A much better idea than when I tried to organize my restaurant with hashtables.
It was too much for the waitstaff, who had to reindex the floor plan every time they added or removed a plate.
On the plus side, delivering the right food was always O(1).
Actually, amateur TV broadcast was something that interested me. I had the opportunity to buy an SDR with wider bandwidth, but I wasn’t sure how much I’d get into it, so I kept things cheap.
Another thing I’m looking into is ADS-B flight tracking. My house is within range of a sports arena where there are all manner of overhead banners get flown. Might be fun to follow them around on a map.
If you post on !amateur_radio@sh.itjust.works, I’d read.
I bought a cheap RTL-SDR to help solve a CTF challenge at DEFCON. The 2m/70cm antenna on my roof is begging for a fun project that’s not just talking to other hams.
“Honey, the water is about to shut off. Can you file a JIRA ticket to fill out bathtubs? I should be able to get to it next sprint”
Not that I was ever interested in being military, but I was at a lunch with two older lifelong army retirees. They kept talking about how military service broke their bodies and politicians won’t cover their medical costs. These injuries were independent of any combat: It’s just expected that you sell every part of yourself when you sign up.
Who wants to be 45 years old with a limp, be unable to hear a quiet conversation, and have horrible back problems?
Yes, OP I highly recommend a GL.iNet device. It’s pocket sized and always does the job.
It’s also great for shitty wifi that tries to limit how many devices you can connect. The router will appear as one MAC and then all your other devices can route traffic through it.
Theoretically, that’s all you need. It’s possible to use certain internet linked amateur transmitters for no cost as long as you have a valid callsign. However, I promise it’s a lot more fun with a real transceiver. You can buy a bare minimum, highly hackable handheld VHF/UHF transceiver for as little as $20.
Or you can slowly give your soul to the moneypit of HF equipment…
If it’s just for movies, consider an Intel ARC A380.
Small, cheap, great transcoding performance, and its drivers should be shipped by default with most distros. It really can’t do games though.
Repeat steps 3-6 as needed
You could replace the systemd service with a systemd timer. Not sure how often you reboot, but maybe once a week would be sufficient?
You could then wrap it in a script that checks for packman’s db.lock file. It would sleep as long as the lock file is present, which indicates that an update is active.
As someone who has owned enterprise servers for self-hosting, I agree with the previous comment that you should avoid owning one if you can. They might be cheap, but your longterm ownership costs are going to be higher. That’s because as the server breaks down, you’ll be competing with other people for a dwindling supply of compatible parts. Unlike consumer PCs, server hardware is incredibly vendor locked. Hell, my last Proliant would keep the fans ramped at 100% because I installed a HDD that the BIOS didn’t like. This was after I spent weeks tracking down a disk that would at least be recognized, and the only drives I could find were already heavily used.
My latest server is built with consumer parts fit into a 2U rack case, and I sleep so much easier knowing I can replace any of the parts myself with brand new alternatives.
Plus as others have said, a 1U can be really loud. I don’t care about the sound of my gaming computer, but that poweredge was so obnoxious that despite being in the basement, I had to smother it with blankets just so the fans didn’t annoy me when I was watching TV upstairs. I still have a 1U Dell Poweredge, but I specifically sought out the generation that still let you hack the fan speeds in IPMI. From all my research, no such hack exists for the Proliant line.
The problem with chromebooks is that the base specs are pretty shit. A lot of them have 4 GiB of RAM and maybe 16GiB of disk if you’re lucky.
They were designed to be thin clients to connect students to the internet, and little else. Maybe they could be hacked into something useful, but I don’t think it’ll ever make a good PC. They were always destined for the landfill.
Meanwhile, the best thinkpads were quality machines back when they came out. IMO, that’s why they’re still so versatile today. Free software can’t fix bad fundamentals.
Oh, judicial duels have always been bad, tending to favor the wealthy who can afford training. The pistol duel was once considered egalitarian because you were just as likely to miss your opponent regardless of how much you trained. For most of the 20th century (until the 90s) Uruguay had legalized dueling. It was mostly used by politicians and the powerful to muder journalists and lawyers who “defamed” them.
But if we are already living in a period where the rich act with impunity anyway, I want a world where there’s a nonzero chance that we get to watch Elon Musk take an estoc to the face because of a twitter argument.
Grand journeys to far off lands. The kind of journey where someone who is “exotic” and personable can make a life for themselves by being the court foreigner.
Also: Judicial duels. They are unjust, unethical, and unproductive, but damn if I don’t want to see white collar criminals have to fight the selected champion of all the folks they ripped off. Of course, being a billionaire would probably buy you a pretty good champion yourself, so we’d also have to bring back old concepts of honor to compel them to represent themselves.
If you’re always using a VPN, that’s not necessarily a privacy threat on your VPN’d device, but any other device on the network that doesn’t have a VPN could be exposing itself to the ISP.
Also, you’re at the mercy of whatever firmware updates your ISP issues for the router. Hopefully they remember to support your box when the next CVE is discovered…
We are forced to keep an ISP router/gateway combo in our home because it has certificates necessary to authenticate our subscription. However, behind that router we have the “real” router with settings and firmware updates that we control. The ISP router is just a hop between our router and the outside world. Everything on our network only connects to the router we control.
BTRFS should be stable in the case of power loss. That is to say, it ought to recover to a valid state. I believe the only unstable modes are RAID 5/6.
I’d recommend BTRFS in RAID1 mode over mdadm RAID1 + ext4. You get checksumming and scrubs to detect drive failures and data corruptions. You also have snapshotting, in case you’re prone to the occasional fat-fingered rm -rf.
For backup, maybe a blu-ray drive? I think you would want something that can withstand the salty environment, and maybe resist water. Thing is, even with BDXL discs, you only get a capacity of 100GiB each, so that’s a lot of disks.
What about an offsite backup? Your media library could live ashore (in a server at a friend’s house). You issue commands from your boat to download media, and then sync those files to your boat when it’s done. If you really need to recover from the backup, have your friend clone a disk and mail it to you.
Do you even need a backup? Would data redundancy be enough? Sure if your boat catches fire and sinks, your movies are gone, but that’s probably the least of your problems. If you just want to make sure that the salt and water doesn’t destroy your data, how about:
This would probably be cheapest and have the least complexity.
I wouldn’t trust anything like that to the open internet. It would be better to access the system over a VPN when you’re outside the network.
I’m very lucky to have an independent radio station in my area. It’s run by a nearby college, but they let anyone take training to become a host.
They don’t always play music I like (hell, they don’t always even play music) but I’ll deal with 30 minutes of buddhist chanting because the variety can’t be beaten. Also, they have no ad breaks.