I think a lot of companies view their free plan as recruiting/advertising — if you use TailScale personally and have a great experience then you’ll bring in business by advocating for it at work.
Of course it could go either way, and I don’t rely on TailScale (it’s my “backup” VPN to my home network)… we’ll see, I guess.
Sawyer filter inline with a camelback is awesome. I’d just fill up my camelback in a stream using a (clean) handkerchief to get the large debris out and then let the filter do the rest.
Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)
That’s…not really a cogent argument.
Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).
Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.
If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/
Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.
80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.
Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.
So the irony is
I see what you did there…
I think you mean more scrupulous, not less.
Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)
Most of the time that leads to them dying.
Well, squishing has a 100% chance of them dying. With a toddler and a baby, having them run loose sadly isn’t an option.
We live in a very mild climate, and there’s under-deck and fence space around our house, in addition to bushes, trees, and underbrush — fairly suitable for a variety of arachnids. It’s not the same as indoors, and survival rate certainly isn’t 100%, but it’s not the death sentence of going from a climate controlled house to below-freezing outdoors.
Because I can trap mine in a jar and take it outside instead.
I think large planes “look” like they can’t work because their “relative speed” is really low — that is, their speed relative to their length. We’re used to seeing birds cover tens of lengths per second, whereas a large airliner covers ~1ish per second at takeoff.
Or not, but this always seemed like a plausible explanation as to why planes look impossible. (Though given that hovering birds don’t look funny, maybe this is a silly observation…).
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
— Richard P. Feynman
I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.
At least, that’s my perspective.
Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.
I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).
Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).
Maybe there’s some interplay between amd64 and x64 architectures.
AMD64 and x64 are the same thing. Do you mean AMD64 and x86? There is definitely interplay there, as AMD64 implements the x86-32 instruction set.
Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.
I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.
Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.
I just wish we’d have neither inflation nor deflation.
Some tech has followed this pattern. For example: entry level Mac laptop in ~2000 was the iBook, priced at $1599 ($3k+ in today’s dollars). The current entry level Mac laptop (M4 Air) starts at $999 — cheaper in absolute dollars, and way cheaper in relative dollars.
(Macs are just an example since Apple doesn’t have a very extensive product list, so there’s only one “entry level” laptop to choose from. And yes it’s fair to ask if the relative specs have just gotten worse, but I think this is also the opposite — the iBook was iirc criticized as being underpowered, whereas the M4 Air is afaik well regarded.)
My comment from another thread: https://startrek.website/comment/16491624
tl;dr: tiny production, would be astonished if they got $6k out of it, and that’s not counting time, props, transportation, etc.
Compensation for engineers in the Bay area will average much higher than $200k, and that’s not counting benefits (medical, etc.). So cost to the company will be way higher than 200k/employee.
For a project that has hardware, there will be large expenses associated with that — custom silicon has huge setup costs, for example.
I’ve been happy with the SMLIGHT SLZB-06M. You can easily flash firmware, and it has PoE which was important for me. I believe it also supports Thread, but I haven’t tried this yet (and I’m not sure if it supports it at the same time as Zigbee).
Zigbee smart plugs from Third Reality have been pretty solid in my experience, and they report power usage.
For circuit breaker level monitoring, I have an Emporia Vue2. I have it running esphome, completely local — unfortunately this requires some simple soldering and flashing, so it’s not turnkey. But it’s been rock solid ever since flashing it. (Process is well documented online.)
I’ve had decent luck with cheap wifi Matter bulbs, but provisioning them is finicky, and sometimes they just crap out and need to be power cycled; Zigbee bulbs (e.g., Ikea) have generally been reliable, though sometimes I’ve had difficulty pairing them initially. After power cycling a Matter WiFi bulb, it takes a while for it to respond to Home Assistant; Zigbee bulbs generally respond as soon as you power them on.
I have a wired smart light switch from TP-Link/Kasa (KS205), and it’s been completely hassle free (and totally local — Matter over wifi). The Kasa smart switch dongles I have work flawlessly but need proprietary pairing, and I’m afraid to update firmware in case they lose local support.
Good luck! Fun adventure :)