My OG Pebble is still going strong, but I have pre-ordered the new Pebble Time 2 because it just looks like a straight-up upgrade. The fact that the new Pebble company is fully supporting the old devices makes me want to buy their new devices even more.

No, it’s nothing sinister. Most user-facing business workstations run Windows and have a Windows COA or, more recently, have the Windows product key baked into firmware, so it’s easy-peasy for the seller to install a fresh, working copy of Windows. The Dell WYSE PCs are Thin Clients, which are used to access Windows (or another OS) running on another PC or a server somewhere so the Thin Client doesn’t have or need a license; this means it’s not easy for the seller to install a hassle-free version of Windows since it will immediately start pestering the user for a license and for novices they’ll assume the computer is broken and return it. The lightweight Thin Client OS they use is neither use nor ornament outside an enterprise settings so they don’t bother reinstalling that. Obviously the seller could install Linux but the majority of people who are okay with Linux would probably sneer and say “ugh, Distro X? I only use Distro Y” and reinstall anyway, so it’s easier just to sell it without an OS. Ask me how I know all this.

Edit to add: some thin clients do have strange architectures and use weird OSes but that’s not a concern here. Aside from size and specs, the only material difference between the WYSE 5070 and a “normal” PC is that the EFI will have limited configuration options, but unless you’re planning on installing Windows XP that’s probably not an issue.

Edit to add to edit to add: I just found this https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/5070/. It’s a detailed breakdown of the device and mentions that it could be speced with an onboard SPF NIC? That’s crazy. It also shows someone modding a second NVMe drive into it.

Yeah, that’s pretty good. The only things I’d be wary of with that particular listing are that it doesn’t come with a power supply (these normally take laptop-style PSUs) and 64GB of storage might not be enough once you start to get to grips with it though you could easily upgrade the NVMe SSD (or hook up an external USB drive).

But aside from that it’s a smart little system and will handle a the setup I described with no issues. The J4105 can be sluggish with multitasking in a desktop environment but for ‘headless’ setups it’s excellent and uses very little power.

No.

Unless there’s something about the RPi that you really want - GPIO, say - it’s not a good choice, especially not the 1GB model you mentioned. Virtually any used desktop or laptop PC from the last fifteen years will be more useful; if you’ve not done so already, search EBay for “USFF”. Those are desktop PCs the size of paperback books. Businesses love them and have them in fleets which means they tend to get cycled out naturally after a few years; the marketplace is full of them and can be had for €30 and up. Unlike a RPi 3, they usually come with storage included (and a proper SSD/HD rather than an SD card), a good quality power supply, plenty of I/O and, if course, a nice solid protective case.

Example: https://ebay.us/m/TxL4yR

Slap PROXMOX on that and you’ll have the seed of a solid home lab. With 8GB RAM you’ll have enough to run VMs for OpenWRT, Home Assistant, Yuno Host, and still have enough resources left over for your Debian tinkering box. Plus, by using PROXMOX you do away with the need for a KVM since you can either SSH into the VM or use PROXMOX’s web UI to access the console and use a GUI if that’s more your speed.

Get a domain name and use that for your email; most providers let you set a catch-all that delivers everything to one place. So if you got, say, strawberrypigtails.egg you could give every service you sign up for a different address: ebay@strawberrypigtails.egg, sdf.org@strawberrypigtails.egg, pornhub@strawberrypigtails.egg and so on. Then, when you start getting loads of spam, you can look at where the email was sent to rather that where it came from and either take action against that service or just block emails sent to that address.

I have a lot of time for Eaton kit. As others have said, not cheap but seems to work well. I’ve not used APC in a while but they used to make good hardware, even if their software was dogshit.

Glad that this works for you, but goddamn that’s some condescending shit. Maybe I want other people in my household - people who don’t give a shit about VLANs or Docker or transparent terminal windows - the ability to browse and watch content on their TVs and tablets with an easy interface that doesn’t require them to learn some specific incantations and a bunch of file paths? Fuck it, may after a long day I just want to crash on the sofa and watch Bojack Horseman without having to get two knuckles deep in an SSH session? Again, glad it works for you but holy shit your manner is tone-deaf.

Yeah, me too. Two VPSs (one Helsinki, the other Nuremberg) each with a couple of IPs. Been running perfectly for years aside from when I fuck them up.

Cows.

A friend of mine was taking over his family farm with access to open moorland for grazing and as an experiment we wanted to see if we could implement tracking without giving a monthly small fortune to a company for a proprietary product or noisy polluting methods like a helicopter. BLE beacons are cheap and long-lasting so each cow got one, and we bodged together about twenty solar powered Meshtastic nodes with GPS that were small enough to be worn on their collars (since the cows tend to heard together only one in the group needs a node), plus another dozen we could install at choke points on the land (old gates, land bridges, etc) the cows were likely to traverse. The nodes were like this, but smaller and shitter. The nodes were programmed to report every time they saw a BLE beacon nearby, with the mobile ones also reporting their own GPS location, all being fed into Home Assistant for mapping. I just checked and apparently, aside from a couple of storm-damaged fixed nodes and replacement batteries it’s still going strong after two years.

Is this loss?

Not sure what you mean. I use Meshtastic a lot, both as a hobby but also for remote sensor reading and herd tracking. Works a treat.

Amazing that they weren’t using Signal for comms outside their group, but for internal comms it’s even more amazing they weren’t using something like Meshtastic.

This is yet another reason why you don’t use whatsapp

ftfy

TIL that NextCloud can use an external database.

It’s cloud all the way down.

There really are no depths these people will not stoop to, are there?

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.