Home computing for $5/month
pandoricity.blogspot.com
pandoricity.blogspot.com
A 35W draw will cost you $5/mo at $0.20/kWh. This will either let you run an oldish laptop continuously, or you can go down the path of newer hardware to optimize your constant draw, and spend that energy budget on in-use amenities (nice monitor or faster processing).
But looking at the bigger picture, why would you want to set a limit on your computing costs so low? Today's dominant business model is to use scaled computational processes to trick people into overpaying for products/services. One of the least prudent things an individual could do is further hinder their ability to exercise their own computational agency!
Clearly that's not a realistic usage, but beyond that I'd say 35W is a high estimate even during use. CodingHorror has some numbers for a Dell XPS M1330 [1], a laptop from 2008 with a Core 2 Duo (2 GHz) and 13.3" display.
Idle at max screen brightness is 20W, wifi bandwidth test bumps it up to 24W. Running an instance of prime95 pushes it up to 50W, but most people don't do that. Especially with hardware accelerated video, I don't think people are spending the majority of their computer use with the CPU pegged.
A home laptop probably spends 18+ hours a day off/asleep, and the maybe 6 hours of use aren't going to all be heavy loads.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-how-much-power-does...
You can obviously buy newer tech for even better power efficiency, but that gets into a discussion of accounting for capital cost vs recurring.
I just put together a home server, I need to get a power meter and see what it's using.
Theoretically if I pegged it out with the screen on max brightness I'd get about 90 minutes out the battery (which is about what linux estimated running stress-ng) in reality depending on what I'm doing I get 5-6 hours and if it's light surfing on an evening over 7. Currently it's saying 3 hours 58 minutes @33% charge, I'm actually surprised how long it lasts given I didn't expect it to but looking at powertop it spends a good chunk of it's time running at about half it's top clock rate and it rarely bursts.
Though to be fair I didn't buy this laptop for it's battery life (I can swap those out if needed) or weight (not that it's excessive) but because it sat on a local maxima for what I wanted (fast quad core with HT, relatively light, relatively good battery life).
The GF's little Asus regularly goes over 10 hours with her using it for the usual net stuff and it's got a tiny battery, it's a cracking little machine but Intellij would wreck it.
Internet is going to cost way more than $5/mo.
To keep things cheap, I just use my work laptop and an OVH $3.50 VPS for the other things.
5.5 Watts:
My Dell XPS13 with a bunch of browser/slack/java processes on Linux. (it's below 4W at idle)
40 Watts:
My 6-year old Xeon E3-1230 (v1) with 14TiB usable ZFS and 32GB of ECC RAM.
Also, if you're really going for very low power, I'd suggest an RPi Zero W instead of some Android phone. $10 @ MicroCenter and you can install pretty much anything your heart desires from standard Raspbian repos. I can't even measure it's wattage at the outlet with my power meter.
I think I have an APC Back-UPS 425VA (or 600VA) that takes care of that for a sprinkle of RPis, a firewall, an access point and the ONT outside. I like to keep my connectivity during the very brief power outages (underground power).
I've been meaning to try using an Anker portable battery as an extended-run UPS, but haven't tried it, and I don't know if it'll keep the USB port powered on continuously.
I think you'd be better off looking at some of the DIY electronic battery things - eg WiMos battery shield or adafruit powerboost (https://www.adafruit.com/product/2465) and a LiPo battery, but they will only provide ~1 Amp.
If neither of those things are attainable I should be sticking with just using the library's computers to try and manage to produce some form of profit I can put towards eventually getting into community college.
If I'm not dirt broke, this entire article is sort've pointless from a practical standpoint unless you just really enjoy this sort of cost-saving exercise. But if you don't and you're making enough for a real computer then you may as well just get the real computer.
Sub-$200 Chromebooks are plastic so they break easily. I've had issues with keyboard switches not working any more. The hole where the power adapter plugs in gets loose and stops making a good connection. You're looking at about 2 years of everyday use before something critical breaks MAX.
