Do not trifle with Appellomancers.

Alt Text: “Anyone who tries to give you a new name is suspicious. Your parents, for example.”

Source: https://www.oglaf.com/branding/

One hundred percent go for USFF. Even the cheapest, most basic processor will smash server roles because it’s not having to power desktop applications, graphics, window managers, etc.

To be honest, I used to have an ISP with dynamic addresses and it wasn’t a huge deal. The address only changed every month or two. I used afraid.org’s dynamic DNS service to get a dynamic address that followed the changes and created CNAME records for my real domain pointing at that. The actual connection was fucking awful but the dynamic IPs never caused any problems.

As for services: Nextcloud is well worth looking into for file sync and photo backup, especially if you’ve already got a file server running.

As it happens, I’ve just finished setting up a system exactly like this for a completely off-grid setup. I needed a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to be completely self-contained to monitor an adjacent, larger system that is only powered up intermittently (close enough that the two systems have a common ground).

Short version: the Raspberry Pi and the Huawei LTE router I’m using for connectivity draw a steady 9W between them (there’s a lot of monitoring going on). I went with an old pair of 80W panels in very suboptimal positioning, a simple MPPT charge controller and a 110Ah deep cycle leisure battery which costs about €45, €30 and €120 respectively. The system has been running a few months now and the battery had never, ever dropped below 12.4V. The Pi uses WireGuard to connect to my VPS so Home Assistant can be accessed with a web browser since the network I’m using on-site doesn’t do public IP addresses.

Don’t you dare give me hope.

Edit: Holy shit. Orland actually says that exact line in the linked article. Kudos.

Yeah, ususally at this point someone goes “ugh, I’m never using Firefox again because Mozilla don’t respect people any more… iT’s TiMe To iNsTaLl BRaVe!”

Fuck Microsoft and all, but this headline and article are basically bullshit. The requirements for Windows 11 aren’t changing. This requirement covers future models of PC released by OEMs. It doesn’t affect existing models, home-builds, second hand, refurbished, end-of-line, surplus, etc, etc.

Honestly in rare situations that a device like that needs to be accessible from the wild Internet I think it’d be mad to expose it directly, especially if it’s not manageable as you suggest. At the very least, I’d be leaning on a reverse proxy.

WFM. Looks like you’re using Let’s Encrypt, which is fine, and everything seems to be consistent. I think you’re good.

<Sips licence like a fine wine served at a dinner party.> Ah, yes, GPLv3, exquisite choice.

Depends on your local laws and such, but in most European countries you can get a prepaid SIM card for a couple of euros/pounds/whatever at any supermarket, making them practically free. If you need a temporary number for a scammy special offer or any situation where your number is publicly visible (Gumtree, etc) it’s a no-brainer IMHO.

If your phone suppprts running two SIMs at once, it has two IMEIs so as far as the network(s) are concerned it’s two distinct handsets unless they deduce otherwise.

A fun aside: years ago I did some work for a small phone company (the company was small, not the phone) and they gave me a SIM with 100 numbers in a block and access to a portal I could manage them with. Sadly, I forgot to pay the annual £10 renewal fee.

IIRC that rule applies to debit cards only, which most businesses pay a flat monthly fee to handle, as opposed to credit cards which charge a percentage. Also, fuck AMEX.

A lot of the convenience of the modern UK high street baking sector is because of Girobank, the 1960s Government’s successful attempt to force modernisation on the banking industry. When I hear about the ass-backwardsness of other country’s banking arrangements (especially the US) I give a little thankyou to Girobank.

Edit: Also, yes, tourist ATMs are predatory bullshit.

I maintain that it’s cheaper to buy better and keep longer, but, yeah, Vimes’ Boots strike again.

So I was about to say “I love my Fairphone 5 and recommend it wholeheartedly but it’s not supported by Lineage is yet, which is really frustrating, especially after its been out nearly a whole year”, but then I checked and - well, I’ll be damned - LineageOS does support the FP5 now so I know what I’ll be doing later on: eating chicken wings. But after that, upgrading my FP5 to LineageOS.

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.

It’s plaintext all the way down.

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And your email, identity document, photo, payment method… lots of fun data points to boil it down to a demographic of one person.

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.