Throwaways from work were one major source of my home lab too. However for me this has become a lot harder in recent years, because our company scrapped its own datacenters and moved to the cloud. A hallway full of decommissioned servers is now extremely rare. We have some "computer rooms" left (not allowed to call them "datacenters" anymore) but it's just for the stuff that really must be on-site.
Other than that, online marketplaces. Not eBay generally, because its auction system and international reach drives prices up, even for items which normally gather low interest. I tend to use local buy & sell websites where people usually offer lower prices than advertised and these kinds of items are not very popular so they tend to go cheap.
I've never seen fanless servers, but my home lab is not something I keep running 24/7 anyway. And it sits in a dedicated room with my 3D printers and electronics workbench so it's not the kind of place I hang out for peace and quiet anyway :) It's my mancave really (though, for lack of a partner, right now my whole apartment is a mancave :) ).
My 24/7 stuff I do pick for energy-efficiency and to a much smaller extent, noise. I have 4 NUCs for this stuff. 2 nice ones with 4/6 cores and 64GB RAM, and 2 ancient ones (one atom and one skylake IIRC) which are very low power though. They're the ones that keep running when everything switches to UPS.
I'm not really big into networking so I have some semi-managed TP-Links that bought new for 35 bucks. They're gigabit, 8 ports and can do basic stuff like vlans and mirroring which is all I need. I'm not doing any CCNA stuff or anything.
Yeah perhaps in the US this might not work. I was thinking more of europe where even ammunition isn't readily available to buy already (and people don't have stockpiles except highly regulated sportshooters).
But I thought the part where the firing pin hits the cartridge gets damaged and the primer there isn't easily replaced. I'm probably wrong, I never even held a real gun.
> Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-datacenter in their house – and therefore there being more computers out there – doesn't mean that there are more distinct people whose main computing device is a general-purpose computer.
I've always done this even when I didn't have a lot of money. Server hardware has always been cheap because most of its audience won't even think about buying it secondhand, they will only buy new with warranty and 4hr support. I got $400 fibre channel cards for $10 because literally nobody wants them and companies throw out perfectly good cards when the warranty expires. It's a joke.
In the early 2000's I had Sun Fire and Netra's. I had an HP 9000 HP-UX box with 1GB (in the day when that was a ridiculous amount of memory). These days I have HPs.
A home lab has always been within reach. In fact I find it harder now due to energy consumption, as energy was always cheap.
The guns are really easily tackled though. Instead of restricting guns (and parts thereof), just restrict ammunition.
I know some people can create ammo but they need the casings which could also be restricted. And really, whoever wants to can create a weapon from a few pipes and other easily fabricated parts. Shinzo Abe's murderer did just that.
3D printers are not gamechangers here. They just make things a little easier.
I really didn't know anyone that didn't have a computer in the years 2000-2010. Even old people with hardly any PC knowledge. I fixed enough old crappy PC's for them :)
And yeah I know you can unlock Android but it's really really fringey. Most people don't. And that's like 95% most.
This exactly. Mobiles are now the standard general purpose computers and they're all locked down. We don't really own our devices anymore nor our data :(
Oh that's interesting. But how do the server and clients manage to find one another then? Indeed an outbound-only server is a discerning feature and a huge security advantage.
I should really read up on it. I know... I will soon!
All the solutions I mentioned are outbound only (for the clients), though they do all have a central point which is open for inbound connections so they can find each other. Or in some cases their own cloud serves this purpose. They call them lighthouses, Moons, etc but the principle is the same.
The embedding inside an app sounds like a really cool discerning feature though. I'll have a look!
Thanks the main objection I have with tailscale is that you can't self-host (and you need external identity providers). I had no idea there was a self host option. I'll investigate. I assume it's an unsupported community option?
Good point but I wonder if this is achievable at this point.
Energy independence is a great thing to have but not relevant if you have no country left :( I doubt Russia will give up without any kind of compromise. And the rest of the world can't make this into WW3 by intervening.
It would be great if you could kick Putin out altogether but he does have a lot more spare rersources. I just have a feeling that soon there will be nothing left to fight for :( Hope I'm wrong.
True, I was following the official wording because even us in the west didn't want to call that an invasion for fear of inciting Putin. Of course that ship has sailed so we can now call it what it is.
But basically the status quo is that these areas would be no good for Ukraine anymore because they're shot to crap and full or armed rebels (or green men). It's not like it's actually useful territory for building housing or running commercial activities etc. It's also pretty clear Russia would keep playing that game even if they retreat.
I would assume they'd gladly give up this territory (and Crimea) at this point for the war to stop. And then go full NATO or at least EU for future protection. I don't think Russia will ever give up the war without some kind of compromise because they would lose face.
Either way, I hope a consensus will be reached soon because this BS war is killing real people.
I can imagine.. But everything about GNOME rubs me the wrong way, so I find it hard to compare. The huuge title bars even when I don't have a touchscreen, everything hidden under a hamburger menu, the lack of configurability..
So for me the comparison against KDE is very different. KDE's tools have pretty sane defaults and can be customised very well.
DeX is pretty useful yes. A bit compromised though by Samsung's latest phones skimping out on the memory side, the S22 has the same amount that the S10 came with 3 years ago. DeX really needs lots of RAM as you'll typically have multiple apps open unlike on a phone screen. Once you run out browser tabs will start refreshing as soon as they so much as lose focus...
Really 12GB or even 16 would be much better for DeX. But you can only get 12 now on the ultra and not everyone likes massive phones.. I don't anyway.
Even if 8GB may be enough now it won't be as apps get bigger. It was nice in the beginning on my S8 but the last years I had it I hardly used DeX anymore as the experience became too slow and the refreshing too annoying. For example, just moving away from a form in a browser tab to copy something from my password manager would result in the browser tab refreshing upon return and the form inputs lost..
> Bluntly, Free software is usually much less full of skeevy bullshit.
Yes and it's amazing how much smaller, faster and battery-efficient it can be without all the marketing and tracking crap.
Most apps on F-Droid are a few MB as opposed to tens of MBs for the play store ones. Most are well written and efficient. The quality of these has really increased the last couple of years.
One thing I really hate about electron apps (besides performance in many cases) is the extreme branding they do. Every app looks differently, not fitting in with the rest of OS.
As a user, theming is a powerful feature to make things look somewhat consistent.
Though I use KDE and Qt apps as preference, and very few gnome apps. They tend to cope with this pretty well.
But why discontinue the old method before the new one is ready? This leads to an awkward UX and disinterest by developers, during the time there is no option.
Yeah the scroll wheel was a big quality of life improvement when it came in. I wouldn't want to do without anymore. Though I mainly use pgup/pgdn to scroll. I wish the keyboard had a big scroll wheel. Some 90s keyboards did, like a big rod. But now if there is one it's for volume control only.
Hopefully soon! It says "upcoming"...