It is really powerful per watt, and has a built-in UPS. Any homelab type things you could do with that? macOS+homebrew will give you a nice *NIX feel, very familiar if you’re a Linux user.
I’m a fan of having a remote homelab computer+disk for off-site storage. This would be a good candidate in that it wouldn’t use excessive power at a friend/family’s place, but may be overkill (I use a pi3 for that).
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
— Richard P. Feynman
I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.
At least, that’s my perspective.
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Hobby 1: Ballroom dancing
No I’m pretty sure Strictly Ballroom is a completely accurate portrayal of ballroom dancing.
Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.
I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).
Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).
Maybe there’s some interplay between amd64 and x64 architectures.
AMD64 and x64 are the same thing. Do you mean AMD64 and x86? There is definitely interplay there, as AMD64 implements the x86-32 instruction set.
Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.
I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.
Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.
I think some commercial TVs might do what you want.
In grad school I picked up a an old free HP LaserJet, with an Ethernet NIC card (it was an upgradable printer, maybe from the mid 2000s?).
It was great! Only complaint was no duplexer, but the thing printed great from Linux and the generic toner was cheap.
Today though…the experience is a bit different.
You discounted space dust.
No I didn’t — it would thermalize and radiate.
This is not my paradox, and it’s not really a paradox at all, as the big bang model explains it nicely. There are many nice articles on the topic of you’d like to read more about it.
Yes. But why is there an absence of light?
If there are infinite stars, then every direction you look would encounter a star. (Things stay the same brightness per subtended angle as they get far away. Space dust doesn’t matter, as it would thermalize and radiate.)
So, the universe can’t have infinite luminous matter, be static and ageless, because if it were then the night sky would look like the surface of a sun.
This may all seem obvious, but it’s neat that you can figure that out with the naked eye.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers's_paradox
Olbers’s paradox, also known as the dark night paradox or Olbers and Cheseaux’s paradox, is an argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe.
The night sky being dark has some profound cosmological implications.
Widely regarded as the best Seinfeld episode is The Contest. It’s about who can go the longest without masturbating, but what makes it great is that they never say that explicitly — it’s just euphemisms and insinuation. And it’s hilarious IMHO.
I believe they initially wanted to spell it out, but the networks wouldn’t let them (I could be wrong). Definitely for the better that they danced around the topic the way they did.
(Yes I know, Jerry Seinfeld is a problematic person, I’m just trying to answer the question…)
To each their own though? I can’t imagine why anyone would want something other than i3 (or similar), because almost by definition the DE is not the program I fired up my computer to interact with, and i3 “gets out of the way better” than most others in my experience.
But…that’s just my use case. It’s a horrible UX for most people, just happens to work well for me.
I feel old…when I was learning how to run Linux I started with an old 386 (maybe 486?) my dad wasn’t using. I think it had 32MB RAM, which was fancy for those machines.
We had dial up at the time, so only one machine could be on the Internet. So, I set up a modem on the x86, plugged into an Ethernet hub (switch?), and learned enough ipchains (this was before iptables) to share a connection. It also ran Samba, an AFP server, and probably FTP and HTTP (just for local access) — but it worked for filesharing.
It could also run MP3 streaming software which amused me because the machine itself was too slow to decode MP3 (but that’s not necessary to stream).
You mentioned ham radio — definitely fun! It’s a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF (“walkie talkie”-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power (“QRP”) it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup…
There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.
Good luck!
D’oh, I’m a doofus — it’s search that I was thinking of (apt-cache search, not apt-get search).
Bonus points: use non-qwerty keyboard for added obfuscation (but keep the qwerty key caps of course).