Sleeping is something I haven’t think of, but it’s a really great way of saving power! Thanks for your input, I’d definitely replicate your approach! (When it comes to scale a bit.)

Is it that high power server takes a few seconds to boot? What’s the hardware you have there? I’m curious that’s the average boot time for an average high power server? I do use heavily obsolete devices for my personal servers (think of DDR-2 era devices with Intel Atom or sometimes core 2 duo devices) usually without even SSDs. With an SSD, my desktop devices (all DDR-3 era with SATA-3 disks) boot within 20…30 seconds, which is good enough for me. I assume the more modern devices would be quicker, but [single-digit, I assume] seconds sounds very good. To me, that sounds like it’s a no-brainer to have this feature. I was thinking whether I can wait minutes for something I need occasionally to boot. Seconds is just too fast. I think that delay is tolerable even for a commercial / production server, where the expectations are just different.

Oh wow, that’s really cool! I do use Caddy too.

Is it that your service/website is on both (low powered server and high powered one) or is it only on the high powered? So, it’s like

• the lower powered server knows it needs help (sounds a bit surreal to me, but perhaps it’s doable)
• or the lower powered server does not serve anything, but wakes up the high powered when the thing is accessed?

I guess that’s the 2nd thing, but it’s very cool indeed! That way you can really have very convenient things for free, as it’s super cheap to run any hardware for a very while on demand. I don’t mind waiting a minute or even two when I need to access something very infrequently and don’t want to run my server 24/7. I do exactly that, but I wake up it via LAN manually.

More likely your system is more sophisticated, I have just joined the hobby, so to say. But I am sure you can go much cheaper than that with bare metal. If I’d really need to host something, I’d rather buy a real server, and invest in solar power instead of paying some rent. Was a happy Digital Ocean customer, before I realised I can do the same with a Raspberry Pi. I was buying a couple of Pis a year for them. Right now, de-facto one Pi can host everything I really need. I regret I wasted about half a thousand on nothing. Could have bought a great NUC instead of wasting money on the cheapest VM for years.

I realised I don’t need my servers being online 24/7, so for me that’s Raspberry Pi and equivalents, plus powering on computers on demand.

I love how they censored the title on the orange site, to have no price in it.

Pedohitler is a nice word, gonna steal it.

What do you mean? I have no idea what to search for. I’d appreciate some links, or some unfolded explanation. Can you patent features? Sounds a bit absurd.

Can I patent booting the OS from a USB drive? That’s a feature, isn’t it?

Well, I do understand the difference between the UI and UX, but I have no idea what they are implying. I asked that question precisely because I have no idea what to search for.

The difference between UI and UX is simple. The UI is just the interface: it’s how the app, service, anything, interacts with its user. The experience is … well, the experience of it. E.g. Gimp is awful at UI, but the UX is not that bad, because if you’d get some basic ideas, it’s quite useful, even despite its ugly UI. Sometimes it’s not that easy to distinguish one from another, that’s why the two are usually combined. Interface can be pretty, and most people would call it good, but the experience of using it could be just terrible. Also, experience is what transfers from your experience, so, for a graphics editor, it’s expected that it would follow some de-facto conventions, even if they’re pretty stupid. Once you’d delve into it, it gets difficult to separate, but if we’d simplify, I’d call a UI is just how it looks, and the UX is how it works. At least that’s how I see it. If there’s someone who can explain these better, I’d appreciate to be corrected.

Can you elaborate on this? The first time I hear there are patents regarding some intuitive interface. What is that?

Even if so, why not replicate the best of all similar apps, Affinity and Pixelmator too.

Well, as I stated in a sibling comment, Gimp did replace Photoshop for me. I’m a semi pro user for two decades. My only issue is with its UX, but PhotoGIMP helps a great deal here.

I was like the other commenters in the thread, but I grew up on even somewhat liking Gimp (yet with PhotoGIMP plugin). It’s good enough for me, and in some places it’s even better. All I want from it is to have a bit better UX here and there, but that’s not too critical.

