but they’ve subsequently benefitted from nearly 30 years of free tech support haha. Took me another year or so before I finally got X working on our Dell laptop, because I had to install a patched X server to work with its Rage Mobility graphics card. I remember thinking that my keyboard was broken because `su` didn’t echo my password back out to the console. We all have to start somewhere, and the manuals that came with that install were priceless to me.
This really is exactly how I feel. There are too many tradeoffs to switch to non-Apple hardware at this point. I'd love to run Linux/BSD full-time, as many of the apps that I frequently use on my Mac are FOSS (e.g., R, PyCharm, darktable, etc.) I've been a Mac user since 2002, and Mac OS X served as my gateway to the Linux/BSD world (that, and a short-lived use of RH 6.2 on an old Dell laptop). IMO, macOS really does need a Tiger/Snow Leopard-esque release, but I'm not sure the vast majority of macOS users would even appreciate such a release.
Honestly, I sometimes feel like I got work done more efficiently on my 1024x768 displays in that era than I do with my 4K+ monitors now. Modern UIs are bewildering at times. I miss the days where Photoshop and Office had toolbars separate from the open document windows. Things just seemed so much more discoverable and made more efficient use of space.
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