I do recommend it. It’s easy to setup and does everything you need in a documentation knowledge base. I used to use confluence before their enshitification; WikiJS is much nicer for my use case.
Go with EndeavourOS instead of Manjaro. Similar design principles, but much more consistent functionality. Been running it on my laptop for over two years now and still haven’t had to reinstall it.
I didn’t bother reading the other comments before giving my glowing recommendation of EndeavourOS, I’m always happy to see other people having as good of an experience as I’ve had.
If you want to judge whether energy consumption is a waste, you have to consider the value of what’s consuming that energy.
Keeping the internet running? A global storehouse of humanity’s collective knowledge available to almost everyone around the world for free? The ability to communicate in real time with your family on the other side of the world, or coordinate protests in every major city in your country, or host a live meeting that would have required fifty people to fly cross country into a single zoom room?
Yeah, data farms could become more efficient and sustainable, as could we all. But I don’t begrudge the power they spend one bit. 2% of global energy consumption is low for the benefit.
Compare to Bitcoin, which accounts for 0.5% of global energy consumption, and benefits no one and nothing…
I’m not sure that the combined energy consumption of the aggregate financial system is less than 0.5%, but it does, unlike Bitcoin, provide utility, not withstanding any reasonable objection to the fairness of this system.
tbh i don’t worry too much about datacenters because they can be built under the land, under ice, alone in the desert full of solar panels and so on. the heat in the winter can also be used to heat houses if it’s in the city…
the sad part is that most of that energy is used for bullshit tasks for surveillance capitalism.
The cloud is over-engineered and over-priced for personal projects and small groups. If you’re a larger company and want high-availability and speed globally, then you’re probably wanting a cloud provider nowadays unless you’re really wanting to manage hardware yourself.
Setting up your own website for fun or something for your local business obviously doesn’t need a fancy Kubernetes setup in EKS. Hell, even a moderate business could be fine if you’re not expecting usage spikes or latency issues (although you’d probably want more than a repurposed desktop).
How many companies need such a scale, but are not able to provide it inhouse for less money?
Everyone wants to be Netflix, but 99% of companies don’t even need close to that amount of scalability. I’d argue, a significant part of projects could be run on a raspberry pi, if they’d be engineered properly.
I’d have a slightly different take: managing things in-house is going to be cheaper if you have a competent team to do it. The existence of the cloud as a crucial infrastructure is because it is hard to come up with competent IT and sysadmin people. The market is offer-driven now. IT staff could help the company save money on AWS hosting but it could also be used in more crucial and profitable endeavour and this is what is happening.
I see it at the 2 organization I am working at: one is a startup which does have a single, overworked “hardware guy” who sets up the critical infra of the company. His highest priority is to maintain the machine with private information that we want to host internally for strategic reasons. We calculated that having him install a few machines for hosting our dev team data was the cheapest but after 3 months of wait, we opted out for a more expensive, but immediately available, cloud option. We could have hired a second one but our HR department is already having a hard time finding candidates for out crucial missions.
On the non-profits I am working on, there is a strong openness/open-hardware spirit. Yet I am basically the only IT guy there. I often joke they should ditch their Microsoft, Office and Google based tools, and I could help them do it, but I prefer to work on the actual open hardware research projects they are funding. And I think I am right in my priorities.
So yes, the Cloud is overpriced, but it is a convenience. Know what you pay for, know you could save money there and it may at some point be reasonable to do so. In the end that’s a resource allocation problem: human time vs money.
Thanks, that looks like something I might have to try. :) Myself, over the network, I still don’t do filesystem level incremental backups, sticking to either directories or virtual machine snapshots (both of which have their shortcomings).
I’ve been hearing about ZFS and its beneficial features for years now, but mainstream Linux installers don’t seem to support it, and I can’t be bothered to switch filesystems after installing.
Out of curiosity - can anyone tell, what might be blocking them?
Edit: answering my own question: legal issues. Licenses “potentially aren’t compatible”.
Due to potential legal incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL, despite both being OSI-approved free software licenses which comply with DFSG, ZFS development is not supported by the Linux kernel. ZoL is a project funded by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop a native Linux kernel module for its massive storage requirements and super computers.
Apart from the license incompatibility (which doesn’t stop it from being used by distros, as Ubuntu has shown): While it’s a fantastic filesystem for servers, it is also resource hungry and not suitable for small or portable systems.
This looks pretty cool. I’d also recommend Caddy, which is a very nice minimal web server that’s designed for scalability. It’s what I use at my home setup, but I should have a look at this one too.
Raspberry Pi has two CSI (camera serial interface) connectors on board, which is a considerable advantage over having to deal with USB webcams. This matters if your industrial robot must see the work area faster, your competition robot must run circles around opposing robots, or more sadly - if your drone must fly to war. :( On Raspberry Pi, in laboratory conditions (extreme lighting intensity), you can use the camera (with big ifs and buts) at 500+ frames per second, not fast enough to photograph a bullet, but fast enough to see a mouse trap gradually closing. That’s impossible over USB and unheard of to most USB camera makers.
Optimized libraries
I know that Raspberry Pi has “WiringPi” (a fast C library for low level comms, helping abstract away difficult problems like hardware timing, DMA and interrupts) and Orange Pi recently got “WiringOP” (I haven’t tried it, don’t know if it works well). I don’t know of anything similar on a PC platform, so I believe that on NUC, you’d have to roll your own (a massive pain) or be limited to kilohertz GPIO frequencies instead of megahertz (because you’d be wading through some fairly deep Linux API calls).
Antenna socket
Sadly, neither of them has a WiFi antenna socket. But the built-in WiFi cards are generally crappy too, so if you needed a considerable working area, you’d connect an external card with an external antenna anyway. Notably, some models of Orange Pi have an external antenna, and the Raspberry Pi Compute Module has one too.
If power consumption isn’t the be all end all concern for you, there is a lot to be said for the ability of x86 to boot into just about anything. You still don’t get that with ARM.
No one would want to buy this to use with high-demanding applications, but for hobbies and trivial stuff. With that said, even a Orange pi zero 3 is “better” than both Rpi 5 and the n100.
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