It depends. I’ve ran small websites and other services on a old laptop at home. It can be done. But you need to realize the risks that come with it. If the thing I’m running for fun goes down. someone might be slightly annoyed that the thing isn’t accessible all the time, but it doesn’t harm anyones business. And if someones livelihood is depending on the thing then the stakes are a lot higher and you need to take suitable precautions.

You could of course offload the whole hardware side to amazon/hetzner/microsoft/whoever and run your services on leased hardware which simplifies things a lot, but you still run into a problem where you need to meet more or less arbitary specs for an email server so that Microsoft or Google even accept what you’re sending, you need to have monitoring and staff available to keep things running all the time, plan for backups and other disaster recovery and so on. So it’s “a bit” more than just ‘apt install dovecot postfix apache2’ on a Debian box.

Others have already mentioned about the challenges on the software/management side, but you also need to take into consideration hardware failures, power outages, network outages, acceptable downtime and so on. So, even if you could technically shoehorn all of that into a raspberry pi and run it on a windowsill, and I suppose it would run pretty well, you’ll risk losing all of the data if someone spills some coffee on the thing.

So, if you really insist doing this on your own hardware and maintenance (and want to do it properly), you’d be looking (at least):

• 2 servers for reundancy, preferably 3rd one laying around for a quick swap
• Pretty decent UPS setup, again multiple units for reundancy
• Routers, network hardware, internet uplinks and everything at least duplicated and configured correctly to keep things running
• A separate backup solution, on at least two different physical locations, so a few more servers and their network, power and other stuff taken care of
• Monitoring, alerting system in case of failures, someone being on-call for 24/7

And likely a ton of other stuff I can’t think of right now. So, 10k for hardware, two physical locations and maintenance personnel available all the time. Or you can buy a website hosting (VPS even if you like) for few bucks a month and email service for a 10/month (give or take) and have the services running, backed up and taken care of for far longer than your own hardware lifetime is for a lot cheaper than that hardware alone.

And a big screen. Not necessarily ‘living room tv’ big, but definetly big enough that I can’t fit that in my pocket.

I personally don’t, but many do. But it doesn’t matter, my employer isn’t legally allowed to read my emails, unless it’s a sort of an emergency. My vacation, weekend, short sick leave and things like do not qualify. And even then, if the criteria is met, it’s illegal to read anything else than strictly work related things out of my box.

We even have a form where people leaving the company sign permission that their mailbox can be accessed by their team leader and without signature we’re not allowed to grant permissions to anyone, unless legal department is on the case and terms for privacy breach are met.

This is the same as complaining that my job puts a filter on my work computer that lets them know if I’m googling porn at work. You can cry big brother all you want, but I think most people are fine with the idea that the corporation I work for has a reasonable case for putting monitoring software on the computer they gave me.

European point of view: My work computer and the network in general has filters so I can’t access porn, gambling, malware and other stuff on it. It has monitoring for viruses and malware, that’s pretty normal and well understood need to have. BUT. It is straight up illegal for my work to actively monitor my email content (they’ll of course have filtering for incoming spam and such), my chats on teams/whatever and in general be intrusive of my privacy even at work.

There’s of course mechanisms in place where they can access my email if anyting work related requires that. So in case I’m laying in a hospital or something they are allowed to read work related emails from my inbox, but if there’s anything personal it’s protected by the same laws which apply to traditional letters and other communication.

Monitoring ‘every word’ is just not allowed, no matter how good your intentions are. And that’s a good thing.

It takes Two (co-op puzzle)

Unravel 2 is a bit similar co-op puzzle game.

I am well aware of the situation and Russia is breaking laws of the war pretty much as fast as they can, by the means (among others) mentioned on the article. But without context this particular message plays directly to Russians and when message like that is spread around someone might take the bait and actually reveal positions of the Ukrainian military, but Russia has proven over and over again that they just don’t care about civil casualties (or human life in general). If anyone there actually provides locations for fighters to the attacker the Russia would most likely attack them first and after that destroy the city and all the informants in it, like we’ve seen many times over last few years.

And that’s what I’m referring to when calling for responsibility on spreading messages like this. Some poor soul might believe the message in fear/hope for the better/something else and that would really only make things even worse for them, as the cities are already being destroyed by the attacker and any intel to them is only going to weaken the force trying to stop them.

By all means, spread the information and reveal the lies Russians are offering, but do that with care and include the context with everything. Revealing information about Ukraine troops is not going to stop Russian drones from attacking childrens and their mothers on the playing field.

Someone more or less anonymous over the internet is saying that. I have no doubt that Russia would level entire city blocks if they have even a suspicion that there’s Ukrainian fighters in the block (or just in case regardless of the intel), but in here we have a single telegram message and nothing else. It might be someone in command on the Russian side, maybe trying to get most out of their ammunition, or it might be something bigger, with the information provided we don’t really know. And that’s something to keep in mind when relaying these kind of messages. We, who are sitting in our chairs in warm glow of the monitor and a beer in reach, should have at least some responsibility on what information we spread and in what context.

