We are on Fidelity. But self-directed on all the big ones are no fee and free trades these days - Vanguard, Fidelity, Merrill and probably others. Just need to watch the fund/ETF fees to have a total cost.

That’s better for sure. Still too much for me. Our all-in investment cost is 0.05% now. That’s a lot of free compounded yield compared against guided investments which are themselves no better than the average market (on average).

That’s all fine, but just be sure you know how much you’re paying them for that service. Before we switched to self-managed a number of years ago our guys were taking 1.4% off the top of the whole account just to pick a bunch of index ETFs. Market goes up 5% and I only see 3.6% of it. Not good. Plus the ETFs they picked had higher expenses than just going with a whole market choice.

They offered to get us on a plan at 1%. Ha, no thanks.

That and the shrinking ability to grant access to device storage. If that becomes an option only on rooted phones (which seems like the directly Google is heading) it will make the audience for such an app much smaller.

They already publish on F-Droid. It sounds like it was just a lot of built-up frustration from the last several years of Google blocking apps that require storage permissions and making it difficult to get restored to the Play store.

This was the bug from the last removal. They were going back and forth with Google unproductively for months. Hopefully the existing fork (which was also taken down from the Play store) can keep going on F-Droid.

Same here. Tried it out and it’s been great for a few months. I was just about to get some family members set up using it.

LULd for sure.

If you’re buying new cameras they’ll be 802.3af PoE. Passive is becoming much less common. So that model router I linked would work great.

I think if you’re a moderately technically inclined person you would be happy with that solution. If you are intimidated at the idea of writing or adapting some scripts, I would probably recommend a router on one of the other platforms plus a PoE switch.

The easiest part of your requirements are the custom DNS records. All of the platforms recommended so far can do this. OpenWRT has the advantage of WiFi capabilities. If you want the router to also be your WiFi access point then it may be your best option. But it sounds like you only need it to be a wired router, which is good.

As far as the ad blocking, I have done this with pi-hole, and with the built-in DNS and block capabilities of OpenWRT, Mikrotik and OPNSense. They are all fine. The router ones don’t have the fancy web UI like pi-hole. So if you use that a lot you will be disappointed. Mikrotik’s is the most basic and a new feature for them, but they are actively developing it. Plus their current routers can run containers, so you can run pi-hole on the router as a container if you want.

PoE ports as a requirement is what narrows your options considerably I think. You could get that from a separate switch. If you want that in the router itself then you have very few options.

Mikrotik has a lot of routers with PoE out. Their newest model in the RB5009 series can do either passive or 802.3af/at PoE out. Many of their older routers have passive PoE only. Make sure you know what your cameras need.

I had similar requirements as you and got this: https://mikrotik.com/product/rb5009upr_s_in

It has PoE out available on all 8 Ethernet ports. The default 48v power supply works with 802.3af/at PoE. It is a 96 watt supply, and can support ~76 watts of PoE downstream. If you need passive PoE then you would need to change to a 24v power supply.

Mikrotik RouterOS requires some learning to use its advanced features, but their quick setup defaults are good. And the platform is super reliable and flexible.

For DNS you would use their Adlist functionality along with a script similar to the one from BartoszP in this thread to enable DNS name resolution for lan hosts: https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=181640. That script is added to the DHCP server config to run when each client gets an address lease. And then you would add static name records in IP / DNS / Static for the other host.domain names you want your lan devices to connect to by name which can’t be resolved via your upstream DNS server.

I will gladly die on this hill.

Obviously! Well done. Your definition is delusional and at odds with science and common language use, yet you won’t back down. That takes commitment. It also has me questioning whether you believe in light outside human perception (since it’s also measured as a wave). You are the embodiment of this fun thread! And I genuinely enjoy thinking about both positions.

But I think I’ll stick with the Wikipedia and dictionary editors, and the likes of Britannica which states:

Sound, a mechanical disturbance from a state of equilibrium that propagates through an elastic material medium. A purely subjective definition of sound is also possible, as that which is perceived by the ear, but such a definition is not particularly illuminating and is unduly restrictive, for it is useful to speak of sounds that cannot be heard by the human ear, such as those that are produced by dog whistles or by sonar equipment.

I appreciate your hill. But several sources disagree with you.

Wikipedia: “In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.”

Oxford: “1. vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear.”

Webster: “1.c: mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (such as air) and is the objective cause of hearing”

Cambridge: “something that you can hear or that can be heard”

These don’t seem to require the ear for the vibrations to be sounds in and of themselves. Only that it would be detectable by an ear if an ear were present.

Upon what do you base your assertion that it is the hearing of the thing that is the most essential requirement? (And given the thread I think it’s perfectly reasonably for the answer to be something like “because it’s my hill dammit!”)

Neat. It has a wikipedia article as well.

It makes sense. But as a US speaker it just makes me want to stick to my guns and generalize our second syllable stress on these units. I’m team kilogram now. And centimeter.

Found a new hill!

It’s amazing that they can measure the speed of sound at all given this. They must need to line up a bunch of eardrums.

That’s my take too. Short for “this requires you to follow a steep learning curve, even if it is not easy to do so.”

Ha! Well I was just having a laugh. Expecting that you would prefer “you should damp your expectations” and that my construction should mean “make your expectations wet.” And it turns out dampen is ambiguous. It means both moisten and dull, deaden, make weak.

Not only that, but most every form carries both meanings, and the “weaken” sense for the word damp predates the “humid” sense. Because the noun came first and it was specific to suffocating fumes in a mine that would extinguish candles, and people.

So my take now is that dampening means both “making weak” and “humidifying, moistening.” Only damping is specific to motion/energy. And I can’t recall encountering anyone using damping to mean “making wet.”

That’s a great point. Water heaters heat hot water much more often than cold water. Maintaining the already elevated temperature.

You should probably dampen your expectations on this one.

I tasted the rainbow 🌈

Darktable is fantastic, but the learning curve is steep for great results. It took us months to get comfortable with it after using Capture One, Lightroom, Photoshop/ACR. It’s different. Our first efforts looked like crap.

For someone processing just a few files I think RawTherapee is probably easier and likely to give better results with limited effort.