In the good old days a decade or so ago where the full fat Pi board was always 35 dollars and the zero was just 5, they were so cheap as to be practically disposable. I have an insane number of Pi 3/4 and Zero/ZeroW boards in projects and drawers around the house, but this has massively tapered off as prices have gone up. At one point I had an 8 pi 3 cluster to learn kubernetes/container orchestration techniques on - completely unnecessary, but building the little rack was 85% of the fun. That cluster ran my home stack for years (DNS, home automation, network admin UI etc).
I've since got a lot more interested in the microcontroller community - so many Pi projects should really be microcontroller projects - the esp32 especially scratches the itch for cheap things to hack on, and you can get them for like 6-7 bucks each with wifi.
Yeah I've been using an ESP32-C6 for the latest wifi connected project I'm working on. The RP2040 and RP2350 look interesting too, I have a couple of them but haven't really done much with them.
I really wish the company would talk more about the post-Gabe transition, or at least begin to give us a rough indication of where the company plans to go.
Those of us who have been customers over 20 years often have a pretty significant investment in Steam content, and Gabe is getting old.
No company will ever do that. Even if they did, no one on the planet should expect it to play out as described. The whole anti-DRM position is based on the fact promises aren't worth a damn thing.
Publicly announced succession plans happen fairly regularly, especially for a company as stable as Valve. Tim Cook is 65 and just did so for Apple. The announcement of Ternus was hardly a bolt from the blue, either. Gabe is 63, and there is little to no indications.
Ignoring how many counter examples of this there are, why wouldn't Gaben do this given that he's majority owner of the company? He can do whatever he wants.
Almost everyone I know with an EV charging at home just reused the 240v dryer socket to avoid paying for a dedicated fast charger. It's often cheaper too to have an electrician fit a new 240v socket instead of the dedicated charger as well.
Home chargers with dedicated sockets is three phase 400v actually over here in the EU and every single home, and even relatively new apartments have that because of induction stoves.
Three phase power is definitely not 100% in the EU. Not even in Germany, though adoption does tend to be higher than neighboring countries.
And FWIW, I find that my induction cooktop works wonderfully on plain old 240V 40A, so I do not think it is a requirement to get three-phase for that ;-).
At some stage I wonder if the UK will need to regulate the charger industry. The price gouging is wild in places. If we look at the energy content of petrol, a litre of gas contains about 9kwh of energy, or at average pump prices 1.58/9 = ~18 pence a kwh.
For sure, EVs are far more efficient at converting a kwh of energy into forward motion, but if we assume 35 mpg (9.25 miles/litre) for the gas car, we need about 970wh to travel 1 mile. A modern EV can manage a mile on ~260wh, almost a quarter of the gas requirement.
There are public charging networks in the UK averaging 92p/kwh - we know we need much less energy to move the more efficient EV, but even with this adjustment fuel cost per mile looks like:
petrol at UK average today: 17p/mi
Electric at very expensive public charger: ~24p/mi !!
At many chargers, there are no savings at all. For comparisons sake, that 92p kwh would be just 28.6p on the most expensive domestic electricity supply, and charging at home would be ~8p per mile on the worst possible tariffs.
I've probably done some bad math somewhere here, but I think the broad picture is correct.
The market should sort this out by itself, not saying regulators shouldn’t watch closely, but competition should be enough to do its thing. Cartel formation especially should be watched for vigilantly.
Of course, thats why I've been clear all my assumptions are for 260wh/mi, which I think is a very fair middle ground figure to compare to a 35mpg car - one can pick far more fuel efficient gas cars for this comparison too, the possibilities are endless.
I think your numbers still illustrate the same point though; if you can't charge at home, an EV is not necessarily cheaper to fuel, and the gap between the public charger price and the cost to a private consumer with home charging is still far too big. 98p vs 15p is staggering.
This explanation for the soldered in SSD on some models has never fully made sense, because Apple make computers with removable fast SSDs right now: the M4 Mac Mini, and their range topping Mac Studios.
I absolutely agree Apple typically ship a fast SSD in their computers. I am not convinced they had to solder them to achieve the performance.
Just in case - I'm always amazed how many Docker users don't know about the prune command for cleaning up the caches and deleting unused container images and just slowly let their docker image cache eat their disk.
Prune is nice, but if you have a bunch of containers which run shirt time for a build step or similar prune would collect those, too. A filter "last used a few months ago" would be useful.
This is how I self host all my home services (Home Assistant, PFSense, Frigate etc), I do not for the life of me understand why so many folks doing self-hosted services for themselves put them on the public internet.
Caddy will even do fully automated valid TLS certificates for private IP ranges via DNS ACME challenge for free etc with renewals handled, so all my internal self-hosted sites have properly terminated TLS too, accessible by connected VPN clients.
It's funny that for many of us in our day job, we stand up private services behind a VPN all the time so only work clients can access it, but when self hosting don't bother with a simple wireguard/tailscale config etc.
A lot of people using docker or even k8s don‘t know that by default, a service is available to all other services via the service name defined in the compose file or your yaml specs. Docker compose builds an implicit bridge network. Most internet tutorials are wrong here and bing ports publicly to your ipv4 interface. So if you follow them you‘ll accidentally expose your database or similar to the public web
At this stage the volume/persistence configuration for all of the major DBs is arguably extremely well understood and has been for years. The only real risk in running the DB as a container for most people is not configuring volumes for persistence correctly.
For most DBs it's one or two paths in the container, and virtually all DBs vendors have a reference Docker Compose example somewhere showing volume config. I can't remember the last time I ever "natively" installed a DB personally!
Do you prefer self hosting DB with container OR using a managed service liek RDS ? I guess both can work depending on your level of comfort and even though I am a big self host guy, db hosting is something that makes me nervous and I end up just leaving it to RDS etc.
The answer to this for me anyway depends entirely on the size of the solution, what the rest of the stack looks like, how many users, what is my support contract like etc etc, do I have to collaborate with other engineers or is it just me? Similarly, if you already have a bunch of ops guys managing some RDS stuff, it might make sense to just take advantage. RDS also comes with a ton of features a simple compose stack won't, especially around redundancy and disaster recovery.
I don't think there's a good one size fits all answer to whether hosting in Compose or RDS is right for you or a given project.
Right, the first two steps are what make AirDrop, "AirDrop". This isn't an alternative at all if it requires both devices to already be connected to the same WiFi.
AirDrop is fantastic for sharing files with people you don't know/just met - if we have to find and agree to join the same wifi before we interact we are no longer talking about the same feature.
If Apple's AirDrop implementation had required people to join the same WiFi first, the feature would never have taken off the way it has among non-techy users. I'm still today mildly surprised I can use AirDrop as a verb in conversation and most of the time the other party knows what I mean.
I've since got a lot more interested in the microcontroller community - so many Pi projects should really be microcontroller projects - the esp32 especially scratches the itch for cheap things to hack on, and you can get them for like 6-7 bucks each with wifi.
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