But with the track record from Russia, I wouldn’t be surprised if they shoot to anything given to them, so if people in that area happen to know that area between this street and that street is completely empty, it might be worth a try to get them to shoot at nothing and reveal their positions while doing it. Just take into account that their accuracy isn’t really the best there is for multiple of reasons.

I don’t have answer for you, but Alec over at Technology Connections made a video few days ago related to the topic. That might not have the answer for you either, but as his videos (and there’s a ton of those, even for refridgerators) are among of the best at youtube that is worth cheking out.

But as a rule of thumb, new materials and hardware are better on pretty much every metric. And if your current one doesn’t work properly anymore it’ll most likely uses way more power than it should, as coolant flow/insulation/something isn’t in fully working condition and thus compressor needs to run more often than on a new unit.

I recommend Hetzner too. I’ve been a happy customer for a decade. Support, should you need it, works well and services are rock solid.

My ecotank died just like all the other inkjets. It went few weeks without printing and blue nozzle dried completely up and on the pipes I can see dried up ink on other colors as well. So I had to dig up old Brother HL3040 back to the duty which I retired after print quality started to drop (it needs new fuse unit or something similar, so not that big of a deal) and I thought having an option to print nice color pictures would be nice.

So, if you plan to run ecotank (which does have pretty good printing quality when it works) set up a scheduled task on your computer to print something, in color, quite frequently even if it wastes some ink and paper. I think the main issue with mine was that even if I print stuff somewhat often there was a period where I only needed b&w documents so color nozzles went unused for a while.

I might get a new set of nozzles and ink tanks for my unit as it’s a ton cheaper than a whole new printer, but if you’re looking for a printer this is something to take into consideration, regardless of their marketing material.

Edit: Mine is Epson, didn’t know that ecotank term is used by other manufacturers.

The actual number will be much higher.

Ukraine reports almost 9000 tanks destroyed. Some time ago I made a rough calculation on what wikipedia lists on Russian military hardware and based on that they had around 14 000 tanks before the war started. I don’t think that even Russians themselves know how many of those are in any kind of usable and/or repairable state and which are just scrap metal laying on some field in the middle of nowehere stripped of anything useful.

Additionally, Ukraine reported destroyed tanks in single digits per day for quite a while, but for last few days the numbers have gone up, I’d guess because of counter attacks in Kursk and/or because Ukraine is finally receiving some ammunition for their hardware. Whatever the case might be, majority of Russian tanks are destroyed anyways and I’d guess that what’s left is soviet relics and a significant portion of those are just scrap metal (which is of course a useful resource) instead of anything even close to combat ready.

more specific to a subset of people who have time to bother

And that subset of people needs to have at least some kind of mindset to learn the viable minimum skills to even start with and a will to learn more and more and more. I’ve done various kinds of hosting as a career for couple of decades and as things change I’m fighting myself if it’s worth my time and effort to keep my home services running or should I just throw money to google/apple/microsoft/whoever to store my stuff and manage my IOT stuff and throw the hardware into recycling bin.

I have the skill set required for whatever my home network might need up to a point that I could somewhat easily host a small village from my home (money is of course a barrier after a certain point), but I find myself more and more often thinking if it’s worth the effort. My Z-wave setup needs some TLC as something isn’t playing nicely and it causes all kinds of problems with my automations, my wifi network could use a couple of sockets on the walls to work better, I should replace my NVR with something open source to include couple of more cameras around the yard and have better movement recognition and cameras should go to their own VLAN and so on.

Most of that stuff is pretty basic to set up and configure (well, that z-wave network is a bit of it’s own thing to manage) and it would actually be pretty nice to have all the things working as they should and expand on what I have to make my everyday life even more simpler than it already is. But as there’s a ton of things going on in life I just rather spend few hours gaming from my sofa than tinker with something.

That’s of course just me, if you get your reward and enjoyement on your network then good for you. Personally I think I’ll keep various things running around, but right now in this place I’m at, the self hosting, home network and automation and all that is more of a chore than a hobby. And I’m pretty sure I don’t like it.

I agree with you, nuclear response would make things very difficult with China and their allies, but there’s plenty of traditional firepower available directed to Russia if things escalate to that point and should Russia attack with nukes I don’t think they’ll have a lot of support for their actions from the east. And triggering nuclear response would likely end up in a MAD scenario which is something I think (and hope) no one really wants to see trough.

But that still leaves a pretty big field to work with traditional ammunition and a skilled pilot from Sweden could still reach Moscow in 20 minutes or so to turn multiple military targets within the city into a rubble. And there’s plenty of airfields closer than Stockholm with equally capable fighter jets. For the ground force, Finns and Estonians could at least in theory reach Moscow in 10-12 hours since majority of troops defending it are already down on some field in Ukraine and our artillery forces move pretty damn fast.

The amount of destruction Russia could cause is of course still an enormous humanitarian crisis, but even if they could turn Kiyv to wasteland (and kill millions while doing it), it still wouldn’t change the outcome of full Nato response without any bullshit politics limiting on actions if anyone is allowed to strike on the Russian soil.

