True dat! If you’re around Seattle check out RePC.
The magic words for ebay:
off lease thin client lot
love you!
It’s too much power draw for me.
This. Even a cheap alibaba n100 would be way better on Power than pretty much any laptop.
Quick computation for Seattle, powering a typical laptop consuming 20W to run say an IoT server, 24/7 at 14 cents/kwh would cost about $25/year. A Pi 4 would be about 1/10th of that.
If you only need a basic server, laptops are AMAZING.
- Full x86 software support
- On the rare occurrence you need to directly interface with it (as opposed to through a webgui on another machine) you have a built-in keyboard and monitor.
- They have a god-damned built-in UPS
Note that the battery will generally stop working after a long enough time turned on and powered via AC, but otherwise yeah.
That will happen to an actual UPS as well.
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True. The best laptops are the ones that let you set a charge limit in the BIOS.
Would pulling out the battery (if possible) and running the laptop only via AC be a viable way to prevent unnecessary battery wear?
I remember back when I didn’t have a desktop PC yet I had a crusty old ASUS laptop that was basically at death’s door and I specifically remember just running it on AC alone because the battery was… uh… gone
It does not matter if the battery is plugged in or not. Far more important is the state of the battery. All LiPo batteries degrade over time. But they can degrade faster or slower depending on the state they are stored in. They degrade faster when at higher charge levels or when stored in hotter environments or if they go through more charge/discharge cycles. Older battery technology also degraded faster in general, new ones tend to last longer in sub-optimal conditions.
Apart from newer battery technology itself battery monitoring and charging technology has also improved. A lot of modern laptops have smarter charging circuitry that lets them stop charging before the battery is at 100%, sometimes configurable in the bios, sometimes controllable via the OS. This can help a lot to preserve the battery life for longer, especially if you leave it plugged in as it spends less time at 100% charge. Older devices also tended to run hotter for longer periods of time, even when idle. Both of these combined with worst battery technology would lead to batteries degrading quite a lot faster if you left them plugged in all the time - hence where the advice came from (note that removing the battery at 100% charge was also not great for it, better to store lipo batteries at 40-60% charge, but it did still save it from the heat of the device) . But when setup correctly modern devices suffer from this a lot less so it is much less important to remove the battery at all - I doubt you would really notice the difference overall on modern systems.
That depends on the age and quality of the laptop. It’s been a while since some started directly running off the cable when the battery is full.
Huh? If it can be used while it is charging - which is all laptops since forever - then it will run off the adapter while plugged in. Regardless of the battery state. You cannot charge a battery and discharge it at the same time - if it is charging then power must be coming from anything other then the battery. Epically with LiPo batteries which you cannot continue charging after they are full - doing so will cause them to burst into flames. So all LiPo charging circuits will cut off power to the cells once they reach a desired voltage - weather that is considered 100% (aka once it reaches 4.2V) or at a configurable lower amount.
Their comment was indicating that laptop batteries will be damaged if left plugged in constantly. Which is a thing that can happen with some laptops, and most old ones.
My comment was about how some modern laptops when left plugged in, will charge the battery and then start running directly from the wall-power once the battery is full. They bypass the charging once it is indicated to have a “full charge”.
will charge the battery and then start running directly from the wall-power once the battery is full. They bypass the charging once it is indicated to have a “full charge”.
That does not make sense. Batteries cannot be charged and discharged at the same time - they are either charging or discharging or neither. When a device is in use while it is plugged in the device is being run directly from wall power - and anything left if sent to charge the battery. The only devices that don’t do that is ones that power off while the charger is plugged in - which does not include any laptop that I have ever seen, generally just smaller devices.
Modern laptops have smarter controllers that can turn off charging before the battery is full or when other conditions are met. But none are able to draw power from the battery while the battery is being charged - that just does not make any sense.
In my experience rPi was terrible as a local server. The micro SD cards would fail regularly and I just got tired of handling backups and restoring them. I switched to a set up box type tiny PC and it’s stable as rock in comparison. Old laptop would be even better for that, shame I didn’t think about it.
Net boot ftw, no sd card necessary.
Lenovo thinkcentre tiny gang rise up!
I even use it as my daily driver (bumped RAM & storage), running Lemmy & Tenfingers plus all the usual jazz.
I will have to replace my old NAS one day because it’s super old, I’ll probably just chuck some drives into a think centre tower or something… I wonder how long time it will take before the electricity consumption would have made it cheaper to buy one of those increasingly expensive NASes…
Tenfingers needs to work on their SEO; I searched for exactly that and most of the first few results were 10fastfingers, which is exactly what came to my mind when I read your post! Even the first one that seemed to be what you’re referencing was about how to install it, rather than what I was trying to find: what it is.
Sounds like a nifty tool, I’ll have to investigate it. Thanks for introducing me to it.
For anyone who, like me, was unfamiliar but curious: https://www.tenfingers.org/introduction.html
Thank you, yes I (I’m the creator) have ironed out the last large potential known problem (a specific type of mitm attack) and have been a bit overwhelmed by ordinary life lately. I’m working on what you might hint at, a less technical introduction to tenfingers. Basically it works like a decentralised online file system where you give the reading rights (to anyone or a select few) how you see fit. FOSS, encrypted & so on, more info in the above link :-)
BTW don’t hesitate to hit me up if there are any questions!
Cheers
Hello! To be clear, first, this is all subjective. My opinion doesn’t mean much.
However, if you’re inclined to consider my opinion, the intro page was largely fine. Yes, it could be improved, but so could pretty much any intro/about page. I, an amateur, wouldn’t consider that my priority were I in your position.
The problem I had was that you didn’t show up when I searched for the exact name of your project. I have never done SEO so I can’t specifically suggest improvements in that regard … Except that your project name is fairly generic and not really related to the function of the software. Unless you get big, people are going to have trouble finding you. You should go for something more specific or at least unique.
Otherwise, as I said, at a glance your tool looks pretty cool. I wish you luck with it.
But your opinion does count! Thank you again.
This ten+ years project is coming to fruition, and I will have to switch gears away from dorky coding and, as you say, promoting the project. I’m a lousy promoter :-)
The name officially comes from the ten “fingers” holding your data (like when your PC is turned off, (*up to) ten others serve it), and unofficially from the reaction to five eyes (the spy thing Snowden uncovered). Finger in the eye sort of, as it circumvents the spying on people and data.
Time to promote I guess!
I personally hadn’t heard the ten fingers metaphor - it makes sense but I wasn’t familiar. I do know of the five eyes but likely wouldn’t have made the connection.
If you are taking my thoughts into consideration: no matter how meaningful your project name is, it doesn’t matter if it’s not unique. Now that I know what it means, I can appreciate it, but (until it gets big) I still need to look it up. If you called it something like “Avoid the Ten Fingers” or “Ten Fingers Privacy” it would be a lot easier to find (note that I don’t recommend either of those names, but you’re welcome to them if you find them palatable).
I’m thinking of “ungoogleable.” My best example of this used to be the band “The The” but I guess Google cottoned on to this because they’re the first result now.
Anyway, I’ve never done any promoting of any kind. Please do not take my advice as any kind of expertise. Good luck with your promoting!
