tburkhol

Sensors. Especially sensors in your living space where fans or other noise from the proper server would be distracting, or in a tight space - inside your HVAC, for example - where a proper server wouldn't fit.

Media front-end. Most of those SBCs are more than enough to run a kodi or jellyfin frontend, fanless for minimum distraction.

Robot. Low power requirement so it could be mobile; but there are lots of stationary possibilities. GPIO libraries are great for running servos and there's tons of libraries to facilitate.

I can see that. If you just want to hang out in a space, then VR Skyrim definitely has some cool places to hang, but how long are you really going to spend in that Skyrim tavern?

When OP asks whether VR is a long-term option, that's what I think. My favorite 2D games I have 500+ hours, probably a half dozen of them; I can still go back to those, some 10+ year old, and sink another 50+ hours. The only VR game I have more than 50 hours is the mini-golf game that's glorified chat.

For me, VR as an experience has been really amazing. It's a level of immersion that's just indescribably better than anything 2D, but each of those experiences has had limited staying power, which I think is because the physical demands of VR constrain my playtime and focus. I can left-mouse-button all day, but my back gets sore if I stand for three hours. So I can handle beat saber because I treat it like a gym session, but the idea of VR walking 7000 steps to Skyrim's Throat of the World...just no.

It's not going to replace flat screen gaming. It's hard to be in VR for hours, especially when you have to manage battery life, but I've had a headset for a year or two now, and it's still amazing where it's good. I'm better with smooth moving, but I still prefer teleporting, for headache/dizziness.

Tried Skyrim, couldn't make it stick - VR just isn't right for massive open worlds. Halflife Alyx is amazing - it's the right scale for VR, the attention to manipulatable objects is amazing, and some of the puzzles just couldn't be done in 2D. Blade & Sorcery is good, too.

Games I keep going back to are Beat Saber, because I'm old and need something to make me stand up and move, and Mini-golf, which is mostly a focus for hanging out with remote friends.

RAID is more likely to fail than a single disk. You have the chance of single-disk failure, multiplied by the number of disks, plus the chance of controller failure.

RAID 1 and RAID 5 protect against that by sharing data across multiple disks, so you can re-create a failed drive, but failure of the controller may be unrecoverable, depending on availability of new, exact-same controller. With failure of 1 disk in RAID 1, you should be able to use the array 'degraded,' as long as your controller still works. Depending on how the controller works, that disk may or may not be recognizable to another system without the controller.

RAID 1 disks are not just 2 copies of normal disks. Example: I use software RAID 1, and if I take one of the drives to another system, that system recognizes it as a RAID disk and creates a single-disk, degraded RAID array with it. I can mount the array, but if I try to mount the single disk directly, I get filesystem errors.

Yeah, if this is what it takes to get new design nuclear facilities in the US, then I'm counting it a win, but I won't count it either way until the watts come out. Who knows: if they run ok, an actual power company might even try one.

And X-windows. There's a few server tasks that I just find easier with gui, and they feel kind of laggy over 1G. Not to mention an old Windows program running in WINE over Xwin. All kind of things you can do, internally, to eat up bandwidth.

As an old fart, I actively dislike photorealistic graphics in most cases. I'm playing a game, and I kind of want it to look like a game, which generally means more surrealistic - exaggerated contrast, high saturation, low texture - than realistic. I'd rather play where the characters look like caricatures than my next door neighbor. And that doesn't even go into great games with sprite-like graphics.

Enough is enough. You've saturated the art budget, it's time to pay writers more.

University is ok if you're starting at zero and don't even know what's out there. It's for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like 'problem based learning,' and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.

Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn't play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.

I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.

I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for 'eggs', 'yogurt', 'steak', etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven 'recipe of the week' type thing.

You'd need some way to cache that video, though, because it'd take 24 hours to write 8TB at SD card speeds of 80 MB/s.

2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.

I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it's cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.