Ugh, yeah. My “temporary” spinners that were an emergency upgrade became permanent when I went to buy the new ones and prices had skyrocketed. I’ve got one cold spare left, so hopefully there’s a price break in the near-ish future

I feel that.

Before I downsized, I was running 3x HP DL360 G6’s with dual Xenons and 96 GB RAM each. Way overkill for my needs but I got them cheap. Unfortunately, they and my air conditioner competed to see who could use the most electricity each month. 😆

The only thing I really lost in the scale down was the ability to spin up dev/test VMs for every little purpose. I’ve mostly just started using Docker containers for things like build environments.

Their Intel graphics work great for transcoding, but yeah, not much else. I’ve got Emby one one of them, and the QuickSync hardware acceleration works well even with multiple simultaneous streams.

Works pretty great as long as you keep your expectations realistic. Easy to upgrade and pretty reliable. Only annoying thing with any of those micro PCs is the cable management is a pain because of the power bricks. I got some USB-C PD adapters and Dell-style cables and that’s made a huge improvement.

About 220W on average with peaks around 280W. I’ve got 8 Optiplex micro PCs, 5 upcycled thin clients running smaller services, fiber ONT, another micro Optiplex as a router, a storage server, main switch, and a 5 port PoE switch for my 4 access points around the house.

Before I downsized everything to the USFF PCs, I was running 3 old enterprise rack servers that were about 220W each.

It’s currently running from solar from about 7am to 4pm with my small solar setup, but I’m in the process of installing a whole house PV system so hopefully will be 24/7 solar powered soon-ish.

Funny you mention them because Cher and T-Pain were the two people I had in mind when I mentioned “few people use it well”. They both used it intentionally for a specific sound (not sure how much Cher used it beyond “Believe”, but that was the song of hers I had in mind). Under the autotune was intent for it to sound that way. I’m unfamiliar with Charli XCX but will assume it’s the same case.

Yeah, you definitely can’t autotune anyone and make a hit but people will try anyway. That’s basically how I feel about people AI-slopping all their emails to me (most of my day is spent emailing back and forth). The few people who use it well are the ones who are normally overly verbose and use it to trim the fat. One of them says what they have to say but also includes a short summary of their key points which I can somewhat grudgingly appreciate.

makes sense they’d update it right after I got mine

That’s how my life works too haha.

And also why I’m so hesitant to settle for a body style I dislike (seriously, crossovers: be a sedan, be an SUV, or be a station wagon; trying to be all 3 is just failing at everything…but I digress lol). As soon as I settle and buy one, I just know they’ll bring back sedans.

Kobalt pretty much mainly has blue livery here, too. I thought it was a Stanley when I first spotted it, so I guess they’re diversifying.

Everyone likes to crap on Harbor Freight tools, but for casual work they last me at least 8-10 years in most cases. Considering they cost 1/3 or 1/2 the price of bigger brands, I’m fine with that. It’s not like any tool you can by these days, especially power tools, are heirloom quality like the tools our dads or grandpas used.

This one seems to hold its place pretty well, but there’s also a lock switch if you need it to really stay put.

Either (voluntarily) 50 years after Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by the upper class who has since moved to Mars or (involuntary) 50 years before that.

Yeah, I’ve been watching that. It is supposed to start fulfilling orders this year (last I read anyway), but it’ll be at least next year before I can probably look into one. And even then, I’d want to let some other/braver people test them out for reliability and repair-ability.

leat just hasn’t been updated in 10 years

I thought I read the Leaf got a fairly big update recently. I’ll have to check on that when I have some time.

Features look nice. I guess I’m just gonna have to get over my “crossover” hate and buy a car that looks like a low-top roller skate lol. Was hoping the industry would have moved on from that unfortunate design by now.

Yeah. Gas [pedal] is used here in the same way the “save” icon is still a floppy disk.

I’m with you in spirit, but I’ve been wanting to go PV+battery for far longer than the AI plague has been a thing. I’d like to be able to afford both of those. Otherwise, we’d be adding them to the list of unobtaniums along with SSD, memory, and GPUs.

“I ate mop who” sounds like “I ate muh (my) poo”

You did it the installs yourself or through contractors?

Fully DIY unless I reach a point where I think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I haven’t started moving circuits from the main panel yet, but I’m confident I can do that and meet code. I may call in an electrician when it comes time to convert the old main panel into just a main breaker and wire its output to the PV inverters, but that’s mostly just to make sure that part is safe and up to code.

How many years do you reckon it takes for that scale of solar to pay for itself

Not fully sure. I’ve got about $7,000 invested so far just in components and materials plus probably another $1,000 or so on the horizon for another 4 panels, wiring, and other accessories. The two 16 KWh batteries are the largest expense ($2600/each) since grid-tie isn’t an option for me. Electric rate is currently $0.26/KWh and rising, so this is mostly a way to insulate myself from further rate increases as well as provide backup power (I re-allocated the money I was saving for a whole house generator to the batteries for this).

Very, very rough math estimates at current rates, break even is just over 8.4 years. That’s $8,000 cost divided by $0.26/KWh divided by 10 KWh per day (5 hours @ 2 KW) divided by 365 days in a year. That break even time could be reduced by adding more panels (already planning to) and/or electric rates rising more (they sure aren’t going down anytime soon/ever).

My utility power isn’t on the chopping block (yet?) but skyrocketing rates have finally pushed me to install a real PV system.

Currently sitting on 2.4 KW of PV and 32 KWh of battery storage. Still in the process of installing as the specific mounts I need have been out of stock, but should have those hopefully by June and can finally begin the install in earnest. Once I have the mounts, I’m going to get a few more panels and will have about 3.5 KW of PV on the roof. Would like to do more, but that’s all the south-facing roof real estate I have to work with. Planning on a ground mount setup for another 3 KW or so but need to get the base system going first.

I’m tempted to go ahead and buy some more battery capacity because I have a sinking feeling the demand (and price/availability) for those is going to increase dramatically in the next few years.

I’ve been told that government auctions canbe a good source for cheap used PCs

Can confirm government surplus auctions or sales are a great source for cheap PCs and that they do get snatched up quickly (guilty!) The only other catch is they never come with hard or solid state drives. I’m assuming those just get pulled and destroyed.