• he/him

I occasionally write long posts but you should assume I'm talking out of my ass until proved otherwise. I do like writing shit sometimes.  

 

50/50 chance of suit pictures end up here or on the Art Directory account. Good luck.

 

Be 18+ or be gone you kids act fuckin' weird.

 

pfp by wackyanimal


 

I tag all of my posts complaining about stuff #complaining, feel free to muffle that if you'd like a more positive cohost experience.

 


 
Art and suit stuff: @PlumPanAD

 


 
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plumpan
@plumpan

I'm pretty sure at least two other people have made this chost but I'm going to make it too.

If you live in the US, you can get skylake generation quad core office PCs for the same price as a 4GB raspberry pi. When you include the cost of a quality power adapter for it, you start getting into kaby lake or even first gen ryzen systems. Most of these come with 8GB of ram minimum, sometimes 16. They can be upgraded. You can get 1L PCs if size matters, or you can get SFF or Mini Desktop systems if you need expansion. They are way, way cheaper than raspberry pis when you start wanting to attach non USB IO.

They do not have GPIO. They use a lot more electricity. They're not the ideal choice for every situation, and pricing can change a LOT if you live outside of the US. But they are basically scrap on the way to the landfill that can still do a ton of stuff, and do those things for many years to come.


plumpan
@plumpan

If your jobs are small enough, a pi really is the best choice.

I have an old haswell era box running my NAS right now. It's more power efficient for me to run small jobs on an entire Raspberry Pi than it is to run a VM on the NAS box. Pi draws what, 5-6w under load (stock pi 4) but when something asks for CPU time on the NAS box it soaks up an extra 25-30w. It's not as fast, but sometimes that just doesn't matter. The delta for this particular job isn't like "twice as fast", it's like 30-40% tops, maybe less.

If you REALLY want to get into watt pinching I'm sure you could argue the idle power use of the Pi, even though it's doing some other very very low power jobs, vs running it in a VM, but I'm pretty confident that the efficiency delta is big enough to make it worth the job.

The only real problem here is this is an 8GB model I picked up when it was new and the whole system uses maybe 600 megs tops. Oops.

So yeah, 1GB Pi 4, still $35, zip tie it to the cardboard box it shipped in and use the good USB adapter you already have laying around. If it wasn't for the blasted ethernet speeds I could probably get away with a 3b for this.


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in reply to @plumpan's post:

ebay honestly. Craigslist is a cespool of flippers trying to sell them as "FORTNITE GAMING COMPUTERS", and I refuse to touch FB marketplace. SOMETIMES you can find them at thrift stores depending on what you have locally. If you don't have a place that specializes in computers then they're usually as is, hope it boots and make sure someone hasn't walked out with the ram in their pocket kinda deal.

I think most/all goodwills send computers to corporate now. Citation needed on that.

In North Carolina all of the Goodwill computer and technology donations are funneled into one location called The Grid that properly validates them as working, throws out anything beige (unfortunately), and sells them there. I do not know if other states have equivalent programs

i do not have nearly the clout to increase the price of anything on ebay and also it would be a drop in the ocean. there are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of these things that you can get for under a hundred bucks, and in 15 years they will still be stacked to the rafters in ebay seller warehouses. the scale of waste in enterprise computing is literally inconceivable, it is beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend just how many phenomenally good computers are thrown out every single day.

thinkcentre (tiny), optiplex (micro), and elitedesk (mini) are the trifecta as it were. A very loud site editor turned youtuber has a series called "tiny mini micro" doing reviews of them.

But the SFF and mini desktop models are similar priced too, with more expansion and a normal power plug.