Google.

Depending where you look it may still be. My wife uses hers frequently on the back of her head and neck to help with migraines.

Whether or not I am the cause of those migraines I shall neither confirm or deny.

/rant

I know both candidates and their positions. Don’t particularly like either candidate. Really dislike one of them. And I haven’t seen anyone host an actual, honest to god political debate in my life, and no, the final season of West Wing doesn’t count.

All that being true, why the blazes would I have watched this one? My entire life, debates have only ever been excuses to put the candidates up on a stage see which one looks prettier, and shout sound bites into a microphone. That’s not a debate, that’s a campaign ad. And I’m tired of them.

I would really like our nation to get back to a point where I can feel comfortable voting for the candidate whose policies I actually think are the best instead of having to vote against the candidate that I think will actually destroy the country.

/end-rant

About 6 years ago I somehow (Safety, Maintenance, and Engineering departments never figured out how) managed to get stuck in a robot cage with 4 water jet cutting robots. I have never been more terrified in my life.

One of my coworkers said he had never seen anyone move as fast as when I yanked the safety rip line to kill the machine. Didn’t get hurt, thank god, but found out that adrenaline makes me giddy. Every thing was flipping hilarious for a few hours after they got me out of the cage.

Well, Marshall Mathers in his Slim Shady persona would be interesting. Not sure who I would pair him up with for VP though.

I figure after 4 years of Slim Shady as President, we would either have world peace or the world would be in pieces.

My house is old enough that it doesn’t have neutrals, so I’m kinda limited in what I can install. I’ve been using smart plugs by thirdreality and battery powered buttons. No problems with the smart plugs yet.

THIRDREALITY ZigBee Smart Plug 4 Pack with Real-time Energy Monitoring,15A Outlet, Zigbee Repeater,ETL Certified,ZigBee Hub Required,Work with Home Assistant,Compatible Echo Devices and SmartThings https://a.co/d/05vm2VMC

Me too! Not much to look at but it’s a great player on iOS. On Linux, I like SonixD.

I use Jellyfin. I think in your use case, each user would be setup have their own library. You can enable or disable library on a per user basis as will as a per client basis.

Downside is that the default web interface isn’t great as a music player. It does the job but it’s not great.
Other hand, multiple music-first clients exist for a lot of different platforms. Odds are good you can find a client that suits how you listen to music.

Edit: said collection when I meant library.

It’s doable. Stick to the 7b models and it should work for the most part, but don’t expect anything remotely approaching what might be called reasonable performance. It’s going to be slow. But it can work.

To get a somewhat usable experience you kinda need an Nvidia graphics card or an AI accelerator.

Piss poor polling accuracy over the last several elections has me questioning the premise of this article.

Not that I’m aware of.

The only time I heard anyone talking about it was on the podcast Self-Hosted . Supposedly it’s a NUC clone with performance similar to a then current (2023) mid range laptop and draws about the same amount of power. I think they said the N100 processor had Intel QuickSync for hardware transcoding.

Sure, but “better” is massively subjective. For me, when I set up a pi, I’m not usually making use of the GPIO or the camera inputs. I’m generally throwing together a headless server. To do that, in addition to the board itself, I need storage, power, heat sinks, an fan and usually some sort of case.

Using the prices at CanaKit as a rough guide, you can come up with this search on Ebay.

The first entry I saw drew my attention. It’s a 7th gen i5 with 16GB RAM and a 120 GB SSD. Not sure the 500 GB HDD would survive shipping, but it’s $100 shipped. Biggest concern is that the seller only has 65 sales. Possible scam?

On the higher end of that bracket there is this. 6th gen and only 8GB RAM, but the seller does have a history.

With the prices on the Pi5 your potentially getting into the price range where it might make sense to look at the Beelinks mini PCs, based around a 12th gen Intel.

Like I said, prices right now are at a spot where I can’t just say throw a Raspberry Pi at the problem. They are great boards but for someone self-hosting their own services they don’t necessarily always make sense anymore.

If you mean for ARM based systems (not just SBCs), I would agree, but the software and support ecosystems for amd64 systems far surpasses even the rPi ecosystem because you have backwards compatibility with a lot of the legacy x86-64 and x86 code. And because they support UEFI, distributions don’t need to explicitly support your particular version of your ARM processor so you can run pretty much whatever OS you want.

Not long ago I saw a one of those old small Dell Optiplex workstations with a 4th gen i3, 8GB ram and a 256GB SSD on Amazon for $100 USD. There’s a new BeeLink with an N100, 16 GB RAM, and 500 GB SSD for $200. They’d both be great for any home lab project that doesn’t need the GPIO of the rPi. And they are both in the same price range.

