I think my suggestion would be to use the PC as a dedicated firewall, but you will need at least two ethernet ports for that (one to connect to the ISP router, and the second for internal network). This lets you learn network security and control the traffic that can actually get to your other computers. You could also set up KVM to start running virtual machines here. The idea with a VM is to keep services separate and isolated, so like one VM to manage security cameras, another VM to host a game server, another one to host sonarr/radarr/jellyfin… etc.

When you are able to expand, your second physical machine should be your NAS. Get your storage space started, share it over NFS or samba, and move your backup/security camera/sonarr VMs over to this machine for direct access to the larger storage space. Pay attention to system usage and move your VMs to balance the cpu/memory resources. Eventually you may want to get a third machine dedicated more for hosting the game servers, maybe a web server to view the security camera feeds, or whatever.

You mentioned backing up Wikipedia… Have a look at the Kiwix project, you can already get access to regular backups for a lot of information sites.

Meh there was nothing important about him and no reason for anyone to care. On the other hand, there was another school shooting in Evergreen, Colorado, at nearly the same time, and THAT is what everyone should be focusing on. Of course the cantaloupe in charge still hasn’t said a word about THAT because he couldn’t make that tragedy about himself.

Why does everyone think the term came from Star Wars? I know it was used in steampunk before then, and google suggests it goes back to a 1958 article about robots. Sorry, not trying to be pedantic, just feels like a lot of people give Star Wars unjust credit for things they didn’t actually create.

Don’t forget that managers think the same thing – if it’s free then it is somehow an inferior product but if you pay for something then that automatically makes it better. This applies forward as well… the more they pay for something, the “better” it must be.

For example… Cybertruck.

From my perspective, open-source products are greatly superior because you have the entire community of users and engineers working on a known issue, rather than a few paid engineers who may not even use the product. Even more importantly, the community will solve problems that a corporation has decided aren’t worth the effort or are “obsolete”.

What kind of crops are you going to grow at 125°? That’s still within OP’s specification of triple digits and with temps getting hotter we’re likely to see a lot more of this happening within our lifetime.

Yeah I think there’s some good ideas that have been built up with the ABL devices over the years, and that mesh leveling seems great. However I also feel like more people should take the time to get their beds physically as flat as possible first, because otherwise your printer spends a lot of time micro-stepping the Z, and I’ve seen some mesh maps that looked absolutely horrible.

Playing around with arduino devices, I have some laser rangefinders that seem like they could work well for an ABL. That might also be a good way to map out the idea I mentioned about creating a thin full-bed shim to get a truly flat bed, and after that perhaps you would only need to do a fast four-corner calibration with the ABL to make sure nothing has changed.

I’ve never had auto-leveling on my own printer, but the one at work has it and I wouldn’t want it. It was great for the first couple years, then the sensors started suffering from corrosion and now it just doesn’t work for crap.

So on my own printer (fully manual) I have always treated the paper test as nothing more than an initial step to make sure the nozzle doesn’t plow your bed during the leveling process. It will get you close, but not close enough. To really dial in your bed, you need at least a 5-point 1st-layer print test so you can really get that initial layer adhering nicely at all points, and this of course performs the calibration with the bed at full heat so it matches conditions during actual prints.

The biggest problem I had was my aluminum bed was badly warped when I got it, but fortunately just bowl-shaped. I cut CD-sized discs of aluminum foil to build up the center – 13 layers in total, then put a glass or G10 bed over that to really get a flat surface. I finished mine with a PEI sticker on top of the G10.

Another problem is that all beds will be completely unique from each other. I have one of the original Ender 3 Pro printers, and purchased a Creality glass bed with it. There was nothing that wouldn’t stick to that bed, and I used a 10mm calicat (which has 4mm feet pads) as my tests for all new filament. Clean the surface occasionally with 91% ISO, and life was good… but after a few years the surface wore out and I was forced to get a new bed. Ordered directly from Creality again, and man, nothing at all would stick to that piece of glass, even for large prints. I tried everything down to brake cleaner to solve the problem and finally gave up on it. That’s when I started working with the G10. The point of this is that you can tell someone a particular bed will solve all their problems, and you will be wrong. The reality is that sellers use different manufacturers to make their product and you never know what you’ll get.

