Come to say thank you. Time to move from proprietary to Open Source
dan @ dan @upvote.au Posts 7Comments 3,371Joined 2 yr. ago
dan @ dan @upvote.au
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Hosting in Singapore is definitely more expensive than the USA or Germany, but cheaper than Australia or New Zealand. It's often a good compromise for web hosting companies since you get good connectivity not just to Australia but to the rest of Asia too (compared to hosting in Australia where you only really get good connectivity to people in Australia).
GPUs are expensive everywhere. I'm an Aussie living in the USA and would offer to buy stuff here and ship it to you, but it's getting to the point where some stuff here is actually more expensive than Australia now, thanks to significantly worse inflation compared to Australia, and the Trump tariffs.
Renting a dedicated server or VDS with a decent GPU would be pretty expensive too. A lot of people are using them for AI, which has caused a lot of price increases as plenty of people are willing to pay a lot for a server with powerful AI capabilities.
I know this is a piracy community, but if you really do want to do online game streaming, a service like GeForce Now would end up quite a bit cheaper even after factoring in the cost of games. Their highest tier (which comes with a GTX4080 and 16 vCPUs) is $20/month which is significantly cheaper than what it'd cost to rent a similarly specced system.
To the point where light speed limitations means rtts of like 200-300 ms
Consider testing servers that are located in Singapore, especially if you use Optus or if your ISP uses Optus as one of their upstreams.
If you're lucky, your ISP will route from Australia directly to Singapore and you'll get around 100-120ms ping, about half what you'd get compared to a US-based server. If you're unlucky, it'll be 400+ms, routing to the USA then from the USA to Singapore.
this community is literally built around hosting your own local infrastructure.
That's part of it, but using a dedicated server, colocated server, or VPS are also considered "self hosted" too. "self hosted" is broader than just having a server at home, and means any server, web service, etc where you maintain it yourself.
Hardware in your own house is generally referred to as a "home lab".
Web is a bit easier than native since the browsers handle all the platform-specific details across all common platforms, and you mostly just have to follow some guidelines that aren't overly technical or arcane. Some examples:
- Use ARIA roles where appropriate
- Ensure sufficient contrast between text and background colours. Should at least meet the WCAG level AA which is a 4.5:1 contrast ratio, but ideally meet AAA which is a 7:1 ratio for body text and a 4.5:1 ratio for headings.
- Ensure you use
<label>tags to label for all your<input>s,altattributes on all images,titleattributes where appropriate (e.g. on<table>s to describe the data contained inside the table), etc.
If you use Firefox, its developer tools have an "Accessibility" tab that can audit for common issues - things like missing labels on checkboxes and radio buttons, colours that don't meet WCAG contrast ratio requirements, etc.
It's a good time to learn more about building accessible sites and apps given it's becoming a legal requirement in some jurisdictions. For example, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect later this year, and it mandates that sites and mobile apps for various industries (like ecommerce, airlines and other transport, media streaming, social media, banks, and some others) meet accessibility guidelines.
I’m on an all Linux machine and the only accessibility software I know of is Orca and it’s so and so last time I tried it.
It's probably worth spinning up a Windows VM to test in NVDA. It's one of the most popular screen readers and probably the most popular open-source one, but only works on Windows since it deeply hooks into the Microsoft Speech API, accessibility APIs, and and other Windows APIs.
It really do be like that. I work with some people who are nearly 15 years younger than me (I'm in my mid 30s and some newer employees have just graduated from university) so I feel this.
This is a really well written article. It's unfortunate that this person has to deal with all these issues.
I suspect the reason that both MATE and the Debian installer have good accessibility support is because their codebases are quite old. In general, it seems like older software is more likely to have better accessibility support than newer software.
Accessibility should be something that's built into software from the very beginning, but I totally understand that not all developers have time for it or properly understand it. It's unfortunate.
For storing the backups, I use a storage VPS. I got one from HostHatch a few years ago during Black Friday sales, with 10TB space for $10/month. Hetzner have good deals with their storage boxes, too - they offer 5TB space for $13/month if you're in the USA (you need to add VAT if you're in Europe).
A good rule of thumb is to never pay more than $5/TB/month, and during Black Friday it's closer to $2/TB/month. The LowEndTalk forum has the best Black Friday deals.
I use Borgbackup for backups, and Borgmatic to handle scheduling them. Borgbackup is a fantastic piece of software.
