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2 yr. ago

It's not that bad, bios is stored on an eeprom chip that can be programmed with some special device. On some motherboards (usually older) the chip is socketed which is really nice. On others, you need to desolder it. If you can find someone doing electronic repair, they might be able to fix it.

Self hosting basically means you are running the server application yourself. It doesn't matter if it's at home, on a cloud service or anywhere else.

I wouldn't recommend hosting a social network like lemmy, because you would be legally responsible for all the content served from your servers. That means a lot of moderation work. Also, these types of applications are very demanding in terms of data storage, you end up with an ever growing dataset of posts, pictures etc.

But self hosting is very interesting and empowering. There are a lot of applications you can self host, from media servers (Plex, Jellyfin), personal cloud (like Google Drive) with NextCloud, blocking ads with pihole, sync servers for various apps like Obsidian, password manager BitWarden etc. You can even make your own website by coding it, or using a CMS platform like WordPress.

Check the Awesome Self-hosted list on GitHub, has a ton of great stuff.

And in terms of hardware, any old computer or laptop can be used, just install your favorite server OS (Linux, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, even Windows Server). You can play with virtualization too if you have enough horsepower and memory with ESXI or Proxmox, so you can run multiple severs at once on the same computer.

I have a 9th gen i7. It sounds pretty good, until you look at the i3-13100F which is 30% faster. CPUs have had a huge jump in performance in the last few generations. The laptop is a Dell Precision 5540 from roughly ~2019-2020. I recently received an upgrade to 64GB of ram which helps a lot, but the main bottleneck is the CPU.

For many people it might sound like a good machine. For certain developers, sure, it's great. But when you work on a complex project written in 3-4 different languages, with a complex build system... it's pretty bad.

The company has a 5 year machine replacement policy... I have to use this slow piece of shit another 2 years until I can get it replaced.

Yes, 40gb is right. To be fair, we only use it for copying files. Cost cutting because AWS costs money.

Something I wish my employer realized is how much value they would get out of providing their developers with good hardware instead of crappy laptops. When it takes 15 minutes to change a line, compile and run the software I'm working on, I'm not going to be very productive.

For context, I work on 2 separate projects that need separate development environments (because they have some conflicting dependencies). One of them has to be in a VM, which significantly affects performance. The laptop was high end 3 years ago, but now it's beaten even by an Intel i3. It also doesn't help that the compamy has installed 2 anti-virus software that take up like 30-40% cpu while I am running builds.

Another crappy thing they did was move the infrastructure to AWS... And it costs a ton, performance is shit, and copying files from the build servers is a nightmare... we have to remote into some "copy machine" on AWS, copy the files from the build server to the "copy machine" via samba, upload the files to some internal tool (that's like OneDrive but worse in every way), and the tool will sync it to our machine. Oh, and the copy machine has very limited storage, it's win10 on a 40gb drive. It's insane.

Game is free but now you pay real money instead of sims money for building the house. No more motherlode and rosebud for you.

I've seen some situations like this in Air Crash Investigation, they just did the minimum repairs to get the plane working and had test pilots fly it away.

Also renamed xml, renamed json and renamed sqlite.

And big monitors come with TV software nowadays...

Look at commercial TVs, those used by businesses. Some even come with a RPi slot.

Main difference is the electron app has access to more things on your computer, like files, sensors, microphone, camera etc.

I refuse to use their shitty app, but I still use old reddit on the desktop. If they remove old.reddit.com, I will probably not use it at all.

On mobile, I tried a few apps. Lemmy feels very empty and devoid of content and communities. Mastodon is not that interesting. I feel that hacker news is the best alternative right now. Even though it doesn't have that many users, the fact that it has a single "community" helps it feel far less empty, and more focused towards technical people.

If you only need nextcloud on your local network, a quick and dirty way of assigning hostnames to machines is the hosts file. Obviously, this has to be done on every computer from which you wish to access nextcloud. Also, nonrooted mobile OSs don't let you edit the hosts file.

Alternatively, you can set up a local DNS server. Pihole also has that capability (I personally had mixed results with Pihole, not sure if I did something wrong). Some routers may have that too.

If you need it public on the internet, yes, you need a domain name. Some providers offer free domains (but it will be a subdomain of the provider). Something to keep in mind is that your IP is probably dynamic. When you connect to the Internet, the ISP assigns you a random IP address from their pool of IPs. To keep the domain up to date, you will need to setup a dynamic DNS solution. This is a simple script/program that periodically checks your IP, and if it changes, updates that domain automatically.

Sad samsung noises...

Exactly. There are a lot of sketchy porn related businesses, and porn is ripe with abuse. Also, porn sites have a moderation problem. It is difficult to verify that the videos people upload don't contain CP (it's hard to tell someone's age just by looking at them), rape, if the people actually consented to the video being uploaded etc. PH decided to just delete all non-verified uploaders, and it is understandable why.

A lot of businesses just don't want to be associated with that, or have to moderate that, or have any involvement. And this also affects their relationship with other businesses.

By being within 100m of a mazda vehicle, you hereby grant us permission to perform the services outlined herein.

FTFY

I have a 2012 VW Golf 6 and it's still ok. You can connect your phone via Bluetooth, but it acts more like a BT headset. It can show a contact list and caller ID, but that's as far as it goes. Maps can only be updated by buying a special SD card from VW. The car itself cannot connect to the Internet at all. It can read mp3 music from USB drives and SD cards. It also has a cd drive, and radio.

I'm quite happy with what it has. I know WV isn't very popular in the US, but it's common in Eastern Europe.

But how does it work? Does the car have a mobile data plan included? Or is doing it through connected smartphone?

But something I forgot to mention about old hardware is that it allows you to run old software, old games... and there's also the nostalgia of Windows XP, or Windows 98, the early web. They remind me of a simpler time...

I would say when it becomes too slow for even basic tasks like browsing the web, or running an up-to-date operating system.

Today, I would say the bar is around 3000-4000 points on cpubenchmark for the cpu, 8gb of ram and an SSD.

You could definitely get a usable computer that has less. I have a Pentium II PC that works great, and can even connect to the Internet. But software today is far more bloated and inefficient than it used to be, such an old machine would be useful only if you don't do anything computationally intensive, and don't need to run any modern software.

Tight things like pants and even socks irritate my skin where the body hair roots are and I hate it.