- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
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The magic words for ebay:
off lease thin client lot
What does this combination of words mean?
“off lease” means they were leased out to corporations and have been returned and are now being sold.
“thin client” is a thin client. familiarity is assumed on [email protected]
“lot” means the seller is selling more than one of 'em.
familiarity is assumed on [email protected]
👍
🙇♂️
‼️
I once did some research & measurements about power consumption; my takeaway was that as soon as the screen is off any ol’ laptop (with the charger constantly attached) consumes pretty much the same amount of energy as a RasPi with identical storage attached.
I used a 2008 hp consumer laptop as a server between 2015 and 2021.
Also, there are so many clones out there. I think now we’re at maybe around four different brands you can choose from other than Raspberry Pi. And these prices are just inflated, absolutely inflated. Like price gouging. Like nonsense.
If you only need a basic server, laptops are AMAZING.
- Full x86 software support
- On the rare occurrence you need to directly interface with it (as opposed to through a webgui on another machine) you have a built-in keyboard and monitor.
- They have a god-damned built-in UPS
Note that the battery will generally stop working after a long enough time turned on and powered via AC, but otherwise yeah.
I have a decade old lenovo yoga that still lasts like 40 minutes unplugged. Idunno how much a UPS that can supply a desktop for that long would cost, nor if that’s an embarrassingly short time, but it works well enough for me
UPS systems are generally configured for 90 minutes of operation, depending on the criticality of the system they’re connected to. The best ones are programable and will actually send graceful shutdown signals (when configured to do so) to your server cluster to prevent data loss that occurs during system blackouts. You can emulate this behavior on your laptop with a script that checks battery% every 10-15 minutes, sending a shutdown signal if it falls below a treshhold you set.
honestly for a home server i’d be happy with like 10 minutes battery life, just need enough to let the computer survive tripping a breaker and resetting it.
an actual outage is basically an act of god and not worth worrying about for something you can just… push the power button on
Size right for your setup and risk tolerance. Just know every outage can come with data loss. Most do not, but it is not a guarantee.
That will happen to an actual UPS as well.
True. The best laptops are the ones that let you set a charge limit in the BIOS.
For what it’s worth, though, the exact same happens to UPSes
Well you have have battery profile settings so you could just set it to never charge above 75% and it will last a long time.
Also UPSs need replaced like every 2 years and according to Jim Salter tend to catch fire if you don’t?
Would pulling out the battery (if possible) and running the laptop only via AC be a viable way to prevent unnecessary battery wear?
I remember back when I didn’t have a desktop PC yet I had a crusty old ASUS laptop that was basically at death’s door and I specifically remember just running it on AC alone because the battery was… uh… gone
Removing the battery when using AC used to be the advice to prolong the battery life a decade ago.
Yeah, that’s about the right time period for my old ASUS LOL. Does that advice still hold up nowadays or is it outdated? Does it apply only to older machines maybe?
Not all batteries are easy to remove nowadays. Also, power management might have gotten better and the battery circuit mostly disconnects when not in use.
That depends on the age and quality of the laptop. It’s been a while since some started directly running off the cable when the battery is full.
Huh? If it can be used while it is charging - which is all laptops since forever - then it will run off the adapter while plugged in. Regardless of the battery state. You cannot charge a battery and discharge it at the same time - if it is charging then power must be coming from anything other then the battery. Epically with LiPo batteries which you cannot continue charging after they are full - doing so will cause them to burst into flames. So all LiPo charging circuits will cut off power to the cells once they reach a desired voltage - weather that is considered 100% (aka once it reaches 4.2V) or at a configurable lower amount.
It’s too much power draw for me.
This. Even a cheap alibaba n100 would be way better on Power than pretty much any laptop.
Quick computation for Seattle, powering a typical laptop consuming 20W to run say an IoT server, 24/7 at 14 cents/kwh would cost about $25/year. A Pi 4 would be about 1/10th of that.
* if you live in a country where used things are affordably priced
But I don’t want a laptop. I want the gimmick computer for random as fuck niche hobby tinkering. Like making an automated Nerf turret.
You can control nerf turrets as-is. My dev manager wrote a script to read the build mail and make his nerf turret shoot a volley of darts into the cubicle of whoever broke the build. And that was 15 years ago.
Lenovo thinkcentre tiny gang rise up!
I even use it as my daily driver (bumped RAM & storage), running Lemmy & Tenfingers plus all the usual jazz.
