• 8 Posts
  • 127 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

help-circle


  • Over the years I have used OSMC for my TV. I have never used it for streaming however always internal across the network streaming of my own content. It worked reasonably well for the most part although I have had issues with Samba in recent versions and have stopped using it. I can’t say much about its streaming, mostly for that you need a supported android or similar device rather than an open source one.



  • I have done this a few times, so long as the drive isn’t mounted it works fine.

    One advantage of this approach compared to clonezilla is you can pipe it through netcat or similar and move it to another machine. You can also first pipe it through gzip as well to save on the transfer bytes a bit as well and then on the other end just store the compressed image or unzip it. Combine a few tools together and you have quite a lot of capability for complete image backups but its usually best done for the boot drives from a live USB.



  • Ideally for your router you want something that runs an open source firmware (OpenWRT, DD-WRT, OPNSense, FreshTomato). Its better because you get a completely unlocked everything you need system with security patches for the hardware’s true lifetime. Every router company stops with the security updates after a few years and then at some point it becomes part of a bot net or one of this mass hack events. Its best not to play in that game and instead run some open source firmware from the outset.

    The best way to start is to look at the website for openwrt.org and use their filtering to find a device that supports your needs (at least 5 LAN ethernet ports I guess and some wifi but AC sounds like it will do). The other option is a more typical 4 LAN port router which will give you a lot more options and then add a switch to that, doesn’t sound like you care too much about it being managed or >1gbps so they are also dirt cheap.


  • You only really get the choice between misinformed or uninformed, there is no option where you can be informed enough on the topics you need to know about.

    While they are right that misinformation in social media is causing a lot of the problem I think misinformation in the press is also driving people to seek information in social media. You can’t have governments and the press repeatedly proven to be lying and have the population accept that version of reality they push. What replaces it is a variety of conspiracy theories, some are just genuine conspiracies but definitely not in the mainstream press. This second aspect the research is consistently ignoring and it matters because its a large part of what is driving people to conspiracy theories. Fake news is not about Trumpnews or theonion its about the mainstream media however much they try to deflect from it.




  • Pretty much all technology goes through the same odd shape of adoption.

    https://www.infusedinnovations.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2020-10-10-at-8.46.48-AM-1.png

    What is often really hard to tell is where you are until your definitely in the trough of Disillusionment. We could be practically very early on the way up and human level or above AI is coming or near the peak of Inflated expectations and its about to crash down before finally finding a use that is less hype and more worthwhile. The regulation will certainly slow things down a bit towards the peak.

    I am not sure whether slightly better chat bots that still lie and image generators that do look reasonably good is the peak or just the beginning. Progress has been dramatic in the past years since invention but the cost of training is now immense and it requires a breakthrough to make big steps of improvement and I am not sure if we are going to make that. A lot of billionaire money riding on it.



  • They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a “factory”. This still doesn’t scale well.

    I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn’t require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can’t help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.

    I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.

    You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn’t last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.




  • It doesn’t really make much sense to go faster than silicon node changes unless there is a lot of optimisation on architecture that needs doing. Historically all these refreshes between nodes were largely pointless with small benefits and preparing them took development effort away from the big changes. It’s progress in silicon that matters and brings the performance improvements and moving to a faster cadence hasn’t historically worked out well.


  • I don’t think modern Raspberry pi’s make much sense unless you are using GPIOs or really need the low power consumption. The 3 and the 4 were OK price wise but the pi 5 is quite close to all these N100 mini computers and they are a lot more performance and expansion compared to a raspberry pi 5 and still quite low power.

    Either a Topton or similar N100 based machine or a mini PC second hand is the way to go at the ~$100 mark. The mini PC will be faster and probably more expandable and cheaper but also more power consumption.



  • Late last year they were talking about $40 for a KWH which compared very favourably to LifePO4 that was more like $130 at the time and Li-ion that was more like $200. However right now on alibaba you can get a 200Ah battery for about $60 and the LifePO4 300Ah are now down in the $50 range which is an incredible drop in the space of 6 months. So in practice they are less dense and more expensive but I think its new technology introduction pricing and at some point it should be about a third cheaper than LifePO4 for the same capacity, all be it a bit bigger and heavier and quite considerably cheaper than Li-ion for the same capacity.

    The small 18650 and other small sized cells have started appearing on aliexpress as well so its possible to get those too butt they are a lot more expensive than a basic Li-ion 18650 at the moment for a lot less capacity. I think its mostly the bigger cells that most people interested in Sodium Ion will be wanting (home battery and grid storage solutions and some of the low/mid range cars) more than small cells since typically the smaller stuff you want to maximise capacity even if it costs a bit more and most will want li-ion and ideally the newer nearly solid state li-ion that doubles capacity per KG.



  • These early days of processors I was constantly upgrading between the companies. A Pentium to K6 to a PIII celeron to a Duron and then an Athlon XP and then a Pentium HT before finally the stable era arrived with the Core 2 duo and all the subsequent CPUs largely being small incremental upgrades at more or less the same clockspeed peak and lots of the performance coming from more cores. There was a lot of back and forth in price/performance and absolute performance as various innovations and pipline length increases and clockspeed were release. Things changed drastically in the 8 years we went from 100Mhz Pentiums through to the Core 2 Duos where both companies lead and trailed and you needed to upgrade your machine most years to keep up with modern games.