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The MiniPC Revolution

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Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#211

Post by NewJazz »

giardini wrote: post #16
Havoc wrote: post #2

> 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

For a small price (probably less than the cost of a "home assistant controlled floor standing lamp") you could buy parts to repair the bathroom lighting? Better yet, pay someone to do it (and maybe show you the hows and the hazards). Then you could be living like a true American. And without risking the "standing lamp" falling into your bathtub!

The bulb could have been $15 and the lamp $10 for a grand total of $25. Good luck having someone come out for that much. Good luck buying tools and parts to do the fix for that much.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#212

Post by skirmish »

kylemaxwell wrote: post #30

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…

> what I would do with it

I set up one to run Frigate [1] to detect motion over my several security cameras and send me notification emails with still images and video clips attached. It works well, and I hate the idea of sending my private videos to the cloud for processing with usual security camera setups.

[1] https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#213

Post by littlecopperpot »

Cheap and replacable. I found this wasteful. You said "I don’t worry about this too much: they are fully solid state machines, running on low power and low-ish temperatures, thus making their rate of degradation much slower than some beefy machine churning 24/7". How coyld this be measured vs just wishful thinking?

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#214

Post by JdeBP »

Havoc wrote: post #143
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>What does a "dead light" mean in this context? I'm in the UK that has more reliance on ring circuits i.e. electrically its a chain of devices. So depending on details one fault can take out all the lights in a room >Your landlord isn't changing your bulbs? They're just taking their time. Normally I'd just replace bulbs myself but this is a bit more complicated cause its hooked into other devices as well and i can't…

Ring mains are parallel, not series. Which means that more than one thing going out is a clue to where the fault is, and an indicator that the job is definitely per the regs one for a qualified electrician. Conversely, only one device going out points the other way. Although IP-rated fittings inside one of the zones is still a qualified electrician job.

But bringing a mains powered non-IP-rated portable substitute into the room in the interim is a truly terrible idea. The regs also specify that there's a minimum distance that stuff should have from baths, sinks, showers, cisterns, and whatnot; and that they should not be reachable at all by a wet human being.

I'll wave this at you:

* https://electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/guidance/safety-around-...

And you in turn wave this at your landlord:

* https://electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/guidance/advice-for-you...

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#215

Post by LtWorf »

kylemaxwell wrote: post #195
LtWorf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How ableist of you :) The thing is that once lights are computer programmed, you can program them. For example I had made a program to stop playing music after I leave home because I hated to put the music off and then walk out, but I also didn't want the music to play all day while I was out.

That's not much of a disability-related use case to insult me about.

You can't imagine a disabled person might have difficulties to get up and reach a light switch?

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#216

Post by dontlaugh »

lostmsu wrote: post #176
dontlaugh wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I considered that, but it doesn't make sense price-wise. You can get the storage bays for very little along with your compute, certainly cheaper than separate hard drive enclosures.

The Aoostar top one actually looks pretty good for what it provides (sus really, $700 for a NAS with 2x2.5G E and 2x10 SFP). But still, the compute options are very limited.

I just ordered the Ryzen 4 bay Aoostar one the other day to replace my HP microserver gen8. We’ll see when it arrives whether it was sus.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#217

Post by pjmlp »

> Cheap and Replaceable

We must be looking into different kinds of MiniPCs, because I don't consider 300 euros cheap, and those models are a joke in specs.

To have something usable it is more like reaching the 500 euros.

Also I don't want replaceable, I want repairable.

Last year I had to throw one away that barely worked, and I am not getting one ever again.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#218

Post by NoPicklez »

MiniPC's are absolutely fantastic and better yet you can often find ex-government machines for cheap, they use hardly any power, take up minimal space and the majority of people are more than enough for your standard server with Proxmox, Unifi, PiHole, Plex etc

I'm not sure how much I agree with "just buy another host", definitely use cases for that but having one machine running everything works very well

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#219

Post by pjmlp »

jsheard wrote: post #49
ibaikov wrote: post #13

I agree and already got two minipcs I selfhost a lot of stuff now. I just now realized it is basically the future Gabe Newell predicted and wanted to make with Steam Machines [1], but he was wrong by targeting gamers and a little too early (perhaps?). Maybe they will succeed precisely because of this revolution. I got soooo tired setting up a gaming system for parties on my projector. There are so many various proble…

Valves big misstep with the Steam Machines was that they expected developers to port their games over to Linux natively, on their own dime. Needless to say that didn't end up happening at any significant scale, so when they resurrected SteamOS they refocused on Windows binary compatibility through Proton instead.

And this will hit them very hard, the day Microsoft decides they had enough of Proton, they are already slowly waking up for it.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#220

Post by pjmlp »

LarMachinarum wrote: post #18

having had quite a bunch of MiniPCs, mostly from reputable brands (Intel NUC series back when Intel had those, then Gigabyte Brix series, then some cheapo china ones), I have moved away from those, because every single one of them (independently of the brand) ended up dying spuriously not long after warranty end and in any case far sooner than any µATX desktop would (in fact I've very rarely had any of the latter die…

I thought to have bought a reputable Gigabyte Brix last year, in the end it travelled two times to support, could only boot from USB regardless of the OS, and eventually with all these travelling around and trying to get the SSD connection to work, it died.

So much for being reputable.

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