Hi everyone, I’m creating this megathread to help regroup information about Pelosi’s recent visit and the follow-up (currently the PLA is conducting military drills very close to Taiwan)

You’re still totally allowed to make your own threads, this is more for things that do not warrant a thread by themselves.

  • holdengreen@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 years ago

    Nice good that you’re into that. Good price point do you get enough RAM with that? I think I would opt for small SD cards and a big NAS if I had that many SBCs. Yah 10-15W shouldn’t be too bad to hook up. I’m 20 and have a nice little chunk saved that’s sort of on fire rn thanks to crypto imploding but still have a bit left over in my bank to make it through for now. When I was more around your age I got really into 3D printing and that sort of thing. I got a cheap Tevo Tarantula kit and really abused that thing. It was great and I had a Bob’s CNC.

    I was mainly thinking to manage things on our property including water flow for artificial lakes/ponds, irrigation, (cameras, lights, censors, motors), anything that should be intelligent. U know it’s fun to do stuff with LEDs like build arrays and little gadgets. There are a lot of electronics projects you can do these days.

    I thought it would be great to have a programmable module that can interface with those high speed signals for example to build a hardware firewall or create someting that can merge two HDMI 2.0/DP1.4 signals into HDMI 2.1 or whatever you want to do. The point is it’s programmable. Or maybe do some marshaling to convert an HDMI 2.1 signal to send over long range wire for cheap.

    • Arsen6331 ☭@lemmygrad.ml
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      2 years ago

      Good price point do you get enough RAM with that?

      Yes, $35 gets me 2GB of RAM. It used to be 1GB but now the base model is 2. This doesn’t seem like much, but most of these services really don’t use very much RAM. You’re only going to start running into issues if you try to do something like run Kubernetes on them (I know this from experience).

      I think I would opt for small SD cards and a big NAS if I had that many SBCs.

      That would work, but as I said, I have no income yet, so it’s hard to get enough money to buy multiple hard drives and build a machine to use them.

      When I was more around your age I got really into 3D printing and that sort of thing.

      I just recently got a 3D printer and am currently waiting for some things to be delivered that will allow me to upgrade it with auto-leveling.

      I was mainly thinking to manage things on our property including water flow for artificial lakes/ponds, irrigation, (cameras, lights, censors, motors), anything that should be intelligent. U know it’s fun to do stuff with LEDs like build arrays and little gadgets. There are a lot of electronics projects you can do these days.

      Yeah, SBCs and microcontrollers are perfect for this type of stuff. It’s really fun to make things like that. If I was doing that, depending on what exactly I needed the device to do, I’d either use a Raspberry Pi Zero (around $5) or an ESP8266 microcontroller (around $1). If all you need is for it to switch some relays and such when it gets a command, a microcontroller should be more than enough. If it needs to do simple processing, then a Raspberry Pi Zero would work. If it needs to do more complex stuff, then you want a full Raspberry Pi or other SBC that has enough power to do so.

      build a hardware firewall

      Well, that’s funny. I actually made one of these. Unfortunately, the SD card I used was part of a defective batch, so it has already failed (after 3 months), and I haven’t gotten around to reinstalling everything, but it worked really well. What I did is: I used a Rock 3A (The price used to be $37) and installed an M.2 WiFi adapter. Then, I flashed Radxa’s Debian fork to an SD card, booted it, and installed a few programs. First, I installed a script called lnxrouter, which sets up all the required configurations and programs to make a Linux machine into a router. I also installed a VPN. I did this to ensure that only those who connect both to the network of the device AND the VPN could connect to my actual device. This makes it much harder for anyone to actually do anything to my device since they would have access to neither my device nor the internet. The VPN essentially acted like a very secure firewall. I also installed Unbound recursive DNS resolver so I don’t have to use public DNS of some corporation, and Pi-Hole to filter ads. I configured the VPN to point to the Pi-Hole instance, and it worked really well. I could either use an ethernet connection to get to the internet if it existed, or if I’m in a hotel or something with no eithernet, I could use a USB WiFi adapter.

      create someting that can merge two HDMI 2.0/DP1.4 signals into HDMI 2.1 or whatever you want to do. The point is it’s programmable. Or maybe do some marshaling to convert an HDMI 2.1 signal to send over long range wire for cheap.

      That would be cool. I’m not sure how one would go about that, but it is an interesting idea.

      • holdengreen@lemmygrad.ml
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        2 years ago

        I tend to like to overstock on RAM because in my experience it’s easier to deal with a system that has more RAM since it still works even if it’s running slowly. But def not worth it to overkill it if you have a CPU that isn’t strong enough or you know your services don’t need it or are more CPU heavy and there is no reason to pay for it.

        cool do you have good enough internet to self host everything you need to broadcast? I proxy a minecraft server (mc.greenempower.org) and that’s it. Since residential upload is so nerfed I don’t bother with other stuff. That’s why I want to maybe colocate maybe instead of using hostens… best I found was free range cloud and they let you send your pi for $5/month and you get a 100mbps hookup. Oh nevermind they upped it to $10/m. that’s not worth it. You know I would look overseas in a non-failing state.

        I’ll try to do that on whatever device has a couple 1gbps ports or see about using usb as a tether as a network interface… That site says “Price includes 25% tariffs for import into the US from China” very strange. Networking stuff has always spooked me a little.

        I hope you can find some more money. I got my first job when I was 16 and worked for a few months and most of my money about is left over from that. But basically only got that job because my dad worked there and I had something to show for myself when I happened to stop by. No work since then it’s pretty tough but idk where you live. I live in the states.

        Planning to try and get in repair business but I like that with computers you can do so much without having a lot of wealth. Being able to exist on here levels the playing field a little bit I think. And it’s good to be productive like working on code or art and contributing to the commons and other revolutionary efforts.

        • Arsen6331 ☭@lemmygrad.ml
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          2 years ago

          cool do you have good enough internet to self host everything you need to broadcast?

          I get 200 Mbit down, 15 Mbit up. It’s enough for most of what I’m doing. Surprisingly, not much requires lots of bandwidth. I’ve even streamed music fine off of it. I’ve had 10 people on my Minecraft server at a time, even with some of them having to go through a Bedrock -> Java translation layer so that Bedrock players could play on the same server as Java players. None of them complained of lag. I also run a Matrix homeserver off of it, and that works well too.

          That site says “Price includes 25% tariffs for import into the US from China” very strange.

          Yeah, I noticed that. It wasn’t there before, which is likely why I could get it for $37.

          Networking stuff has always spooked me a little.

          It’s really not that bad. I learned about most of it when setting up the networking for my servers and when creating my router setup, which is two routers, running OpenWrt, meshed together in a B.A.T.M.A.N mesh.

          I live in the states.

          Me too. California.

          Planning to try and get in repair business but I like that with computers you can do so much without having a lot of wealth.

          Yeah, computers have allowed me to do a lot. I have been passionate about them since I first laid my hands on one when I was 5 years old. I used my parents’ computer and realized that someone must’ve created the programs I was using, so I tried to find out how one would go about doing that, which started my entire journey with them. Now, I have 13 servers, 21 projects on my Gitea, some of which are relatively popular, like ITD, which is currently the most feature-complete Linux companion for the PineTime smartwatch, and is in the OpenSUSE repos. Computers are a lot of fun.