bluGill

China was a really backward country 50 years ago. I expect that China has paved a lot of roads which are still in good shape. Europe by contrast has had paved roads for a long time and those older roads via normal wear and tear are wearing out. The question then becomes when do you patch, recover, or replace - this is in order of both cost and how nice the road is after. Give China a few more decades and their roads will become less smooth because it isn’t worth the cost to make them perfect.

If you don’t have a sensor then that is cheaper in the short term, but it quickly wastes a lot of energy running when the humidity is under control. For a dehumidifier you need more energy to get lower so the room well generally will be fairly consistent not too low humidity even as outside humidity changes, but you will use a lot more energy than a system that turns off when humidity is good.

there are purely mechanical systems that used to be used. However they have some weird machining requirements so it isn’t clear they are cheaper than a digital system (this partially depends on volume - make more and the machining gets cheaper per unit). The digital system is as we already have established is very cheap and lets you put buttons and LEDs on the unit for a few cents more - this is far more valuable to marketing than the possible savings (if any!) from a mechanical control.

Almost no cars, trucks, or tractors are steam based anymore. I believe most ships are ICE as well, not to mention rockets, and animal/muscle power. As such I’d need a very deep analysis of the situation to believe any claim. (deep because in an ICE a large part of the power comes from burning fuel producing steam, so we can start debating how much of an ICE is steam - have fun).

In any case my local electric utility generated more power from wind than all customers used last year, so I can make a good claim most of my power isn’t from steam. If your utility isn’t in the same situations or close you should be demanding they get with the times.

America is not a capitalist society. It is a clasical liberal society. The core concept is you can work for whatever you want and thus obtain it.

Chicago is known as a democrat stronghold. The republicans don’t have power to fight anything there.

Your safe following distance on gravel at 50mph is more than that. 3 seconds is your minimum following distances on normal surfaces (used to be 2, advice has changed), you should have a 4 second following distance on gravel. https://www.drive-safely.net/safe-following-distance/

Versital perhaps but overrated since there are plenty of other chemical mixtures out there and a different one is usually better.

The code allows for a disconnect switch near the oven instead. I’ve never seen this in residential applications though.

You should know that wd is for water displacement. If you are trying to do anything else there is a better chemical you should use instead.

How small? I bought a N100 system from Protectli which I’m happy with. It should work better than a pi according to the specs - but I never tried a pi so I can’t say if it really is. However this is bigger than a pi. I have an old system76 Meerkat, which is much smaller (I think this is the NUC form factor?), but my system is 8 years old and so not really comparable to anything modern, but that is an option.

Depends on what is inside, intel N100 or better CPUS are considered really good in general. There are some bad CPUs in mini-PCs though. Make sure the hardware has drivers for your choosen OS, not everything supports linux [well] even today. And every once in a while someone makes a PC with bad design and so it doesn’t work well for technical reasons.

There are a lot of small PCs that are low power that will work well. I haven’t used GMKTech’s, and one look at their website says I won’t try to navigate that mess. (why does everyone need a subscribe to our newsletter popup blocking my ability to see anything - I avoid anyone who abuses me like that)

Validating restore is one of the harder things. There are some people who restore means it works on the exact same hardware - commonly hardware vendors will change internal details without changing model numbers so this plan often fails when it turns out the computer restore to is slightly different and so you don’t have the right driver on your backup (My dad used to repair computers for people who did this - he often charged thousands of dollars to fix a 10-30 year old machine that a new PC could run circles around. IIRC most of the machines were HPUX and not PCs so the cost of porting to a new machine was ). Most people figure they will be replacing the computer with something newer and so instead install the latest OS and then restore just files, now you face the question of do you restore applications or not?

I would test restore on a cheap raspberry-pi, assuming the backup is from x86, or on a cheap ebay x86 if the backup is from ARM. For most self hosted people this is really what they want to know can be done because they don’t know what the replacement hardware will be. The goal here isn’t a usable system, it is enough that you can show your files still exist.

Well for sure that is better than nothing, so since you have it keep doing it until/unless you have something better.

Your next task is to make sure you can restore the data. Since the data is - probably - saved, you have good odds. Practice restoring means that when a computer breaks you will faster be able to get the replacement running again. Practice also means in the off chance something isn’t saved you find out about it while your old computer is still running.

Then we need to think about threats.

Ransomware that encrypts your disk will encrypt that shared drive too. I don’t know what unraid offers, but you should enable read-only snapshots (now practice restoring them!), and save those snapshots. Ideally you want some pattern like all backups for a week, then 1 backup a week for a month, then 1 backup a month for a year, and 1 backup a year for the next 7 years. This way you can just go back to before the ransomware and restore from backups.

You might delete one file on accident. You are likely not to realize it for a while. One more reason for the pattern saved above. Make sure you can restore individual files.

Your house might burn down destroying all computers. You want a copy of all that data someplace else, maybe more than one someplace elses. Though perhaps you only want a yearly and weekly copy. If the data is encrypted (very good idea for off site!) make sure the key is saved someplace else secure where you can find it - a key you can remember is a bad key so thought about how to save the key is important.

You might die or become mentally disabled with important files that your heirs need. Pictures, wills, tax/bank data (including passwords!). document the above well enough that someone else can at least figure it out. Ideally you would know someone unrelated to you into computers and leave them a lot of money ($5000?) to figure out your system and get your heirs the important files after you die. (this should be a great business opportunity, but odds are not enough people will pay for it)

There are a lot of variations I didn’t think of, but I think I covered enough to start you out. You get to decide how far you go. I’m not far enough myself, but at least I have one backup in my RAID.

One last thought - you might have some data you don’t want backed up. If you delete the evidence of your crime but the backups are there they can get you. Your secret porn collection might be legal, but still not something you want your heirs to find out about, maybe keep it in a different way? Your call here.

It isn’t hard to make a drone. I have confidence that I could do it, and I’ve never tried. They are available off the shelf, and nobody will bat an eye if that becomes my hobby - just keep a few around and ready to fly with cameras and post photos of my various outings and I look just like any of dozens of other people I know who have drones.

I would need a place to test my first attempts, but it isn’t hard to find a farmer’s field in winter where nobody will see what I’m doing. Which is to say I couldn’t stage such an attack today, but I could next year.

I don’t want to donate to Mozilla, I want to donate to Firefox. I can donate to Mozilla, but little if any money would go to firefox, instead it goes to various causes unrelated to web browsers.

Code allows painting the white conductor black which is what i do. Or at least it did 10 years ago when I last checked.

Running more than one outlet on a 220 circute is generally against us codes. It will work but don’t do it.

I have a phev with only 30 miles of range - ofen I get home with a nearly dead battery and need to leave again soon - I want faster charging. I’m sure someone with 200 miles of range can be fine on 110 volt slow charging as there likely enough time over a week that it works.

Jellyfin is on his nas which we assume has more power.

I’ve known more than one person who found a completely different career and never went back. You might take a job in Real Estate as one person I know did and discover you like it better and so all that time in school was a waste now that you know you don’t want to do that. Or maybe not - you might take that job to make ends meet (as I once had to take a non-tech job) and decide you hate enough that you don’t want to go back.

I’ve been hearing that line for more than 20 years. Anytime there is a tech downturn you hear it loudly - this has happened several times since 2000. However the fact remains that most coders make far more money than most people in construction. The exceptions tend to be people who own their construction business - though if you do the paperwork construction is one of the easiest businesses to work for yourself in once you have skills.