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eemil

209 karma · joined November 25, 2018

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eemil··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
So many docker app supervisors nowadays.

I'm surprised there's no such thing as a self-hosted deployment spec. An opinionated docker-compose file (or similar) with well defined inputs, outputs, and requirements that works for the average use-case.

eemil··on Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity
Doesn't matter what it looks like, problem is it changes the facade. For that you need to submit some paperwork and get it approved.

You can actually install a heat pump in most apartment buildings, as long as it's on the balcony and not visible from the street (=below waist-level). Main reason you wouldn't, is condensate output which has to be piped indoors or into a heated drain during the winter. Or you just pipe it into your balcony's rainwater drain and accept that you can't use the heatpump below 0C.

eemil··on 10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module
Homelabbers, please look past twisted pair. 10 GBit is way past the point of diminishing returns, it's why your NICs are so easily overheating.

Fiber is affordable, and for short distances you can use direct attach copper cables. Basically two SFPs hardwired together. You can order a 3 meter 10 GBit DAC cable for like 20 bucks. And they can be had in lengths up to 10+ meters.

eemil··on Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract
> Could too much thermal insulation cause the bed temperature to lower (to avoid overheating chamber temp) to the point the print no longer adheres? etc.

I've insulated my Core One specifically to reduce noise, vibration, and improve high-temp printing and learned that:

1. When printing at high temperatures, you don't have to worry about overheating. Chamber fans are plenty capable of cooling the printer down.

2. There are so many nooks, crannies, thermal bridges, and gaps that modifying the printer to add insulation is a fool's errand. You will spend a lot of effort for little gain. If I were to buy another Core One, the only thing I would do again is damping pads in a couple areas to reduce resonance caused by the flat steel panels.

3. That being said, insulating the core one externally by covering it with a "jacket" of insulation or placing it in an enclosed(ish) space is very easy and effective. In an enclosed space, you need to make sure the chamber fans exhaust out, so they can retain control of the environment. You don't want it to be a fully closed system.

For point 3, these days I literally throw a beach towel on my Core One when printing high-temp filaments. It covers the top, front, and sides. This is enough insulation for 55C printing (the maximum allowed by hardware/firmware) and is easy to remove when I don't need it. Of course there are plenty of more suitable materials you could use, from textiles to foamboard insulation. But the concept is the same.

eemil··on Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
Maybe I'm in the minority... but this seems like an extremely compelling offering for certain use-cases. Not for enterprises, but for individuals and small businesses.

My off-site backup is a thinkpad x230 with a 1 TB HDD. It's currently at my friends house, and I access it with tailscale. 7 eur/month to colocate this in a datacenter with stable (and fast) Internet + power seems like a pretty good deal.

I can understand some of the concerns with user-provided hardware. Maybe a better model, would be for CoLaptop to offer hardware themselves. This would allow them to standardize on a few models, which opens up many possible improvements such as central DC power, power efficient BIOS settings, enclosures with cooling ducts, etc. They can still follow the "old laptop as a server" model by buying off-lease laptops from the corporate world.

eemil··on Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
Same here, I've found a single (not too big) monitor to be best for ergonomics.

Still keep a second monitor around, but it's exclusively for screen sharing. Speaking of, having a dedicated monitor for sharing is really nice:

- It can have a standard resolution and aspect ratio (1080p) which is perfect for sharing

- It is a clean slate. I only share stuff I consciously move to that monitor. No need to clear my screen or burden my colleagues with unrelated windows in our call.

- Yes app sharing exists, but screen sharing is just more reliable and works better for sharing multiple things sequentially/simultaneously.

eemil··on Apple Business
Would be nice if you could buy a Macbook with a proper on-site warranty.

Dell, Lenovo, HP will gladly send a technician to your house, and their NBD warranties cost about the same as Applecare. And they don't care if you're an enterprise or an individual buying one measly laptop.

eemil··on The state of Linux music players in 2026
I want to switch to Roon, but the lack of a web client (let alone a native linux client!) makes it a total dead end.
eemil··on A static site generator written in POSIX shell
Bit of an unknown feature, but tree can output HTML. I've used tree -H to generate directory listings more than once.
eemil··on Best practices for long-run LED strip installs (20–50M) to avoid flicker?
What a brilliant, simple solution. This way each segment in the LED strip has an equally long current path, and should have identical voltage/brightness.

