71–80 of 261 posts
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>unlicensed electrical work Are you from the US? The overwhelming likely fixes to "my bathroom light won't work" are not work that would require skilled electrical work or a permit. The cost is also not likely to be more than a floor lamp, and the tenant can also keep the fixture when they leave. Also many jurisdictions (willing to bet covering a huge plurality of Americans) would let you subtract the cost of necessa…
I'm glad you've only ever worked with pleasant landlords who don't have dangerous electrical work in their apartments, but this is not my experience
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They're all fairly new. "Mini PC NAS" seems to be the magic Google words. One example is the "Beelink ME mini", which has 6 m.2 slots.
What are people doing with 6 M2 slots?
Or make it a 5x1 parity for a smidge of redundancy.
Counterpoints: - Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc) - can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstal…
I'm thinking of a beefy mini-PC + USB-C 8+ hard drive enclosure. I feel like I rarely upgraded anything except GPU and storage. And GPU's are not needed for a server. Enclosure means easy storage upgrade and I can always reattach the enclosure to another machine quickly. Might even install OS on the enclosure, then the whole setup will survive compute upgrades until the predominant architecture changes.
Unfortunately a lot of the mini-PCs skimp on USB ports. AMD's FL1 form-factor mobile "socket" has 4x 10Gbps + 1x 40Gbps USB-C ports on the SoC, but many of the designs often only have ~2x usb3 class ports and rarely the USB4 port at all. I'd really appreciate these mini-PC's exposing more of the chip's usb! Definitely something to shop for.
With USB4, there's also the added benefit of having host-to-host interfaces: it's short range but 40Gbps host-to-host is real nice to have (in practice it's often half or less this speed alas).
Upgradability is over-rated, when costs are low. A Minisforum 795S7 can be had for $400, and has dual ("only" PCIe 4.0) SSD slots and a 16-core 7945HX Zen4. It's mobile-on-desktop (MoDT): I can't ever replace the CPU, but I suspect this crazy cheap system is going to have a long long life before I feel the need to upgrade it. Replacing it whole when the time comes seems not a concern. RAM and SSD are separate and can be moved out if desired.
Counterpoints: - Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc) - can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstal…
> So you mean to tell me you’ve been using your torch to take a shit this last week because your light bulbs don’t work without the PC you watch Netflix on? This made me laugh. I’ve currently got a home assistant controlled floor standing light in my bathroom because all the old school switch ones in ceiling are dead and landlord is being well a classic landlord
What does a "dead light" mean in this context? Your landlord isn't changing your bulbs? I've mostly lived in 100+ year old homes with old janky wiring and have never had a light fixture die, just bulbs.
I would like to have a light in my stairs. It's hard to see at night in the winter. My solutions is going to be to spin up home assistant, a zigbee base, and some fairy lights on a 'smart' switch.
I could learn the skills to troubleshoot why the electrical connection is (apparently) bad to the lamp, but given that said connection is in the walls, my DIY skills are trash, and I'm scared of electricity, I'm gonna do the project that's more fun and lines up with some stuff I wanted to do anyway.
I have no idea why the lamp doesn't work, especially because the fixture at the base of the stairs does, but the landlord insists it worked before we moved in.
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You are conflating naive and a barely functional human being. If someone doesn't know what the electricity zaps and couldn't think two steps ahead then they definitely should be anywhere near a power circuits, operating a car or be allowed to vote. EDIT: of course it should had been 'shouldn't be anywhere' but it's even better, so I leave it as is.
you've just excluded at least half of america from voting, however smart you think most people are... the reality is significantly worse
If so, this may be the first time an important political question has been resolved without a light bulb turning on (figurative or otherwise).
MiniPC must either charge from USB-C or have an internal PSU. Those external power bricks are so annoying when you start adding more PCs to the cluster.
Another option is getting a dedicated power supply. Mean Well makes a HEP-600-20, with 560W of 20V power. You can power quite a cluster off that! It sucks that they don't take 24v: there's so many 24v power supplies, but 19/20V is quite rare!
I have quite handful of hard drives in toaster-style carriers: having a single high efficiency rugged 12V power supply felt better than dealing with a sea of questionable-efficiecy power bricks.
These look like fun technology, but I don’t even know what the use cases would be anymore. I don’t need something to control my lights: I have an actual light switch for that. I don’t have endless terabytes of media that I need to serve within my household, so I just don’t know anymore what I would use this stuff for. Twenty or thirty years ago, I loved having a home lab, but these days I’m just not sure what I would…
If one wasn't likely to have a rack of desktop PCs at home, one probably will be hard pressed to have a reason for a collection of mini PCs.
On the other hand, there are a few more use cases than just over-egging a light switch or being a big file server. One can replaced dedicated hardware such as network gateways/routers, and do self-hosting, for examples.
There are RaspberryPi systems that one can get with extra Ethernet ports that can be set up to do application gatewaying and routing with general-purpose operating systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, and such. And obviously filtering HTTP/other proxies incorporating spam/advertising/malware blockers are a well-known use case.
There are oddball mini PCs in some parts of the world with loads of serial ports, useful as terminal hosts if one has a lot of systems with no disploy/HIDs. (I saw one mentioned on the FediVerse the other day. It turned out that it was an old Russian point-of-sale system, with 6 serial ports.) More of a use case for someone who already has lots of PCs (with serial ports), of course.
But yes, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone is Kitboga with a server farm in xyr garage running speech synthesis engines and language models to call scammers. (-:
On the gripping hand, I swapped out someone's under-the-desk tower for a mini PC years ago simply for space reasons.