251–260 of 261 posts
I ended up going with a more expensive mini-PC style vendor, but I was surprised there didn't seem to be a ton of competitors.
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You're trusting that someone will follow the law about one receptacle, but expecting them to not follow the law about another nearby receptacle?
gfci will do you the courtesy of flipping instead of killing you
When house shopping, I have found non-GFCI outlets where code said they should be GFCI. A homeowner got a crappy electrician, and you think all landlords will get the best electricians that follow code?
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> in the United Kingdom Don't forget to earth all your water pipes to ground, and only use sockets that are water-rated to resist biblical floods. I remember being intrigued by a big 40 x 40 cm plastic box on the outside wall of the cabin we were staying at in the UK. Opening the movable front-flap revealed 1 (one) 220V power socket, protected on all sides with enough rubber and plastic to seal a submarine hatch. I h…
You are thinking of section 250.104 of NFPA 70, the National Electrical Code published by the U.S.A. National Fire Protection Association. (-: BS 7671 (IEE Wiring Regs) does not require bonding of the pipework if the mains (service) pipes and the internal (installation) piping are both plastic.
what are some hardware people would recommend (specifically looking for power efficiency)?
I find the idea of a pc being "cheap and replaceable" a negative. PCs take a lot of resources to make. We shouldn't encourage throw away culture any more than is necessary. Just my opinion, though.
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 bought a cheap Beelink mini pc to tinker around with. It didn't take long before something went wrong. It still technically works, but I can't simply reboot it anymore. I have to unplug the power, let it sit for 10-20 seconds, plug it back in and then boot. It's too annoying, so it's basically trash at this point. I tried a new PS, but that didn't help. I assume there is a bad capacitor in there or something. I've…
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Sometimes size matters, tho. I came into MiniPCs from a Raspberry Pi solution. Our Pi's had to display multiple videos onscreen and weren't fast enough (I think the standard at the time was RP4), so we switched the critical ones to MiniPCs but they had to be small & light enough to hang off the back of a VESA mount on a TV suspended above a gym floor.
I've found the Pi video decoder chips pretty weak, but still usable. I've got a Pi 2 displaying a 4x720p stream perfectly fine. Would struggle with anything more.
It makes sense since the cost of computing has come down, but it's funny to see the cyclical nature of it all. The web was run on beefy SPARC and NeXT workstations until Google came along and sharded it out onto cheap off-the-shelf hardware. Then containerization/virtualization started replicating individual machines as VMs to try to give you root-access control on timeshared hardware. Now computing is cheap, and the…
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N100/n97/n150 are all perfect (about the same perf). 6-10w idle (similar to rasp pi) but 4-10x more perf.
Just to adjust the numbers a little, the Pi idles at 2-4W (for similar RAM spec), and the N100/150 are only about 2-4x more performant (with a slight bit less efficiency), for most tasks, in real-world benchmarks. (Not saying they're not a good value, but you'd have to cherry pick a few benchmarks to say there's 4-10x performance.)
At the wall? I measured mine and it was higher with gpu disabled.
Real world benchmarks/usage is going to be dominated by sd card speed vs m2 perf. That’s why upgrading system is so much slower on pi vs n100…