---

That being said, 20-50m is a really long run even with 24V LEDs. Even using this trick, you'll run into significant voltage drop and heat in the LED strip's copper traces since they're only so thick. There's a reason why manufacturers specify a maximum length. I would check the datasheet and split the strip into multiple segments depending on this value. Maybe there are some LED strips designed for this use-case, with an even higher voltage and/or thicker traces.

eemil··on iPhone Air
If you're going to do a phone-width camera bump, at least make it flat so I can put my phone down without it wobbling. Apple's bump on a bump is the worst of both worlds.
eemil··on Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?
Even if the patents are only valid in China, this is going to hurt western companies a lot. If you're manufacturing a product in China, you'll need to either:

1. Pay the patent trolls, giving them power and hurting your margins

2. Move manufacturing to a more expensive, less competitive country

In the long run, you could argue that point 2 will lead to domestic manufacturing which everyone wants. But unless you can find a way to make these companies actually competitive (e.g. tariffs on chinese printers), I think the more likely scenario is these hamstrung companies will wither and go out of business.

eemil··on Using Home Assistant, adguard home and an $8 smart outlet to avoid brain rot
This simply isn't true. Where I live every major operator offers multisim i.e. two (e)sims with the same number. It's primarily used for smartwatches, but they support phones as well.
eemil··on TIL: timeout in Bash scripts
Every time I learn a new Bash trick or quirk, it just pushes me further towards Powershell and Python for system administration.

Bash scripts are so hacky. With any other language, my though process is "what's the syntax again? Oh right.." but with bash it's "how can I do this and avoid shooting myself in the foot?" when doing anything moderately complex like a for loop.

eemil··on Gumroad’s source is available
By the time licensing becomes relevant, your business is built around the platform and this gives Gumroad an unreasonable advantage in any negotiations. Imagine what they could say:

- You're now a competitor. Stop using our software (you can still sell on gumroad.com, hint hint)

- Give us 20% for 1 year (next year, who knows...)

- We won't give you a license, but we'll buy you out for next to nothing.

eemil··on If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling
I'm surprised Chris left out a big reason: cable is cheap, and labor is expensive. And there are a lot of fixed costs that don't depend on the number of cables or their thickness.

You might save a little bit going with 4 pairs instead of 24. But that goes out the window as soon as you need to run a single new cable. If you want to be stingy, pull the cables but leave them unterminated.

eemil··on Aspartame aggravates atherosclerosis through insulin-triggered inflammation
What's with the double standard, around sugar and artificial sweeteners?

Artificial sweeteners do not need to be as safe as bottled water.

They just need to be less harmful than sugar. Which they are, because sugar is unequivocally, very very bad for you.

eemil··on Ask HN: How does your global site handle China?
That's certainly one way to go, and this "best effort" support as you describe it is what I personally advocate for. Put it out there on the free Internet, and if it works in China as well, great.

But if your business has customers in China, and wants to retain them long-term, this is untenable. Not only do you risk getting blocked on a whim, but without local servers latency will suffer as well.

eemil··on Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
Why don't they just put two connectors on the 90-series cards?
eemil··on Modular PC Design: Sustainable Approach Enhanced Repairability Reduced E-Waste
Market forces are driving companies to make more and more highly integrated, glued together macbook clones because consumers demand them. Or at least manufacturers think they do.

Maybe it's time for a class of repairable laptops/desktops, similar to what Intel did with their "Ultrabook" branding a decade ago. Call it an ecobook, and require upgradable storage, RAM, and access to replacement parts for 10 years. Something that lets companies say "this is thicker than a macbook, but not because it's worse".

eemil··on Modular PC Design: Sustainable Approach Enhanced Repairability Reduced E-Waste
How about supporting a socket for more than one generation?

My desktop PC from 2018 is still going strong, on account of using the AM4 socket (AMD). That allowed me to upgrade to the 5800X3D a while back, a whole two generations or four years newer than the original CPU.

eemil··on Visualizing All ISBNs
Depends on your jurisdiction.
eemil··on Astronauts face unique visual challenges at lunar South Pole
Perspective shouldn't be a problem. Some cars already do eye tracking, using a camera placed near the gauge cluster, as part of a driver monitoring system.
eemil··on Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
Why spend money on something so subjective? If you care about peripherals at all, a $13 basic keyboard is just as bad as a randomly chosen mechanical keyboard. Neither is likely to your taste :)
eemil··on Five minutes of exercise a day could lower blood pressure
How much more evidence do we need, that exercise is good and any amount is better than none?
eemil··on Former President Trump has won the presidency
Unfortunately I agree. With things like climate policy out of the way US stocks could end up doing very well over the next couple years at the expense of future generations, and probably the world.
eemil··on Google Drive Blackout in Italy After Another Major Anti-Piracy Blunder
Malicious compliance at its best :)
eemil··on End-to-End Encrypted Cloud Storage in the Wild: A Broken Ecosystem
One downside to encryption, is it prevents the server operator from doing any deduplication (file or block level) on their end.

Maybe one reason why cloud providers aren't pushing it that heavily. Especially the big players, since more data = more duplication = more efficient deduplication.

eemil··on Dookie Demastered
US only? Really should have put that front and center... before I spent 20 minutes deciding which drawing to enter :/
eemil··on Discord runs Powershell on load to find Nvidia binaries
This is why I run everything possible in the browser. Discord, teams, zoom, outlook, etc. It also makes switching computers and operating systems a breeze. Not that I switch often, but I like to remain platform agnostic.
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