Borgmatic has an "append only" mode which lets you configure particular SSH keys to only be able to add data to the backup, not delete it. Even if someone/something (ransomware, malicious users, etc) gains access to your system and tries to delete the backups, they can't. Essentially, this is protection against ransomware.
This is a very common issue with other backup solutions - the client has full access to the backup, so malware on the client system could potentially delete all the backups.
I have two backup copies of most things. One copy on my home server and one copy on my storage VPS. If you do do multiple backups, Borgbackup recommend doing two separate backups rather than doing one then rsyncing it to another server.
"The full source code of Lego Island? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your archives?"
"Yes"
"... Can I see it?"
"No"
It turns out that burning carcinogens in your living area isn't the greatest idea. Who would have thought??
Gas is expensive in California too though.
I installed solar panels on my house. Given how expensive electricity is in California, I estimated it'd only take me around 5-6 years to break even, and that number keeps going down as they increase electricity prices higher and higher. Electricity prices doubled from 2022 to 2024.
Electricity is significantly cheaper in areas that have municipal electricity, ran by the city itself. In PG&E's area, it's 62 cents per kWh during summer peak. On the other hand, I used to live in Palo Alto where electricity is around 18 cents per kWh, flat rate (no peak and off-peak rates).
Same with industrial automation. There's some robotic arms, assembly lines, etc in use today that still use PCs with ISA slots - the predecessor to PCI, which was the predecessor to PCIe. Old 16-bit bus with a max speed of around 5Mbps. That's why you'll occasionally see newish "industrial" motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.
They also often have a lot of the hardware in stock and ready to deploy, to handle replacements.
A project I worked on at university (way back in 2010) was for one of the largest providers of air traffic control systems. Our project was interesting - overlaying eye tracking data from Tobii eye trackers they provided (thousands of dollars each at the time) on top of screen recordings taken via VNC, to aid in training of air traffic controllers.
It was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes, though. Whenever they built an ATC computer system for a client, they'd build one or two spares at the same time, with exactly identical hardware. They did this for two reasons:
- If the hardware breaks down, they can supply a new system that exactly matches the hardware that was verified.
- If a client has an issue with their system, they can try and replicate the issue on a clone of that client's system.
We got to see a storage room with a large number of these systems. Lots of different PCs anywhere from a month to maybe 15 years old. :)
Thanks for the recommendation!
Sandboxing does use some RAM, but it was a big win for security. One site can't crash the entire browser or use a security hole to get access to data on other tabs. Still, the majority of the RAM is taken by the site itself. The processes do share some RAM - they're not entirely isolated.
I'm not a game developer so I just used the first example I could think of.
Most regular players didn't encounter these bugs though, as often they're edge cases that don't occur during regular gameplay. A lot of them were found by people intentionally looking for them.
I'd argue that games today are bugger than games in the past, just due to how complex they are now. Sure, they're a different class of bug (and arbitrary code execution via buffer overflows isn't really a thing any more thanks to ASLR and the NX bit), but I don't think there's fewer bugs at all.
In some cases, the RAM actually is in use by the site. That's especially the case on sites with heavy client-side logic. In that case, it's not Chrome's (or Firefox's) fault, it's the website's fault. If you hover over the tab, it should show memory usage in the popover.
Chrome has a "Memory Saver" feature where it'll unload tabs that are offscreen/hidden which helps quite a bit. Not sure if Firefox has something similar.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're also using something like Google Analytics to track users.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Apps like Chrome use available RAM if it's available, but they should be releasing it for other apps to use when there's high memory pressure.
It's the same with disk caching. If you have a lot of free RAM, the OS will use all of it for caching files.
Games were impressive in this way too. Computers and consoles didn't have much CPU power or memory, so they had to squeeze every little bit.
This was still happening even with 5th gen consoles. Crash Bandicoot couldn't fit in the Playstation's memory so they ended up overwriting system memory and memory allocated to features of Sony's standard library they weren't using.
These days, game development is more "boring" in that aspect. Systems are powerful and frameworks like Unreal Engine handle all the core stuff. That's not necessarily a bad thing though - it lets the game developers focus on the game itself.
Don't. Use a VPN like Tailscale or Wireguard. Tailscale uses the Wireguard protocol but it's very easy to configure, and will automatically set up a peer-to-peer mesh network for you (each node on the VPN can directly reach any other node, without having to route through a central server).
The only things that should be exposed publicly are things that absolutely need to be - for example, parts of Home Assistant need to be publicly exposed if you use the Google Assistant or Alexa integrations, since Google and Amazon need to be able to reach it.