I do get a billing error about every 2 or 3 years. Usually something like they double bill a month, or the price for just 1 month is suddenly 2x - 3x the normal price.

I’ve used them for probably 2 decades, getter in because of the $1/month for a year deal.

I think I’m on the top, or 2nd from the top, tier. Has unlimited disk space, but it’s not open access from the start. Every so many tens of GB you have to call to get the soft limit raised. They are trying to keep a bot from just filling the space up.

I use their hosted WordPress, so that they handle the upgrading.

I also have run a few wiki sites on there. Those install and run fine.

I wish I could figure out if I could install OwnCloud or such on there. I’m not great with Linux. You don’t have rights to the OS, but anything you access through a webpage or FTP you can put there. You should have access to chron jobs, but my skills aren’t there yet.

I mainly use them to host my own email domain, that I then access from gMail.

Biggest problem I’ve had with them is they will charge extra if you use a phased-out version of Python. So you have to make sure you keep anything using Python updated.

We could keep the 0 hour as the “middle” of the night and 12 being the “middle” of the day (though I’m not sure if that’s really the sun’s high spot for the day for any places).

But with fully controlled mirrors, we could make it exactly 12 hours, so we could just then switch to the 0 hour being when the sun comes up.

It’s pretty simple, actually. A village somewhere in Europe that is completely in the shade all day for part of the year has already proven it.

Mirrors.

We just need a ring of motorized mirrors around the Earth.

At hour 0, the mirrors will rotate to show sun all across the entire Earth.

At hour 12, the mirrors will rotate to put all of the Earth into night time.

That lets the entire Earth have the exact same synchronized time synchronized with the daylight.

The mirrors will block the sun from parts of the earth facing during the night.

The mirrors will constantly be rotating to keep the proper amount of sun light facing each part of Earth as the Earth rotates.

The mirrors will be solar powered.

This will fix it, right?

I am not talking about jank yolo prayer work. I’m talking about people learning how to do something properly. Duct tape a car is not the repair I’m talking about.

You are complaining about there not being enough skilled workers today. I’m talking about people learning the skills over time.

Look at how many types of food and products are starting to promote cleaner ingredients and more sustainable materials as people are starting to learn more about their health and the environment. People can learn and thing can get better.

I’m not saying that today everyone should push a button and start self hosting. I’m saying it would be great if more people learn to self host and that there are benefits to people learning more.

People don’t just absorb knowledge. It will require education programs.

Did you know how to do everything before you started?

More self hosting would improve the “average” person baseline.

Education of people is always(?) better, I’d say.

It’s good to exercise the mind, just like exercising the body.

What if 25% of car drivers could handle their own car maintenance? The one downside people will scream at first is that fewer mechanics will be needed.

But that is too short sided.

More home mechanics will need to buy more tools, so that’s more store jobs and more manufacturing jobs and more shipping/trucking jobs.

And more people who understand mechanics mean a better workforce who can invent new/better products or processes. And can do more research into manufacturing science, which would improve society.

This would also lead to safer cars because they are better roadworthy, and car manufacturers would have a harder time using low quality parts.

So all of those changes would apply to technology when more people know how to use technology.

Nice. I would not have thought to clean the connectors.

As long as you remember before you turn off the computer!

That’s a neat idea of using an extra phone as a file server. I’ve only thought of phones as consumers, not providers.

I vote for CasaOS based on the videos I’ve seen of it. I haven’t actually done any self hosting stuff myself, yet.

Laptops are cool servers because it has a builtin battery that usually lasts at least an hour, especially if the screen is off. You don’t have to worry about UPS batteries that give less than 10 minutes and have a horrible beeping sound.

I’m not saying this rudely. This sounds like a “read the manual” moment, since different vendors can have different settings.

Or at least links to the exact one you are looking at.

Elephants do throw loose dirt on themselves. It was either to help reduce the sun rays, or to help keep mosquitoes off - sorry I can’t remember.

