zrail

In a data center, sure. At home it's much less interesting and you can fake it with a NanoKVM or PiKVM for fairly cheap. Also a lot of "business" desktops with Intel processors will come with vPro, which is almost but not quite the same as a true IPMI.

Yep. I am very satisfied with my do-almost-everything Lenovo M80S gen3. It came with an i7-12700 (12 core 20 thread) and I've dropped in 96GB memory, a 10gb network card, and an LSI HBA connected to a used SAS disk shelf.

It runs a dozen VMs and sits almost idle most of the time unless I'm experimenting with CPU LLMs. My one quibble is that it's small form factor and has limited PCIe lanes so installing a GPU is complicated.

The whole setup including the M80S, the disk shelf, an old Brocade network switch, a Unifi NVR, and 12 spinning rust disks uses about 200W total, which is about $30/month in electricity.

It might be nice to add default messages that can auto-populate the date so she won't notice if network goes down for awhile or someone forgets to post a message.

Wait how is that dumb? It's factually correct.

> yet

> people want that paycheck

In most cases people _need_ that paycheck. You can talk about morality all you want if you have the privilege to not need a paycheck, but you can't know everything about everyone's lives. You mostly only ever know about the choice someone else makes. You hardly ever know what options they had to choose from or the tradeoffs they need to think about.

Sure, and now that their threat model includes devastating landslides they will probably make different choices.

Yep, exactly. At our previous place we never had an outage last more than a couple hours, in 7 years, so it didn't make sense. Current place has had four in the span of four years, plus we have geothermal heat so we can't just hook the furnace to a portable genset.

It'll never pencil out in terms of dollars saved on lost food and hotels, but just knowing that the power will be out for a max of 15-20 seconds makes it worth it for us.

Inverter units are nice, those Honda engines run forever.

I've had my 26kW generac for almost two years and it's done several multi-day outages without issue. I just have my mechanical contractor come out and do the annual maintenance on schedule, keep track of the weekly self-tests, and otherwise don't worry about it.

Your second point depends on your threat model. Personally my threat model is a wind or ice storm taking down the aerial electrical lines in my area (SE Michigan). The natural gas lines are all buried and the pumping stations are powered by natural gas so are inherently more reliable.

If your threat model involves civilization deteriorating to the point where natural gas stops working then sure, a generator with fuel storage on site probably makes more sense. I'd argue that gasoline is the worst of available options though. Diesel and propane are much more shelf stable and typically more reliable than small gasoline engines.

It turns out that was ordinary fraud[1] not a flaw in the physical plant. States with functional regulatory bodies don't have this problem. At most you get a situation like Michigan in the winter of 2019 where there was a massive fire at a primary storage facility and they asked everyone to conserve gas if possible.

[1]: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4896585-texas-g...

Gasoline generators are significantly cheaper. There are some tri-fuel generators that can run on gasoline, propane, or natural gas, but again they're more expensive.

A natural gas powered permanent standby generator is amazing for peace of mind but they're a significant investment.

You are grossly underestimating the force of sustained 250kmh winds (cat 4 hurricane), let alone the 400kph winds present in an F4 tornado. Even if your 900 year old building's walls could withstand that it would likely have no roof and be unlivable for an extended period of time.

Modern residential buildings in Florida etc are built to withstand these kinds of forces with hurricane glass and beefed up structures.

That's not really true, afaict. This press release[1] states that Fab 21 (Arizona) phase 1 is 4nm, which is not the best but clearly is enough to manufacture the A16, phase 2 opening in 2026 will be 3nm, and phase 3 will be 2nm or better. I'm not a semiconductor engineer so maybe there's some process nuance that I don't know, but it certainly seems that this is at or near the top of TSMC's process list.

[1]: https://pr.tsmc.com/english/news/2977

I was expecting like "terrible old server that I refer to as toilet because it's terrible" but this is so much better. Bravo.

Sounds more like Xen if Xen could boot containers instead of VMs.

> homelab toilet servers

....go on?

I use it as a caching proxy on my homeprod nodes. I want docker containers to be able to query Tailscale's MagicDNS without using host-mode networking everywhere. My config is really simple, just forward .ts.net to 100.100.100.100 and otherwise forward to NextDNS.

First release of Basel was in 2015 when Stripe was already 5 years old and the progenitor of this tooling was already running with several dozen users.

You're making a pretty bold assumption that the US will ratify this. The US does not make a habit of ratifying UN conventions.

Looks like the SDK got updated a couple hours ago:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk/commit/efe2103f9b284...

This is pretty exciting. Can't wait for the datasheet!

That's a pretty cool little board. It looks like they have versions with 10/100 Ethernet for not a lot more as well.

Well, sure :) It's a function present in the PIO code that isn't called by the current firmware setup.

Not sure which part you're referring to, but I agree. The u2if firmware I'm using has an interface type that generates the addressable LED bitstream with the RP2040's PIOs. The host software dumps the pixel color values over USB CDC into a buffer on the RP2040, then when it's done the firmware tells the PIO to read the buffer with DMA and stream out the precisely timed LED bitstream.

Currently it's running in "one light string per PIO" mode but there's an inaccessible mode where one PIO can do up to 8 strings simultaneously. The pins have to be physically adjacent, though, so it's a bit more difficult to set up in a generalized way.

Yep, that one is pretty cool too. It only does one i2c bus so it seems like it underuses the hardware a bit, but the mainline driver is pretty valuable.

Not really. I've been researching this extensively lately to try to add GPIO to my stack of Dell Wyse 3040s.

Options with mainline linux kernel drivers:

- MCP2221A (i2c + 4x GPIO)

- CP2112 (i2c + GPIO)

Options without kernel support:

- FT232H

- Arduino nano and clones

- Raspberry Pi Pico running some interesting firmware

- ESP32 running something like ESPHome (completely separate from host)

I've chosen the Pico for now and forked the u2if project for firmware and host support[1]. I also put together a generic ESPHome-compatible protocol server in python to tie my widgets to Home Assistant[2].

[1]: https://github.com/peterkeen/u2if

[2]: https://github.com/peterkeen/aioesphomeserver

Daily necessities being locked up is evidence that petty crime like shoplifting may be up. People shoplift necessities when they can't afford them. Nobody is stealing socks for meth money, they're stealing because their feet are cold and they don't have the money to pay.

And why, you might ask, is shoplifting up? Might have something to do with the historically horrific levels of income inequality in the US.

> Please call me (order of preference): Xe/xer, They/them or She/her please.

https://github.com/Xe

Alternatively, you put in load shed devices. They're basically fancy self-resetting circuit breakers that trip when the generator begins to be under too much load. They all trip at the same time and then come back up in a pre-determined sequence.