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.
209 karma · joined November 25, 2018
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Maybe one reason why cloud providers aren't pushing it that heavily. Especially the big players, since more data = more duplication = more efficient deduplication.