Back in the day I was running GLTron on an Athlon 1800+ w/Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (I think?) and I was running dual monitors. GLTron didn’t like using both screens since it presented as a peculiar resolution. So I emailed the GLTron dude and he quickly emailed me a patch that let me run the game across both monitors (bezels not an issue because I was doing multiplayer split screen).

What a great game.

Where I am there’s a smallish internet provider, Sonic, that advertises almost-too-good-to-be-true service. As a former subscriber…nope, it’s pretty much what they say it is. It was gigabit fiber and I could iperf to a university server and get 900Mbps+ (depending on time of day). Fast.com would say 1Gbps.

My only complaint was that iirc the advertised price was for service, with an extra charge for router. BYO router meant you were charged slightly more for service (this is my recollection, not positive though).

They are a pretty vocal net neutrality advocate, and from what the tech told me they offer “best effort” service, meaning while ATT fiber may support gigabit, they’ll throttle it and upcharge you for the extra speed; Sonic, afaik, didn’t do that. They now offer 10Gbps Internet for I think the same price as the gigabit, but I think you need to BYO network gear to take advantage of it.

Unfortunately our new place doesn’t offer them, otherwise I would still be a subscriber.

Point being…too good to be true usually is just that, but sometimes it’s not 🤷

Behind in specs? Depends on which specs I guess — but CPU/GPU performance is AFAIK pretty great? https://www.tomsguide.com/features/iphone-15-pro-benchmarks

Features, yeah, depends on what you’re looking for. AFAIK iPhones are the only mainstream phone to offer satellite texting though.

I have both an iPhone (work) and an android (personal), and they both…kinda just work 🤷

I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.

Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding — so it presumably won’t draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I’m guessing it’s ballpark accurate.

Works flawlessly for Immich of course.

The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.

For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!

In grad school I picked up a free used HP LaserJet. It had Ethernet, and could use generic/off brand cartridges. Yeah it was big and noisy but it was an awesome workhorse and it Just Worked (with out-of-the-box CUPS/Linux support too, IIRC).

How the mighty have fallen.

When I was in college, working for Google was a dream job for a lot of my friends. I have to think that hiring from that position is awesome — lots of really smart, motivated, enthusiastic grads, and you get to pick the best. I wonder if all that has changed?

Old article, and yes, “corporations are not friends” yada yada: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companines-that-havent-had-layoffs-job-cuts-yet-2023-1

If I’m ever in the market for another job and have the luxury of choice, the layoff question will be pretty high up.

Not a lawyer; would this likely stand up in court? Obviously I wouldn’t risk it were I the dev, but just curious.

As others have said, I’d play with routing/IP forwarding such that being VPN’d to one machine gives you access to everything — basically I would set it up as a “road warrior” VPN (but possibly split tunnel on the client [yes I know, WireGuard doesn’t have servers or clients but you know what I mean]).

Alternately, I think you could do some reverse proxy magic such that everything goes through the WireGuard box — a.lan goes to service A, b.lan to service B, etc., but if you have non-http services this may be a little more cumbersome.

Cannot recommend Immich enough as a self-hosted Photos alternative. Obviously not a drop in replacement, and if you don’t want to self-host it’s not really feasible. But it is just awesome.

On the other hand, a completely open ecosystem works well too — ARM for Linux feels exactly like ARM on x86/64 in my experience. Granted this is for headless stuff on an (RPi and Orange Pi, both ARM, both running Debian), but really the only difference is the bootloader situation.

I’m annoyed that the nice bike trainers don’t generate power, or at least have the option to. My Wahoo shouldn’t be drawing power from the grid, it should be supplying it!

Plate nuts are really useful, used them on vacuum systems in grad school. Once threaded by hand, you don’t need a wrench for the nut end since the other nut prevents the plate from rotating. Made star-pattern tightening a large flange with cramped access relatively easy.

Can’t believe I went through years of grad school with puerile labmates and never once heard (or used) that phrase…

We love package managers though!

Most Linux users like the benefits of having a single command/interface to search for, install, and update software. The problem is when the source(s) for those programs is locked down.

Important to note though that air resistance is nonlinear — it uses less energy to get from A to B slowly than quickly.

Does budget include storage? Tight budget without storage, even tighter with…

If power usage not a concern then used x86/x64 gear is probably the way to go. Surplus gear (corporate, university…) possibly an option for you. That’s a very tight budget though, so I don’t think it really gives you the luxury of choosing specs unfortunately. That said: I might go fot the best bones/least RAM/storage if you think you might upgrade it down the road. 4GB RAM with an upgrade path to 32 is preferable to 8GB non-upgradable IMHO. Likewise, 500GB spinny disk with extra bays and an NVME slot is nicer than 500GB SSD with no upgrade path. Again… really tight budget so this may all be out of the question.

I’m a fan of low power gear, so I’d recommend something like a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB, or another SBC (I just grabbed an Orange Pi 5 Plus and I like it so far — NVME, 16GB RAM, dual NIC). However these will be out of your budget, especially once you add case, power supply, and storage.

Good luck!

I’m fortunate enough to not be in a position where money is tight for food, but re: beans and rice, I absolutely love my instant pot!

Mexican-style beans are, IMHO, delicious, easy to make, and dirt cheap. I love them, our toddler loves them, and it’s easy on the wallet. Dry beans are really affordable, and a 25lb bag of rice is great to have in the pantry (note: careful with bulk brown rice as I think it can go rancid). A stove and a pot can do both, but an instant pot and a rice cooker makes it so easy.

I also drink a fair amount of coffee, but again, bulk or even just “make coffee at home” is very affordable. A few cups at Starbucks costs the same as a pound of beans (which yields many cups).

My ex is ATT fiber which, despite having zero love for ATT, was pretty great.

They are trying to get me back…but they don’t offer fiber (or any service!) at my new address.

Fuck you, man! If you don’t like my fucking music, get your own fucking cab!

Cool! I just got an Orange Pi 5 Plus, 16GB RAM**, but haven’t set it up yet so can’t give any recommendations. On paper though it looks great — significantly beefier than a RPi 4 (my current server), and supports M.2 NVME as well. Might be worth looking into for your use too, but the emphasis here is kinda on computing with a very low power budget, so I’m sure you could get more horsepower with e.g. an x64 NUC or similar.

Here’s a review, and note that this is without extra heatsink so it was probably thermally throttling (as was the RPi?): https://www.phoronix.com/review/orange-pi-5

**I first ordered the 32GB version but it got seized for counterfeit postage, and then some shenanigans ensued. If buying from Amazon I would suggest only buying units in stock and shipped from Amazon. May only apply to US though…