I've been told that government auctions canbe a good source for cheap used PCs
Can confirm government surplus auctions or sales are a great source for cheap PCs and that they do get snatched up quickly (guilty!) The only other catch is they never come with hard or solid state drives. I'm assuming those just get pulled and destroyed.
I just use the webapp UI and don't bother with the clients/extensions. Easy enough to just log in, copy/paste from there.
But yeah, the official client (and probably browser extension as well) would probably be forked if/when needed.
Thanks, and yeah, it's been fun putting that all together. Unfortunately I'm still learning FreeCAD so they're not as integrated as I'd like yet, but as soon as I have time to hammer out a design, I hope to have all 3 of these and the UPS/power supply in a nice case.
Yep, running/charging it from solar is why I ended up getting that chonky 18650-based UPS board. It's the only one I could find that could combine 5V input and battery without dropping out (battery kicks in immediately if solar insufficient and draws the difference between input and output and charges and powers simultaneously otherwise).
Thanks!
What are the use cases for taking it with you instead of just connecting to your homelab?
I built it just to see how much I could cram onto a Pi Zero clone/how many self-hosted services I could have on something I can fit on my keychain, and the answer was "a lot". It's something of a travel server, travel router, emergency backup server, etc.
I mainly just wanted a subset of my homelab services available in something I could take with me anywhere. Home lab could go down while away, power could go out, something to use while glamping, can take it with me if there's ever an emergency where I have to evacuate, etc.
What started out as a single unit has become a three unit portable stack lol. Yay feature creep!
I've got a second unit that connects as a client to the main one with some additional backup services:
The second one is basically a backup to my main stack in case of disaster/power outage/etc. Those all tunnel to a cloud VPS + load balancer and only need an internet connection to setup the tunnels to receive traffic from the VPS (and route back out to it). Those services are stopped and a cron task keeps them in sync with the main ones in my homelab. If I need to fail over, I just SSH into the VPS and re-route traffic to them instead of my homelab endpoints.
I self-host my own email and chat and phone services, so those have become critical services I want to always have online. Essentially these little Pi clones are a backup stack for my most used services and one that is both extremely low power and portable should I ever need to host them on the go (house burns down, have to evacuate due to emergency, etc).
I have a third unit that's built on a PiZero2W but it's still on the workbench (but functional!). Just haven't gotten any kind of case at all built for it.
It's got two RTL-SDR units attached. One is tuned to the NOAA weather radio station and feeds into Snapserver on the main unit (so you can listen to the weather radio anywhere on the network) as well as piped into Meshtastic EAS-SANE alerter in order to forward emergency alerts to Meshtastic. There's a USB-connected Meshtastic node attached as well for that.
The second RTL-SDR is setup as a generic FM radio tuned to the local variety station. It's just piped to Snapserver on the main unit to make it available on the network.
I may convert the second SDR into a ADS-B listener, but for now, I like having the FM radio available.
Photo
I still don't have a "full" case for it, but here is the core unit attached to a UPS circuit which gives it up to about 14 hours of runtime. I'm also planning to add a small USB hub with ethernet into that, but I'm still learning FreeCAD so I'm not quite ready to put it all together yet. The USB power cord is wrapped in aluminum foil and electrical tape due to RF from the Wifi adapter causing random glitches. I need to add some ferrite beads and route them away from that when I build it into an integrated case. For now it looks janky but works lol.
Main Unit:
Secondary Unit: This is an older photo and is also connected to my Bose radio acting as a Snapcast client to the server on the main unit.
I run Jellyfin on a Banana Pi M4 Zero. It's a little less capable than the Pi4 but runs JF just fine. Specs on this one are quad core 1.5 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC on Armbian.
The media files are all on the 1 TB SD card while the Jellyfin data directory (especially the SQLite DB) are on the eMMC. This seems to work much better as the DB file kept getting corrupted on SD. Should also help the SD card from wearing out since it's pretty much only reading data from it most of the time.
As you guessed, transcoding is not going to work (JF is removing the v4l2 hardware support anyway), so I pre-transcode them to H264 + yuv420p in an mp4 container before moving them to the SD card. I also scale them down to 720p to fit more on there, but that's because this is a travel server and isn't my main media source.
Can't speak for Paperless though.
I guess uncle jokes are ok in the comments (I hope anyway)?
Who is the sluttiest Spice Girl?
Ho Spice
If I was going to fall off the wagon after 2 years, I hope to gods it would be with something better than Bud Light.
Mine's only for people I know personally, so it's backed by my LDAP server and registration is disabled in Synapse. I use my regular onboarding process to create the new LDAP user and grant access to Synapse.
I just want more games to let you quit to desktop from the game without having to first "Quit to main menu -> Are you sure? (yes!) -> Loading screen + main menu animation -> Quit to Desktop -> Are you sure? (Yes, i'm goddamned sure!)"
I understand where OOP is coming from re: social media screenshots as memes but I'll still have a bit of fun meme-ing the dilemma. No hard feelings, OOP, and I agree with you.
In before anyone assumes I'm making a blanket statement: Not all podcasters are crackpots, but all crackpots seem to have a podcast.
"I ate mop who" sounds like "I ate muh (my) poo"