Ran into this. Was constantly denied time to properly load test and configure things. So it all went in with default values and high resources. Then they got the bill, throttled everything down, and then normal compute processing was missing SLAs measured in half-days.

But look on the bright side. Every minute of the day programmers were typing, creating value, instead of wasting company money reading or thinking.

Skill, but mostly due to the company not investing in the time to train to do it right. The company just wants to start next week by saying “flip the cloud switch” and immediately see their costs go down, without any outages and without putting in due diligence.

And sometimes the CEO/CIO/manger is too busy to coordinate training because the decision maker is busy on their “cloud provider training” for only them, in a Swiss Alps super swanky spa and resort.

Specing out server is a real pain. (not sarcasm)

The last video from “hardware haven” I saw (not the last released, just the last I saw) found:

Fuzzy memory on details: a 5th or 6th gen Intel idled at 7 watts vs an ultra efficient at 5 watts. He calculated out that it would take 2-4 years, depending on your electricity, to pay for the cost difference of a new ultra low power machine. CPUs and even graphic cards have gotten much better at idling very low.

If you don’t need the I/O pins, look into a mini PC. In the US, used can easily get you something under $100 US. New would probably be around $100-$150.

If you get a low CPU, they idle around what the PI would be doing.

A PC would give you faster, more durable storage, inside of a case. And maybe memory upgradability, if you need it eventually.

A PC would be bigger, but some are not much bigger, especially if you add any USB dongles or external storage to the PI.

The YouTube channel “Hardware Haven” has a bunch of random old “junk” computers he’s worked on.

The early US phone numbers were from a set of a few names, and the 5 digits, because they thought people couldn’t remember 7 digits.

And now people have to remember several sets of at least 8 random symbols, and change them every 60 days.

Had one of those. Very convincing. Showed my boss. My boss also thought I could be real. So I clicked it. The landing page was an internal “you’ve been caught” page. Then I got the phishing-email training assignment.

What is the parameter to use that tells apps to not auto update once they are installed?

An analogy is writing everything on one piece of paper with a pencil. When you need to change or remove something, you cross it out, instead of erasing, and write the new data to a clean part of the paper. When there are no more clean areas, you use the eraser to erase a crossed off section.

The larger the paper, the less frequent you come back to the same area again with the eraser.

Using an eraser on paper slowly degrades the paper until that section tears and never gets used again.

In general and simplifying, my understanding is:

There is the area where data is written, and there is the File Allocation Table that keeps track of where files are placed.

When part of a file needs to be overwritten (either because it inserted or there is new data) the data is really written to a new area and the old data is left as is. The File Allocation Table is updated to point to the new area.

Eventually, as the disk gets used, that new area eventually comes back to a space that was previously written to, but is not being used. And that data gets physically overwritten.

Each time a spot is physically overwritten, it very very slightly degrades.

With a larger disk, it takes longer to come back to a spot that has already been written to.

Oversimplifying, previously written data that is no longer part of a file is effectively lost, in the way that shredding a paper effectively loses whatever is written, and in a more secure way than as happens in a spinning disk.

With spinning disks, I preferred Seagate over Western Digital. And then move to HGST.

Back in those days, Western Digital had the best warranty. And I used it on every Western Digital. But that was still several days without a drive, and I still needed a backup drive.

So it was better to buy two drives at 1.3 x the price of one Western Digital. And then I realized that none of the Seagate or HGST drives failed on me.

For SATA SSDs, I just get a 1TB to maximize the cache and wear leveling, and pick a brand where the name can be pronounced.

For NVME, for a work performance drive, I pick a 2TB drive with the best write cache and sustainable write speed at second tier pricing.

For a general NVME drive, I pick at least a 1 TB from anyone who has been around long enough to have reviews written about them.

Some of the best and worst decisions people have made started with, “I was bored.” Ha!