Your statement that "a proper monitored alarm system would have prevented this" is optimistic. I never had any particular expectation that if somewhat intelligent criminals decided to break in when no one was there that I wasn't going to lose whatever they could get at. The cameras let me document what happened and when and what was taken. If the imagery ends up having any other value that's a bonus rather than the point.

I'm guessing with such an obvious endpoint for the camera storage it never occurred to anyone there was a second box. I had something like this in mind when I wired the building. It seemed like a good idea to make onsite security footage much harder to find given the cameras were obvious and anyone breaking in would probably look to damage or destroy the system.

I really thought the cameras themselves were the deterrent, but these guys gave it a shot anyway. Cutting the cable to the starlink and walking off with the NAS drives seemed to be the plan.

In the future I'm going to add a local battery backed alarm connected to external siren and strobe that is immediate on opening the office door to draw attention. I was driving down to WWDC when the starlink went offline and saw the notice on my phone but wrote it off to equipment failure which gave them enough time to clean the place out pretty well.

The hole in my strategy was thinking nothing could happen without notification, but being in a car in the middle of Norther CA with spotty cell coverage and lots of distractions blew that up pretty hard. I'm also thinking one of ubiquiti's cellular backups is in my future. Starlink offline is annoying but not the attention grabber that a still of a guy walking in the door would have been. Cellular backup would have gotten me that.

One week ago 3 guys broke into my shop while I was traveling. They had sense enough to power down the starlink that was providing internet which would have taken out all of the remote camera options.

They did not realize that almost everything they were doing was being recorded via the unifi system. In the end about the only thing of value left in the building was the hard drive with all of their pictures on it.

The police have used the footage to identify all of them and it will be pretty open and shut when they see a court room. Offline and air gapped the whole time they were there but did exactly what it was installed to do.

> it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass

I think your analogy would work better if toll booth operators built the roads, the cars, the toll booths themselves, and then were all replaced by fastpass.

Glib as well, but this one hits home a lot harder. Well said.

If anyone would like to try the app out (https://winpin.app) I'm pretty confident that downloads and update flow are working and it has been running without issue for me on multiple macs for the last 4 months. There are a lot of edge cases I'm sure I haven't seen yet, but it has truly changed my workflow and I'm interested to see what others think. Please don't try to purchase a key, it is fully functional without one. I'm still working on that with Polar.sh and want to make sure my t's are crossed and i's are dotted. Gotta be one of the weirder posts to HN since I actively do not want to sell you something right now.

So much this! Social media has also allowed people to reinforce their own opinions and spread them by connecting with others who think the same way. Back when we mainly interacted in real social communities, fringe ideas couldn't get traction because there wasn't enough reinforcement.

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