I love this community, I used to rant about efficiency all the the time on reddits self hosting community and everyone thought I was insane. If the damn thing is going to run 24/7 for 5+ years then put a little thought into its power usage!

I personally love old Dell optiplex micros on eBay. Cheap, plentiful laptop hardware in a cute little box which allows modest upgrades. My primary server in a full sized case is just a laptop CPU, Ryzen 5600g. It brings me joy that my network has four servers and still is under 75w idle for everything including networking gear.

My wife won’t leave the house without several water containers as it she is crossing the god damn Sahara. We live in the North East, its not even dry! I always ask her how she survied childhood without stupid fancy bottles that are marketed. Fortunately she is patient with my crap and loves me…

No gpio but old centrino laptops make excellent low power servers. My primary server was a first gen centrino from 2011 up until recently and I think it only used 12w idle after putting a SSD in there. Had it’s own UPS built in.

I was being dramatic, sorry, yes, this!

You would be the bad guy if you make him return it. Personally I would have a talk with your son about how unusual the act is and how his act could be used as leverage over him, nothing is free. Teach him healthy skepticism. Also call back those parents and tell them to fuck off, completly unacceptable they bought something connected and important for your son without checking with you first. They dont know your house or rules…

Edit: the phone isn’t on friends family plan, right?

I migrated from WordPress to Grav and love it. If you know markdown Grav is easy, efficient and FAST.

I host my own cloud and various other services for myself and whole family. Any 404 resolves to a rickroll and I’m never mad, often letting it play fully.

33% have severely deficient IQ

I went a little crazy and setup my own wireguard VPN network, all the remote hosts connect to the VPN and the primary server connects to each of them and pushes backups. Because I use btrfs and lots of snapshots I use btrbk, annoying to setup but now my hourly snapshots get pushed everywhere, minimal bandwidth and it flawlessly has worked for years.

I do this except the offline copies are raspberry pis, they grab an update then turn their network card off and go black for about a month. Randomly they turn on the network card, pull a fresh copy and go black again. Safe from randomware and automatic.

I have a trailer (workshop) with solar power, batteries, a raspberry pi controlling everything and a cellular hot spot. It pumps all the solar, battery information and light controls over MQTT and home assistant over cellular. So yes its possible, what do you want to do?

I’m not a doctor and a dude, just speaking from personal experiences and shared stories, but are you on birth control? Birth control pills made my wife emotionally unstable when she was PMSing and finally she had enough and stopped taking them. It was a night and day difference and she hasn’t taken them since. Just food for thought.

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This comment hits hard. There are a lot of ignorant people in my life that spout idiotic stuff and I brush it off, I disengage. I could take the time to listen, converse and correct but I don’t. I disengage, I brush it off as just “Oh boy, there goes crazy Joe rambling again! But generally he’s a good guy so I’ll tolerate it”. I need to start taking the time to push back and correct people I care about so they understand people are judging them when stupid things are said. Thank you!

Shit I thought I was so damn novel. Blast you.

I’ve owned and deployed a lot of pi, every model, and in my experience when I have similar instability as you described its related to the sdcard. Either the sdcard itself or the tray soldered to the pi. I had one pi that would corrupt the sdcard without fail after 2 months and I played with bending the sdcard metal tray inward a little to help press the card better into the contacts and the problem went away. Try fiddling with the sdcard holder or different sdcards.

You won’t miss him. You’ll miss the idea of who he was

This hits hard with some personal relationships I lost during COVID because they were anti vaccination. Couldn’t be bothered to care how their decisions affect others, that was ‘their problem’.

I host it on the host that runs the script and proxy it. I have one mission critial pi that is my uptime bot, pi hole and backup VPN if my elaborate server falls on its face. But you could easily use docker volumes too, and have the script push to that folder.

Yep, here is the yaml but redacted

- type: entities
            title: Communication
            entities:
              - type: weblink
                name: Webmail
                url: https://postale.io/
                icon: mdi:email
              - type: weblink
                name: Mattermost
                url: https://mm.stuff.com/
                icon: mdi:chat
              - type: weblink
                name: Mumble Server
                url: https://mumble.stuff.com/
                icon: mdi:radio-handheld

Similar, but more fancy, I have a bash script that runs every 15 minutes and ingests a config file. The config file has a super simple CSV format of every service I have. It checks that all the services are operational and generates an HTML file from it. If any services are down the HTML will show its down, otherwise its just a helpful link.