Don’t get me wrong, if I needed to kitbash a desktop or small server together in a hurry, I would probably be using a Pi3 or Pi4 because I’ve 6 of them collecting dust from when my self hosted services outgrew their available compute. I replaced them with a keyboard damaged laptop with a 6th gen i5 and my old desktop with a 4th gen i5. But if I needed to buy something today, I’d be doing some price comparisons first.

If you like Pi’s, use them. They are great kit. But if price or (more recently) power consumption are your primary consideration, it’s no longer as simple a choice as it was pre-pandemic. It’s worth looking around now.

Of course, none of this applies if you need the GPIO. But then you’re looking for project boards, not desktop or home server systems. Different set of criteria. And a different set of head aches.

Been able to use rPis as a desktop for a while now. The 2s and 3s weren’t particularly pleasant but it was doable. The Pi 4 8GB with an USB3 jump drive as root partition was a lot more pleasant, at least until you hit thermal throttle.

Right now though, there are more powerful options in the same price point, once you account for power, storage and optionally, a case. At least for desktop and home server use.

The Raspberry Pi’s just aren’t the go to hardware for the home lab anymore. Probably won’t be again unless the price comes back down on the Pi’s or the price on new and used amd64’s goes back up.

I didn’t use early generation smart phones and was completely bewildered when I discovered apps often used swiping left/right to interact. No app I had used before ever indicated that was an option. I suggested we should add indicators to our app to teach people but that was rejected because “everyone knows that”. It’s easy when you know how.

Oh it’s even worse when you did have experience with early smartphones. I’ve used Windows CE phones, Blackberrys, PalmOS phones, early Androids, and since 2015, iOS. None of them did things the same way, but all navigated using clickable objects on the screen. I was shocked when I had accidentally stumbled upon gestures. In 2017.

I’m still discovering new gestures, usually by accident. It’s becoming more intuitive, but only because I now know that it might be an option.

Hard drives can fail. A strong magnetic field could scramble the data on the platters. HDD’s are pretty reliable usually though. Biggest concern with external HDDs would be fall damage.

I would say to check random files from time to time and you should be fine. Every 2 or 3 years, replace your backup drive. A backup program like Borg could help detect if you have a problem with your files, but you lose a bit of the simplicity of your current rsync method.

Anything your truly worried about should follow the 3,2,1 standard. Minimum 3 copies, on 2 separate media types, with 1 copy offsite. That said your current setup is already better than 95% of the general population and probably 70% of the Fedi.

Last time I needed to do this was 2006ish. Like I said it’s been a while. Worth checking into though. Might need the cd burner installed (or emulated) for the option to be available.

I also seem to recall that thee were a couple of projects attempting to strip the DRM off of Apple’s proprietary music format. Not sure how those turned out.

And no, as far as I know, it is not possible to go straight from Apple Music to mp3, or whatever format you prefer. It has to be downloaded to iTunes first.

Not sure if it is still possible, but the work flow for this used to be to use iTunes to burn the tracks or album to a CD and then rip the newly created CD to a format of your choice.

If you don’t have a CD burner, I seem to remember it was possible to emulate a cd burner on Windows and create an iso instead. I don’t remember how I did that though. I was running XP back then and that was a long time ago.

Edit: adding link to iTunes software

@Sinfaen@beehaw.org

Digging into it further it looks like modern phone technology has become incompatible with fax and modem technologies. Seems to be something to do with how voice over IP (VOIP) compresses the voice line which damages any digital signal sent over it. It looks like this affects both cell phones and modern landlines as well.

The only real options in 2024 seem to be to use a fax service, or to purchase a landline that explicitly supports fax and use a fax machine or a computer with a modem to send the fax. A fax service would probably be cheaper for a one off fax. Thanks again for the rabbit hole. That was interesting!

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/can-i-hook-up-a-fax-machine-to-my-iphone.485116/

https://superuser.com/questions/748154/use-a-smartphone-as-a-dial-up-modem#748163

Well that’s a tech I haven’t heard of in a while. I suppose it tracks that if telegrams were still in use till 2006 that fax’s would still be in use today.

To help answer your question, a cursory search turned this up:

https://www.howtogeek.com/218505/how-to-fax-a-document-from-your-smartphone/

https://www.getfaxing.com/2016/05/02/can-i-use-my-mobile-cell-phone-as-a-fax-modem-to-send-a-fax/

Honestly, it should be possible to send faxes from your cell phone for free though. Or from a laptop using your cellphone’s voice line. It’s a phone after all and fax machines sent their data over phone lines. I seem to remember using my cell phone for dial up internet back in the day, so it should have been possible to send faxes at that time as well. Unless there is an OS limitation, I can’t see any reason why that might have changed, even with the changes in tech since then. Hell of a rabbit hole you’ve found for me! Thanks!