No. Yes. Kind of.

My home setup is three ProLiant towers in a ProxMox cluster. One box handles all-the-time stuff like OpenWRT, file server, email, backups, and - crucially - Home Assistant and is UPS protected because of how important it’s jobs are. The other two are powered up based on energy costs; Home Assistant turns them on for the cheapest six hours of the day or when energy costs are negative and they perform intensive things like sailing the high seas, preemptive video transcoding, BOINC workloads and such. The other boxes in the photo are also on all the time basically being used as disk enclosures for the file server and they are full of mismatched hard disks that spend virtually all their time asleep. At rest the whole setup pulls about 35-40W.

Ten pictures of Feddit users reacting to clickbait headlines that will make you say “no, these are all trains. No, I’m complaining as such, I like trains, I just… I thought… No, the headline said something about… reactions, yeah, and ins- actually, hang on, how did you get in here?”

Fedi Punter in Media Lingo Rant Slam: Reaction

Hey. Heyhey. Heyheyhey. Have you ever noticed that your warships have giant barcodes on them? It’s so that when they return to port they can scan the navy in.

That was my first thought. I’d happily have one of these, but wall-mounted somewhere with high footfall, displaying a dashboard of some kind.

YYYY-𝓜𝓜-DD

I like my months fancy.

I used Kodi with a Jellyfin plugin for media center duties.

Consider a refurbished USFF business PC.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=usff+pc

A unit from any major brand will be good and there are i5/8gb units available for well under £100 that will happily shunt 4K video about. Plus they have the advantage of coming in a nice case, lots of ports, included storage, etc…

That reminds me of one of those shit jokes from the eighties:

“There’s two new ladies in the typing pool who do a hundred times the work of anyone else.”

“What’re they called?”

“Daisy Wheel and Dot Matrix.”

Honestly any parts you buy today probably won’t be much good in 30 years.

Did you know the world naïve is written backwards on your water bottle?

Three HP ProLiant servers running ProxMox cluster. Each box has a VM for Portaiber, as well as mismatch of VMs running Home Assistant OS, OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Windows and Debian, along with a Windows file server that connectes to four cheap NAS running Ubuntu LTS with a combined 20 mismatched hard drives by iSCSI and borgs them together with Storage Spaces.

It’s a fucking mess, if I’m honest.

BBC Radio 6 and ABC Triple J are two ad-free radio stations that play a lot of new music and are staffed by passionate and qualified DJs. A lot of my music discovery is from listening to those.

Stay local, wear 24 bits.

Extra point if they have the PowerPoint shuttle controls visible in the bottom-left corner.

That’s an expensive way to kill someone. It’d probably be cheaper to pay for a hitman at the point.

They usually have casters but they’re pretty flimsy.

Man, I just love the way you guys ignore basic exception handling, insist on using undocumented APIs, exclusively hook into system resources, fail to address even the most fundamental of good memory management practises and then demand your software runs as an unprotected kernel-level driver.

It’s fucking great.

Does that mean my stash of IBM MicroDrives are finally going to be worth something?

Right? My school just taught us shit like triangles and iambic pentameter.

“Oh, that steak looks well done and extra-rare!”

I may have oversold it, to be honest, which is fair given what we’re talking about.

Soak a tampon in water and microwave it for a few seconds. It’ll give off loads of whispy steam for a long time. Then, just pop it behind that lovely roast chicken (cooked yesterday) or warming bowl of macaroni soup (ice cold) to make it look piping hot for the photo shoot.

You ever seen the microwaved tampon trick?

That’s an SCP, isn’t it? A sentient corporation?

Poor Mr. VGCats. He went from running an engaging, vivid comedic romp to… selling x-rated pictures of his characters to greasy perverts.

Not sure about Z-Wave, but the ZigBee Alliance promotes Thread as ZigBee’s successor. A lot of Thread devices are backwards compatible with ZigBee.

Tell me more, my good Sir/Madame/Homeslice.

Huh. It’s tricky, isn’t it?

Suggestion: Business laws preclude collusion between competitive businesses. Result: “No, Senator, even though our companies sell the same items made in the same factories with the same SKUs, for the purposes of this conversation we target different markets even though our own sales data proves this isn’t the case.”

Suggestion: CEOs must sacrifice a child every time they make an acquisition. Result: “CEO of Globoco announces acquisition of struggling orphanage.”

Suggestion: Airtight laws that force everyone to play fair and pay their way. Result: Billionaires give handjobs to politicians and get the law neutered in return.

I don’t post to Gitea because I scrawl my code onto a piece of leather made of human flesh and venture down to the shore on a stormy night to hurl it into a raging sea as I shriek insults at God in a language known only to madmen. We are not the same.

Steadily increasing unsigned integer on a long-running piece of infrastructure: bonjour

+1 for SFF/USFF computers. £100 will get you a compact and reliable refurbished machine that is easy to upgrade too, and if you use software like Proxmox and outgrow the box it’s easy to slide over to something bigger.

&& sudo halt -f

It’s quittin’ time! See ya Monday!

Hiren’s PE

It’s a community-run successor to the classic Hiren’s Boot CD. It’s a live disc running Windows Embedded with a lot of customisation and loads of disk management, recovery and diagnostic tools included.