grahamsz

Yeah that’s exactly what i do. I have an A record that points to my house and i update it every 4 hours from a script on my router. Been really happy with cloudflare, they have a weird restriction about using your own nameservers, but as long as you are happy with theirs then they seem to be great.

I was thinking about hooking one up to a GPS module to run a local NTP server

https://blog.networkprofile.org/gps-backed-local-ntp-server/

Also the argument we should be having in the US is whether we reach our climate goals through this kind of carbon-pricing model or the top-down regulatory model. In a sane world we'd probably expect republicans to be arguing for a carbon trading scheme and the democrats to be arguing for regulation.

They certainly should work at the power level. My utility is ~36% renewable in their power mix right now, but I pay for 100% and that extra money causes them to go out and buy extra renewables for the remaining 64% of my power. I'm not under any illusion that on a cold, still winter night that my power isn't coming from coal base load - but I have high confidence that they really are buying that extra power, and that in turn creates more demand for solar generation.

My employer does something similar, we buy the RECs from something like a third of the output of a local solar farm (under contract) and then also buy dirty power from the utility. That should ultimately wash out.

Though what I can't figure out is how that solar power is actually accounted for when it hits the grid. It's been severed from the renewable energy credits (that we bought) so presumably it must not count as a non-carbon power source when it enters the grid, but I can't find a category for "non-green solar power" on any of the utility reports. Anyone know where it goes?

That's right in the range for subfloor heating, obviously a question of whether or not you can get it somewhere that you need it

I suppose that's very true. But it could be done - if a data center needs megawatts of cooling and is in an area where buildings need to be heated in the winter, then there should be a legal obligation to not just dump that heat.

There's probably some alternate uses for the heat if these things were well designed. There's some building in denver that is near a major sewer and in the winter they use a heat exchanger to extract that energy and use it to heat the building.

I’ve seen it done in data center environments where there are two connections to two different switches - so you can do maintenance on either switch without downtime.

Same reason for having dual power feeds to each machine.

It certainly opens a can of worms though, I can see the democrats pushing for 16 (Scotland’s done the same and it’s further pushed the conservatives out of power there).

It’ll also be far easier to fight the GOP proposal in court as there will be people who are actively disenfranchised by raising the age, but it’s not clear that existing voters could have standing to sue if we enfranchise younger people.

I run a wireguard service on my Unifi Edgerouter and it works pretty well for that situations. I can also (in theory) send WOL packets from home assistant but i’ve never tried.

Yeah I’ve wrestled with that too - I justify it to myself that they are so much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft but they are certainly not a small operation.

I also appreciate their participation in WinterCG and the dream of having interoperable runtime environments for serverless platforms. While I don’t think it’s quite there yet, I think it’s a force for good to have a medium-sized player trying to push the interoperability that Amazon obviously isn’t big on.

I have a .ms domain registered with nic.ms but I point the domain name servers at cloudflare and i can manage it in CF with all their features. I do have to pay for it elsewhere but that’s a minor inconvenience.

One benefit of using Cloudflare DNS is that you can place a CDN on the domain apex. So if you’d like to have https://domain.com instead of https://www.domain.com then they can make that happen.

Cloudflare will do DNS for domain suffixes that they don’t support. I’ve never used Porkbun but as long as you can set custom nameservers then you can point it at CF and use all the tools they support.

I’m in Colorado and pay $49.95 for 1000/1000 (though i’m grandfathered in and i think it’s $69.95 for new users). There’s another ISP that offers the same at $70, or i can get 1200/35 cable for about $60.

I can get 2500/2500 for $149 and 10000/10000 for $249 (from my municipal provider) or I can get 6000/6000 for $300 (from the cable provider).

Round here it’s all government run. The city runs power, water, sewer, phone, internet, trash/recycle/compost.

We’ve got the second fastest internet in the country (and it’s free for low income people), our power gets an American Public Power Diamond rating for reliability, we’re (mostly) on track for being 100% renewable power by 2030, the city captures and liquifies the methane from the sewage treatment process and uses it to run the garbage trucks (that say “Powered by You” on them) and our rates for all of that are cheaper than commercial providers.

Amazingly we still run into people who live here, know all that and still believe that the government is incapable of running anything well… it’s kind of startling.

Still, that makes a bit more sense for why you have a generator and that then pretty much requires you have a UPS - so i get it.

Totally agree. I think the lack of mixed zoning is fucking weird about this country. When I lived in edinburgh I was upstairs from a bar and an indian restaurant - but where I live now it’s almost a mile to get to any kind of retail or dining.

I was also reminded in a recent story about revitalizing downtowns that lots of asian cities have all kinds of stuff inside high-rise buildings. Like you’d got a noodle restaurant that was on the third floor of a random building in hong kong. But the US seems to practically require that they be entirely office space.

Yeah that seems kinda crazy to me too. I’ve lived in my current house for 8 years and the only time the power has gone out was when a vehicle crashed into one of the distribution boxes by the road. Our power and internet come from the same provider so it was a double whammy for several hours.

But I suppose it depends where you are - i worked at a place that had two independent power feeds from two different cities, massive UPSs to run the datacenter for 10 minutes and then two redundant diesel generators with several months of fuel on site. I still saw that go down twice in my time there.

Sure - but you’ve got to start somewhere. There are a lot of people who aren’t experienced sys admins who are buying raspberry pis or arduinos and they are probably really good candidates for self-hosting some of their services. I was surprised to find my neighbor (who’s a PM with a physical security system company) trying to do something with chatGPT, at first I was a little dismissive because i figured she was just typing prompts into the website, but in reality she was having issues with the python bindings and getting her virtual environments straight. If you can get to that point, you can surely self host stuff.

I run git locally for some of my projects and that was trivial to set up - I think anyone who’s used github would have comparable skills to self host gogs or gitea.

Certainly it’s somewhat expensive, but people spend a lot of cloud hosted services too. I’m sure in my house we’re dropping over $100/month on dropbox, chatgpt, google, adobe and probably a half-dozen smaller ones.

I run a bunch of stuff on Docker on my Synology NAS. It’s not quite plug and play but at it’s best it’s quite within the realm of someone who’s got some computer skills. At it’s worst though it can suck up a lot of time. I enjoy that kind of stuff when it’s not mission critical but I used paid cloud services at work for things that I run for free at home - precisely because I don’t want to be the one dealing with downtime in an emergency situation.