Medvedev found keys for the booze cabinet again? They seem to happily forget the fact that Moscow is well within reach of multiple Nato countries by now. Obviously a ton of things need to change before anyone with a gun is standing on a red square, but Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Poland (among others) are quite capable of hitting the Kreml (in theory, and in practise if needed) with fighter jets in less than 30 minutes. Additionally their ports opening to gulf of Finland are in reach of both Finns and Estonians with traditional artillely, and at least we in Finland are pretty capable and accurate with our hardware.

So, even if they find some old soviet relic still functional, Nato has multiple options to level multiple cities at Russia before their missile hits the ground. Nuclear attack against Ukraine would of course be a humongous tragedy with terrible price on civil casualties, but I’m pretty confident that it would be the last thing the Russia we currently know would do as a country.

losing 1380 personnel, but only 1 tank

That’s what I’ve been following too. And additionally, based on quick’n’rough estimation from wikipedia numbers, artillery reserves are pretty much depleted too, so Russia is fighting on what ever soviet era relics they can refurbish and what they can manufacture/buy. I don’t think they’ll have short of ammunition any time soon, but diminishing numbers of barrels should start to show up on these statistics ‘in the near future’, whenever that might be.

My bank uses 6 digit ‘customer number’ (which is set by the bank) and that’s verified with an app and a personal PIN (app shows ‘login attempt ABCD at mm.dd. hh:mm’ where ABCD is shown on login page too) or via SMS OTP (again with ‘ABCD’ verification). And again with personal pin + app or OTP to confirm transactions. The app itself can be protected with a fingerprint or phone pin and every new installation needs to be registered to the system, so I can’t just use my phone app to access my wifes account (or anyone elses) but I still can map multiple accounts (like corporate ones) to the same installation.

I think that’s pretty reasonable approach.

Did they damage that target? Disable it? Destroy it?

I haven’t seen any public statistics for this, but based on my understanding, if you hit pretty much any modern tank on top hatch or some other weak spot with a javelin it’ll at least disable the tank as it pretty much melts everything inside the crew space/engine bay. Those might be repairable, but most likely not in the location.

And what Ukrainians will most likely encounter is not a modern tank, but a T-62 or some even older soviet relic, which doesn’t have active armor and those can be stopped with a good throw of molotov cocktail. So, my somewhat uneducated guess would be that every decent hit is a destroyed tank. Of course there’s missed shots, less than optimal impacts and all that, so actual number isn’t 100%, but I’d guess that it’s not far off.

And for tanks there’s also a guestion if Ukraine can even find anything to shoot at. On Ukrainian reports destroyed tanks have been in single digits per day for quite a while, so either Russia has learned on how to defend their gear or (in my opinion more likely) they just don’t have that many tanks anymore. Obviously across the whole Russia there’s a ton of relics around, starting from T-34’s from WW1, but I guess no one knows how many of those are in condition where they could even move on their own and even if they did it’s guestionable how effective those would be on todays battle field.

But javelins are still pretty neat hardware and they can easily destroy pretty much anything on the field, the only guestion is if Ukraine can get those close enough to hit anything interesting.

As a rule of thumb, if you pay more money you get a better product. With spinning drives that almost always means that more expensive drives (in average) run longer than cheaper ones. Performance is another metric, but balancing those is where the smoke and mirrors come into play. You can get a pretty darn fast drive for a premium price which will fail in 3-4 years or for a similar price you can get a bit slower drive which will last you a decade. And that’s in average. You might get a ‘cheap’ brand high-performance drive to run without any issues for a long long time and you might also get a brand name NAS drive which will fail in 2 years. Those averages start to play a role if you buy drives by a dozen.

Backblaze (among others) publish their very real world statistics on which drives to choose (again, on average), but for home gamer that’s not usually an option to run enough drives to get any benefits from statistical point of view. Obviously something from HGST or WD will most likely outperform any no-name brand from aliexpress and personally I’d only get something rated for 24/7 use, like WD RED, but it’s not a guarantee that those will actually run any longer as there’s always deviations from their gold standard.

So, long story short, you will most likely get a significantly different results depending on which brand/product line you choose, but it’s not guaranteed, so you need to work around that with backups, different raid scenarios (likely raid 5 or 6 for home gamer) and acceptable time for downtime (how fast you can get a replacement, how long it’ll take to pull data back from backups and so on). I’ll soon migrate my setup from somewhat professional setting to more hobbyist one and with my pretty decent internet connectivity I most likely go with 2-1-1 setup instead of the ‘industry standard’ 3-2-1 (for serious setup you should probably learn what those really mean, but in short: number of copies existing - number of different storage media - number of offsite copies),

On what you really should use, that depends heavily on your usage. For a media library a 5400rpm bigger drive might be better than a bit smaller 7200rpm drive and then there’s all kinds of edge cases plus potential options for ssd-caching and a ton of other stuff, so, unfortunately, the actual answer has quite a few of variables, starting from your wallet.

While that might play a very small part on their strategy I don’t think anyone in Ukraine thinks twice before shooting it should the situation really need it. It would make a nice trophy, agreed, but I think the mentality is that if it doesn’t burn then nice and even if it does the charred remains are still a trophy and a big PR win via social media.