What a surprise!

Thanks. It’s still much more work than I’d like can afford to have at the moment, so I’d stay with what I have for a while. But I have an obsolete Intel Atom machine as a server at work. It’s my personal web and file server, plus Syncthing node. The sysadmin thinks that’s for our website to work. (It’s not used for that at the moment.) I can emulate some for-work things if/when needed, but at this point nobody cares.

Nobody else, including the boss is aware. But I don’t do anything sketchy there. Just a separate offsite node, plus they have some decent power backup system. We did have massive blackouts in winter (I live in Ukraine), and not a single time the server went offline! Bonus thing, they have a static IP.

I’m hesitant to move to something bigger there though, as the future of me with the company is not very clear. I can get a higher position at some point and also replace the sysadmin (he plans to retire at some point). If so, I may move the entire company to completely self-hosted everything. And add a couple of servers to myself. But if not, I don’t know. Perhaps I could use that server till it would die its natural death, even if I’d part with the company. I’d still visit them sometimes.

I wonder whether that’s much better than a cheap VPS. Power wise, I guess it’s the same, it’s really underpowered, two cores, a gigabyte or two of ram, nothing fancy at all.

I tried, but I don’t understand how to bypass a cgnat. With Tailscale it just works. Also, I tried Netbird, it’s very similar, and it works well too. I’d love to simplify this, but I have no knowledge at the moment. Would love someone pointing into the right direction.

Hey, how’s your Surface with Linux? I wonder whether there is any model that can sleep properly without issues. So that you can have it lying around and pick it up when needed. Mine cannot sleep properly. So I turn it off and on when needed. Not super useful, but tolerable for a secondary device you can have in your backpack, not worrying much about it. (Coz it’s cheap on a second hand market, specifically my very model.)

Hey, I have no experience with the accessibility side of this, so I cannot tell. At least now. If I’d explore the topic, I might recommend something at some later point.

I have a MacBook Air 11” from 2010, with a broken screen. I plan to utilise it as a server, but it’s not really good in that department. I do that purely because of the experiment, plus I have it lying around anyway, so why not. If you want, I can link a blog post about the laptop, when I’d write it. (May not be very soon, say, weeks. If no months. No ETA. I played with it for a while and put it off for later.)

The time capsule, is it a router? I have an AirPort Extreme router at home, I still use it. It’s a decent router, if you don’t need anything too special. I have no idea how good that is accessibility wise. I believe Apple products are the best at it, so I’d rather recommend macOS, I have no idea how bad that is with Linux. I remember the relatively recent series of posts about it, I bet you know them better.

It looks much better than I have. My current infrastructure is built upon a set of mostly obsolete devices: Intel Atom 230 and 330 used processors. Also, SBCs: a few Raspberry Pi 2Bs, and a few Orange Pi Zeros (the very first gen, 32-bit). They are spread among different locations (office, relatives, home), and if I’d get a side gig job with the next company, I may deploy a couple of used computers for them too. So there’s not much to picture, but it looks much worse than this.

Also, is it a Surface on the left? I almost sure it is! I’ve bought 3RT (obsolete slow model) two weeks ago. It’s piece of shit hardware, but the concept of a Linux tablet / laptop for cheap (I buy used) is beautiful, so I’m considering getting one more modern model at some later point. I guess when my battery would be in a poor condition. It’s a great device for sshing, at the very least.

I have no proof for this except my memories. Perhaps we could find some links somewhere, but that would change nothing: it doesn’t work today. My guess that maybe it was different for different markets / locations. As I clearly remember a friend learned about Pi-Hole and bought an SBC just to deploy Pi-Hole. I’d been having it censoring the ads for my entire family, till it stopped doing that at some point. I still have that Pi-Hole deployed by the way, it continues blocking trackers and other shitty things online.

I wonder why browser extensions still work, while network-wide ad blocker does not.

Well, I remember it actually stopping YouTube ads, 2018 or 2019 was when it changed. Or even 2020, won’t recall.