I will have to replace my old NAS one day because it’s super old, I’ll probably just chuck some drives into a think centre tower or something… I wonder how long time it will take before the electricity consumption would have made it cheaper to buy one of those increasingly expensive NASes…
Tenfingers needs to work on their SEO; I searched for exactly that and most of the first few results were 10fastfingers, which is exactly what came to my mind when I read your post! Even the first one that seemed to be what you’re referencing was about how to install it, rather than what I was trying to find: what it is.
Sounds like a nifty tool, I’ll have to investigate it. Thanks for introducing me to it.
For anyone who, like me, was unfamiliar but curious: https://www.tenfingers.org/introduction.html
Thank you, yes I (I’m the creator) have ironed out the last large potential known problem (a specific type of mitm attack) and have been a bit overwhelmed by ordinary life lately. I’m working on what you might hint at, a less technical introduction to tenfingers. Basically it works like a decentralised online file system where you give the reading rights (to anyone or a select few) how you see fit. FOSS, encrypted & so on, more info in the above link :-)
BTW don’t hesitate to hit me up if there are any questions!
Cheers
Hello! To be clear, first, this is all subjective. My opinion doesn’t mean much.
However, if you’re inclined to consider my opinion, the intro page was largely fine. Yes, it could be improved, but so could pretty much any intro/about page. I, an amateur, wouldn’t consider that my priority were I in your position.
The problem I had was that you didn’t show up when I searched for the exact name of your project. I have never done SEO so I can’t specifically suggest improvements in that regard … Except that your project name is fairly generic and not really related to the function of the software. Unless you get big, people are going to have trouble finding you. You should go for something more specific or at least unique.
Otherwise, as I said, at a glance your tool looks pretty cool. I wish you luck with it.
But your opinion does count! Thank you again.
This ten+ years project is coming to fruition, and I will have to switch gears away from dorky coding and, as you say, promoting the project. I’m a lousy promoter :-)
The name officially comes from the ten “fingers” holding your data (like when your PC is turned off, (*up to) ten others serve it), and unofficially from the reaction to five eyes (the spy thing Snowden uncovered). Finger in the eye sort of, as it circumvents the spying on people and data.
Time to promote I guess!
I personally hadn’t heard the ten fingers metaphor - it makes sense but I wasn’t familiar. I do know of the five eyes but likely wouldn’t have made the connection.
If you are taking my thoughts into consideration: no matter how meaningful your project name is, it doesn’t matter if it’s not unique. Now that I know what it means, I can appreciate it, but (until it gets big) I still need to look it up. If you called it something like “Avoid the Ten Fingers” or “Ten Fingers Privacy” it would be a lot easier to find (note that I don’t recommend either of those names, but you’re welcome to them if you find them palatable).
I’m thinking of “ungoogleable.” My best example of this used to be the band “The The” but I guess Google cottoned on to this because they’re the first result now.
Anyway, I’ve never done any promoting of any kind. Please do not take my advice as any kind of expertise. Good luck with your promoting!
Thanks again!
The full name is the Tenfingers sharing protocol (& implementation), but I think it’s not high on the search lists because it’s kind of unknown, I have now to publish it so that people can test it and start to use it regularly.
I’m thinking of starting off in ask lemmy, to find places where people might want to check it out, lots of smart people around here :-)
My pleasure, hope it helps. Good luck!
In my experience rPi was terrible as a local server. The micro SD cards would fail regularly and I just got tired of handling backups and restoring them. I switched to a set up box type tiny PC and it’s stable as rock in comparison. Old laptop would be even better for that, shame I didn’t think about it.
Not all SD cards are created the same, but also make sure you add “temp to RAM” setup so the constant tmp writes are not burning out the card.
Net boot ftw, no sd card necessary.
If it wasn’t for Linux, these old computers would be useless. We need to remind them of that and not buy them for high prices. Beat them fucking prices down into a pulp. Your prices are too high you need to cut it. And not with baking soda but Common Sense. Don’t be a thot… Get these prices to drop
Have you looked at the price of these old dusty ass laptops online? Like, they want a fortune for them. I’m just gonna wait until they’re buried in Old Tech and then they eventually start selling them for cheap because I ain’t buying that. Orange pis are way too expensive and raspberry pis are just irresponsible. Peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys. All this capitalist innovation, but yet we can’t afford it. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