A good, aluminum Chromebook that will actually last a few years of everyday use is about $300.
I do "actual computing" on it too, since it is has way more ram and disk than any of my cloud stuff.
https://swappa.com/buy/google-chromebook-pixel-1st-gen-lte-u...
If you don't mind that it's four years old at this point, it was by far the best Chromebook I ever used, and my girlfriend is still using it as her daily driver (I gave it to her because I thought it was too nice a piece of equipment to gather dust in a drawer).
There's a hidden cost though. I recently had them re-soled and had to buy some laces (this is after about a year and a half of wear) and the cost of re-soleing the boots was also very expensive! I'm not sure I am saving much over the cost of regularly buying less expensive boots.
It literally takes me like 3 years and a few 1000 miles before my shoes need resoled...
I didn't think they needed to be resoled, but I don't know shoes. My wife is the "fashionista". :-)
For throwaway shoes that you cant resole, I like Ecco. Excellent!!
I just want my feet covered; I don't want another hobby...
It's funny, because I used to hate polishing my school shoes as a kid.
I only polish my boots around once a month, so it's a couple of hours a year. I spend more time sewing up clothes and sewing on replacement buttons, which I've also discovered now that I'm an adult is a cathartic activity.
There's something nice about trying to distance yourself from the throwaway disposable consumer culture we have now, and actually fixing things.
I guess I've become a hipster.
I recently had to sort huge boxes of legos for a hacker space. It sounded miserable but it really was relaxing just letting the mind blank out.
Any tips for polishing? I've got the gear, just never used it.
I know, I know - Youtube is that way. :-)
Wipe off any lingering water, let the leather dry, and then apply a thin layer of mink oil - work it into the creases, that's where the leather will split if you don't keep it supple.
Let that dry, and then apply a very thin layer of polish with a damp - not wet - rag. Work it into the seams; if it's not under your fingernails, you're not trying hard enough. Once the entire upper is done, give it a few minutes to sit, so the wax can solidify a bit, then buff it lightly with long strokes of the rag. Repeat with another thin layer of polish.
You won't get much of a shine the first time. The temptation is to apply polish more heavily, but then it just gets sticky. Next time, you can buff it more firmly, and next time more firmly still. After a few goes, you'll have enough of a layer built up to develop a proper shine, and then it's just a few minutes of maintenance at a time. You'll never get a really good gleam off anything but black leather, but anything else will still look much better than if you don't put the effort in. Same for any leather that's not full-grain, but it still helps. And don't polish suede! Just brush it.
Mink oil every half-dozen times or so is enough to keep cracks from forming; more often than that and it'll soften the leather too much.
I get ten or more years out of a good pair of boots this way. Dress shoes are more delicate, I suppose, but they'll still do better with proper care than without. Good luck!
I guess that is a consequence of fashion becoming the primary driver of cost, rather than actual quality.
Case in point: I was assaulted and robbed last year walking on the street, while carrying this laptop in my backpack. I don't have much else in the backpack and it's a thin one without padded protection. The robber pistol-whipped me and I fell to the ground. He kicked me in the back once (while I have the backpack on). My Chromebook took most of the force. There is still a visible dent on the front cover of the laptop right now, as a result of this. It still works perfectly (other than the dent being an aesthetic issue). This was a year ago and I am still using this Chromebook.
I also had none of the issues you mentioned with keyboard switches, power adapter plugs, etc. Maybe it's a manufacturer thing and not a Chromebook thing? Maybe Acer is better?
I suppose I could be just lucky, but as is I could probably use it for another 4 years without trouble. The biggest issue is the soldered in RAM which is only 2GB. But that's plenty for emacs, light firefox, and even videos since it's got hardware decoding acceleration.
