Behind in specs? Depends on which specs I guess — but CPU/GPU performance is AFAIK pretty great? https://www.tomsguide.com/features/iphone-15-pro-benchmarks

Features, yeah, depends on what you’re looking for. AFAIK iPhones are the only mainstream phone to offer satellite texting though.

I have both an iPhone (work) and an android (personal), and they both…kinda just work 🤷

Not a lawyer; would this likely stand up in court? Obviously I wouldn’t risk it were I the dev, but just curious.

It’s pathetic that I’ll happily recommend my Emporia Vue2 energy monitor to folks running HA — not because it works out of the box, but because the company is aware of the community integration projects and seems ok with it, even if they don’t actually support it. (ESPHome Firmware flash gives you local control — It’s been pretty great!)

I’m fortunate enough to not be in a position where money is tight for food, but re: beans and rice, I absolutely love my instant pot!

Mexican-style beans are, IMHO, delicious, easy to make, and dirt cheap. I love them, our toddler loves them, and it’s easy on the wallet. Dry beans are really affordable, and a 25lb bag of rice is great to have in the pantry (note: careful with bulk brown rice as I think it can go rancid). A stove and a pot can do both, but an instant pot and a rice cooker makes it so easy.

I also drink a fair amount of coffee, but again, bulk or even just “make coffee at home” is very affordable. A few cups at Starbucks costs the same as a pound of beans (which yields many cups).

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-israel-hamas-strike-planning-bbe07b25

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/world/middleeast/hamas-iran-israel-attack.html

Not sure if that’s the type of source parent was referencing. My understanding of the consensus among certain groups is that the point of this conflict, from Iran’s perspective, is to make it unappealing for Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel — which may be exactly what they’re getting, e.g.: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/14/saudi-arabia-puts-israel-deal-on-ice-amid-war-engages-with-iran-report

Is power consumption a consideration? I want my self hosted server on 24/7, so a low-power single board is much more economical for me.

Also, are resources a problem? If your game is maxing out your rig and some batch job on a self hosted service starts, that could be annoying — or it could be a non-issue, just depends on your usage both as a desktop and a server.

It’s at a much, much larger scale** than that — our local group is collapsing in on itself, and it’s ~10M lightyears in diameter.

** talking about length scales only makes sense in reference to the specifics — two bananas separated by 10M lightyears, with no other matter nearby, would (I’m guessing) be expanded away, but a cluster of galaxies will not.

Is the dotfile overhead of a DE substantially more than any other program? Is there a particular conflict that you’re thinking of?

For a multiuser system it can be great to have multiple DEs or WMs.

I think the advice should be taken to heart here — you’re dealing with a userspace problem but you’re trying to get the kernel to make it all better.

You’ve already mentioned the two big things, compressed RAM and swap; optimizing userspace (or paying for more RAM) may be the only option at some point.

If you want to get creative, is there a reason you can’t use a local computer for some of these services? An old raspberry pi or similar could potentially run some of your services. You could run some containers on your home server and call it a day. Quick search turned up this https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/routing-docker-host-and-container-traffic-through-wireguard

I’ve been eyeing an Orange Pi 5+ for my RPi4 upgrade — think I may stick with that route, but glad to see RPi putting out another model.

My experience with RPis over the years was that the multimedia was way better supported than alternatives, but for self hosting that’s not really relevant for me (headless, and don’t really care about transcoding).

I’m guessing that’s because you’re using software decode? If you use HW decode it runs wonderfully in my experience. I could play raw 1080p h264 or VC1 Blu-ray rips over the network just fine**. You have to pay for VC1 and MPEG2 IIRC — otherwise it will try to play in software which is no good. This was an rpi3 with Kodi on Raspbian.

Interestingly I believe they removed MPEG2 and VC1 HW support in the 4, so those files play better on a 3 than a 4. But if your media is in h264 and you use a supported player it should work great on a 4.

** I think NFS worked best, and of course over Ethernet. Maybe http also worked (iirc samba would stutter occasionally).

More like “a buffering shit,” amirite?

Remember: elections have consequences.

Also remember that — as much as disaffected and/or malicious actors (or Simpsons and South Park, for that matter) will claim otherwise — the two major political parties in the US are not the same.

In this case presumably the MTB weighs more, which helps on downhills.

I think there’s a whole literature out there on rolling resistance as it relates to tire size and pressure as a function of road quality — for really nice pavement/velodrome, skinny tires at high pressure win, but for rougher surfaces (e.g., chipseal or less than perfect pavement) lower pressures can be advantageous.

RTGs aren’t radioactive-specific, they are just a solid state way of turning a temperature difference into electricity. The better way to do this (at scale) is e.g. a steam engine, which is what big power plants do.

Yes, I don’t think RTGs are really what you’re asking about. It’s just a solid state way of turning heat into energy instead of using steam.

Lot of comments about RTGs, but I don’t think that’s what OP is asking. RTGs convert heat to electricity, same as a conventional power plants — they just do it in a solid state way instead of steam. In RTGs it doesn’t matter where the heat comes from; they are not really analogous to solar cells, as the title asks.

In fact, there are consumer products that use the same technology — you can buy a little electric fan that sits on top of a wood stove and, once up to temp, will start spinning. The electricity is generated by the thermal gradient using heat from the stove, essentially the same as an RTG.

One practical thing I like about Linux is that you can control the GUI/window manager independently of the rest of the system. So I can use i3wm, a tiling window manager, and my interface to the computer will be the same — I can upgrade my computer, I can install a new distro, whatever, and I’ll always have the UI I want.

I grew up collecting mushrooms (US), but definitely restricted to only a few varieties which basically couldn’t be confused with anything deadly (some lookalikes maybe, but gastrointestinal distress — not death — would probably be the worst case). And yep, learned by going on mushroom hunting walks through the woods with local old timers who knew what was what.

I have a similar vintage Air, 4GB. I run Debian+i3, though that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Machine feels quick, except for bloated websites.

ETA: In case you’re not familiar, i3wm is a lightweight, tiling window manager that is very keyboard-driven. I love it, and you might too! But it takes a little getting used to and definitely isn’t a Windows-esque experience.

So long as the stream that the pi is receiving can be decoded in HW you’re fine. But if you’re streaming e.g. a raw VC1 Blu-ray rip, I think things will work much better on a pi 3 than 4 (though you still need to purchase the codec license for HW decode on a 3).

But yeah, if the server is transcoding to HEVC or h264 in real time (or again, the source material is already in that format), then the 4 should be good.