Anecdotally, I have never has a laptop die in over 20 years except for the backlight failing after many years on my second hand Toshiba T1100 and my aged HP 2510p becoming flaky after a few disassemblies to clean dust out (and attempting to use better thermal paste on the heat sink).
It's BIOS ROM code for (some) chromebooks and chromeboxes to allow you to run a normal Linux distribution. Not something like crouton, but regular Linux booting.
I used it with an ASUS chromebox to get a cheap but decent desktop experience. It's a Celeron, but easy to upgrade the storage and memory (2 DIMM slots!).
Been there. Lost a couple days of work over it. Gave away the chrome book.
My biggest issue isn't cost of running the stuff. The problem is the network: I am limited to a 5 Mbps upload on a goddamn commercial line*. I literally don't have an option for a faster connection. No static IP, no IPv6, no SLA, no anything. Do you know how long it takes to upload 1 TB over a link like this, while still having the web be usable? Because I do, and it's not pretty.
This is why home computing isn't happening. I am not running a rendering farm or a BTC mining operation here, so just having CPU cycles is doing me no good. But being able to run small apps on a self hosted PaaS would be really great, and I can't do that, basically ever.
Last time I used a WISP, the expected latency was something like half the best case for comcast or sonic dsl, and bandwidth was 6mbps symmetric.
When set up right, latency is ~zero queuing delay plus the speed of light to a peering closet ~3 miles away.
This was with Canopy gear and unwired ltd; unwired is at least one generation newer than that now. FWIW, Musk's rainbows-and-unicorns low orbit satellite internet is targeting 25ms.
https://app.printfriendly.com/print?source=homepage&url_s=uG...
Nah, gonna keep my rapsberries.
Some of the clones look better but the community is too biased toward the RPi brand.
Everything bellow that is probably going to be headless and then the only meaningful differentiator for me is physical ethernet.
I have 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running docker that has the following containers running
- A service I wrote to control my TV
- A service I wrote that sends commands to a smart plug that turns my lamp on and off (I can then invoke it via curl and have setup Alfred workflows so I can do it from my mac)
- GOGS to store private code repos and mirror ones on github
- ZNC (IRC bouncer)
- A service I wrote to present a dashboard of common things I like to glance at (e.g. twitter feed, pocket, pinboard, the weather etc)
- A service I wrote that hooks up to Twilio to manage my voicemail
- Portainer (a gui for managing docker containers)
- A docker registry to store my custom images
I have another Raspberry Pi 3 running Pi-Hole to block internet advertisements at the DNS level
Then I have a Raspberry Pi 1 (model B) that runs NGINX to act as a reverse proxy to services in my network that I want to be exposed. These are all protected by SSL (LetsEncrypt) and client side certificates authentication. It also runs a service that updates a DNS record on AWS Route53 whenever my IP changes as I don't have a static IP.
Then the last one is this https://github.com/djhworld/blinkt-tube-status I can't take credit for the case etc, but it's super handy in the mornings!
Love to learn more about this.
The service just says a message to the user, gives them the option to leave a voicemail, then I call the transcription API to try and transcribe the message into an SMS message (sort of like what Google Voice and Apple offers on iPhones but I don't have an iPhone and I believe Google Voice is only available in the US)
I plan to do more with it soon, Twilio's transcription API is a bit rubbish, I think it might be geared towards American accents so it fails quite miserably with British ones with hilarious consequences.
It also lets me vpn into the house and stream locally stored music / video to my cell phone.
This took a day or so to set up.
Can't recommend it highly enough, but cost / performance / functionality are all > 10x a raspberry pi. The only thing it's missing is hdmi out + retro pi.
These are the high end home/smb choices. You can go much cheaper and get 90% of the functionality from other synology models.
I'm pretty sure the platform can hold its own being a Google product and all, but this reads a lot like the posts from Microsoft MVPs back in the day.
EDIT: to clarify, I believe consumer hardware has progressed enough to provide an elegant solution to a slew of simple cloud services which people pay monthly for, i.e. storage. The markup on simple software that is hosted in the cloud is just too high. Now convincing investors to touch a hardware start-up with a 10ft pole...
This basically exists, no? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0181JTPCU/
Though I haven't used it, and I don't think they sell a "hassle-free" box yet.
If you don't mind the proprietary aspect, there are some NAS boxes that come with a simple(?) GUI for installing and running such services.
No, it's the maintenance. The security updates. And for email and social, the anti-spam/anti-abuse workload.
that's why there is a golf rush of competitors offering lower-cost alternatives?
However, I suggest forking out a few hundred more for an intel model if you can. My only remaining windows+office instance is now a vm on a 25w box that hosts a half dozen other things. The electricity this saves vs a desktop/home-built server has easily paid for the beefier CPU.
[edit: I estimate this setup is costing something like $20/month, including power + depreciation. Cloud backup is another $10/month, and I run a $1.30 / month cloud vm to host my website.]
How do you reliably convince any given home ISP to change your RDNS record?
[0] https://gnu.io/
Working remotely on a server gives you cloud abilities because you can easily switch devices and continue working.
Having a cloud service provide the gui or editor is an option available now. But to have a local editor with ssh means you can work on your phone using a proper mobile editor you can run a full ide on your desktop or use vim directly on the server.
The security and privacy of your code remains in your hands. Best of all worlds.
I have a dedicated server in a datacenter somewhere that has essentially become my main dev machine. It can only be connected to through a VPN that I built/manage. It's a fantastic setup, honestly.
That's one of the primary reasons I have sticked with Emacs(with evil), tmux/screen is also essential.
"Ok honey, now type in gcloud compute instances create my-vm --zone us-central1-b --preemptible. But don't forget the --preemptible otherwise the bank will take our house."
"You don't need a bigger screen than that."
"Sorry kids, Google says you have to stop playing Minecraft now."
"Oh don't mind that noise, telemarketers call the server sometimes."
(These are obviously not quotes from the author)
I'm assuming VR is out of the question due to the latencies.
I don't think VR is supported, and yeah, even a low ping would make it a vomit comet anyway.
Here's the pricing: https://www.paperspace.com/pricing You have to sign up and then request access to the GPU instances (each instance type has to be requested individually, unfortunately. I found the GPU+ instance to be a little underpowered, and the P5000 has been performant enough that I haven't bothered to try the P6000). I can take up to 24 hours to get access. Once you have that though, you can create an instance with the parsec image and it comes with all the drivers, as well as steam and EA origin pre-installed. The parsec client by default starts up without admin mode, which crashes a lot in my experience, so I log in using the browser client and restart the parsec server as admin manually. It's basically ready to go out of the box and the longest part of the setup is just waiting for your steam games to install.
To have someone talking from a position of simplicity and economy use such an excess of technical design to present it was a bit much.
I would be surprised if the site renders decently on a chrome book. Ironically.
Also, without external keyboard+display, using a laptop as my primary computer would ruin my body in a month flat. Ergonomics are important.
https://www.amazon.com/Micro-Charge-Cable-Adapter-Connector/...
(not all will support charging and OTG at the same time)
...and new Chromebooks can run Android apps...
So if you want a CLI, your Chromebook or your Android can get you there.
Really, most Android apps are a terrible desktop experience. They handle the mouse poorly, they handle multiple monitors poorly, few of them at this point can deal with being resized to arbitrary sized (i.e., you get only phone-aspect-ratio sized or full screen), they handle co-existing with other running processes poorly (i.e., if you change the focus from one window to another on a different monitor on an application playing a video the video pauses).
I'm running Termux on a Samsung Chromebook 3. Can you explain what you're running, so we can try to see why it doesn't work for you?
Also, don't forget, you can run Termux in the background, with an sshd, and then run any SSH client you want to talk to it --- which puts the copy and paste into your control.
Also, Termux is open source... So, if you have ideas about Copy and Paste, you can try to implement them.
To switch application windows in Termux, Control-Alt-C makes a new window, Control-Alt-N goes to next, Control-Alt-P goes to previous. It works great, and is super quick.
You can run multiple Termux Application Windows, and then you can run multiple SSH clients, so multiple monitors will work.
I know some of these are kind of hacks, but I'm just trying to be helpful.
Android Apps do handle the mouse terribly, no argument.
For me Control-W closes the Termux window.
For me Control-Alt-N switches between sessions, which all live in the same physical window, which I cannot figure out how to open multiple of.
It seems like your suggestion is to use Termux just to run an SSH server locally and then use another, non-Android SSH client, to deal with the fact that Android apps on ChromeOS work terribly UI-wise. That's a good idea, it leads me to my next problem:
It lives in a separate IP address space from ChromeOS... I have some weird IP address inside the ARC that is not the same IP as ChromeOS... I did not try to SSH to that address from ChromeOS though, does it work ?
To be honest, I still can't browse a Termux server from a different machine, and I've spent a while trying.
It's already ruined music for the majority of musicians.
But when the people don't want albums, what do we expect?
Today, we listen to music more than ever, but only those supported by a large audience really see any benefit from the streaming model. People just aren't spending the kind of money they used to on music, and it's affecting the music itself. [1] Years ago (for a solid 10-20 years) your average unsigned regional band could do well on CD sales alone. Yeah, it was up to them to make a good album, but the sale of 100 albums (which could easily happen over the course of one or two good nights), assuming 100% ownership could give the band $1,000-$1,300 to split. In retrospect now, they'd need about 1,800 downloads to achieve the same thing (Which people don't even really do anymore). Or ~70k-700k streams just to hit that same number. [2]
Ironically, I just heard of a Netflix suit suggesting something similar for movies[3]. I'd imagine if this was to happen, we'd see the same thing in Hollywood: a tightening of belts high up the food chain which may or may not affect A-list actors; but an otherwise decimation of the lower market. AMC has a nice quote (Although, they'd naturally be opposed to such a thing, so take it with a grain of salt): "...[the] price level is unsustainable and only sets up consumers for ultimate disappointment down the road if or when the product can no longer be fulfilled."
[1] https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAA... (I wish I could find something to 2016, but not a graphic like this)
[2] http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-muc...
[3] https://qz.com/1055032/netflix-for-cinemas-moviepass-wants-t...
I think what went wrong with music was the initial value set, and then competed with (into extinction) by Davids and Goliaths. Steve Jobs valued a song at $0.99 11 years ago. We've yet to adjust that for inflation. It's only gotten worse with valuations for streaming. The real problem now isn't that we don't listen to albums anymore (OK, maybe that's half the problem) or that we don't have physical music, but Steve Jobs valued it too low. And that a song that took $2,000,000 to produce costs the same as a song that took $0 to produce; yet both command a $0.99 price point.
I'm getting preachy, and I'm sorry.
In addition, Starbucks -- at least the one near me -- doesn't allow you to occupy a seat without purchasing something and since the Internet service offered there is subsidized by coffee ... very expensive coffee, at that ... the cost of using Starbucks[0] daily for 5 business days/over 4.5 weeks/month assuming you get away with buying only one Venti Starbucks regular coffee at USD$2.45 is about the cost of broadband at home, not including fuel to drive there and back (assuming you didn't walk/ride a bike)... and there's no preemptible VMs included with the brew.
[0] I skipped library internet access because, at least for me, the performance is so bad at my public library I wouldn't consider that viable Internet service. And it smells like books there.
Probably because you didn't include the laptop's price. If you spent $300 and it lasts you four years, that's already $6.25/month. Sure you get internet access for free, but so could the author, it's not like you can't take a Chromebook to Starbucks or the library.