Your observations about the bed warping from the tightness of the screws is interesting, I never thought about that part before. I have heavy springs under my bed, and I have always suggested people get those springs as tight as possibly without being completely closed, then adjust the Z-switch to that point before you start your leveling process. Tight springs means the screws should never wander. It’s been around 3 years since the last time I even touched my leveling screws, and I just fired up the printer and ran some new pieces last week without any issues. A good tool is one that you can ignore for a year, then use it without having to recalibrate. Anything else is just frustrating!

There are a lot of suggestions we can make to help newcomers get their bed leveling correct, and there are a lot of variables that we simply can’t account for including manufacturer defects. One idea I had years ago but never got around to trying is to print a thin sheet of filament the size of the entire bed, ironed to create a top surface perfectly flat to the nozzle but taking up any imperfections in the aluminum plate. Then put a thin bed over the top of that, and you should have a perfect surface that lasts nearly the life of the printer. Seems like a good idea, but how do you figure out where to fill in those first layers until you have a final layer that covers the full bed?

Yes! One of my most favorite Johnny Depp roles.

They don’t want to admit they’ve been screwing us over even though we all know it’s happening. All these companies could have rolled out suitable internet speeds a decade earlier but they would rather limit everyone to the lowest common denominator so they don’t have to admit just how terrible their equipment is in most locations.

I’ve gotta say, having city-owned fiber is great, folks here don’t have to wait weeks for Comcast to send out a tech who conveniently never shows up on the scheduled day, and customer service actually has a clue what they’re talking about. This is how a public service should operate.

I would say cable TV coax has quite a lot more capacity than what the providers let on. In my city they offered up to 50mbps at over $100/month. Then they lost their lawsuit trying to prevent the city from installing its own fiber network and suddenly the cable company decided they could offer 150mbps for around $75/month (with no equipment changes). Once the fiber network started becoming operational (offering 1gbps bidirectional for$50/month) the cable company decided they’re better also offer gigabit connection speeds, but once again they simply flipped a switch to increase your bandwidth. This capability has been in place for quite some time, they just didn’t want to offer it and their illegal “monopoly” gave them no incentive to provide competitive speeds.

*I say “monopoly” even though we technically also have DSL available in town. However when I asked one of the techs why DSL couldn’t give me more than 896kps upload speed, I was told that the cable company had an arrangement with them which prevented the DSL from providing the speeds needed by businesses. After the lawsuit that broke up the state-wide bans on other providers, this practice was exposed and also broken up, so now the telco is able to max out their DSL speeds.

You might check if a simple CPU upgrade would get you there. I previously ran some 2005 Poweredge servers that came with a Pentium D processor, and it cost me something like $8 from ebay to upgrade to a Xeon and start running KVM.

Keep an eye out for people trashing perfectly good desktop machines because Windows 10 is being retired.

If you want a server that “does it all” then you would need to get the most decked-out top of the line server available… Obviously that is unrealistic, so as others have mentioned, knowing WHAT you want to run is required to even begin to make a guess at what you will need.

Meanwhile here’s what I suggest – Grab any desktop machine you can find to get yourself started. Load up an OS, and start adding services. Maybe you want to run a personal web server, a file server, or something more extensive like Nextcloud? Get those things installed, and see how it runs. At some point you will start seeing performance issues, and this tells you when it’s time to upgrade to something with more capability. You may simply need more memory or a better CPU, in which case you can get the parts, or you may need to really step up to something with dual-CPU or internal RAID. You might also consider splitting services between multiple desktop machines, for instance having one dedicated NAS and another running Nextcloud. Your personal setup will dictate what works best for you, but the best way to learn these things is to just dive in with whatever hardware you can get ahold of (especially when it’s free), and use that as your baseline for any upgrades.

Crepuscular rays: shafts of light which are seen just after the sun has set and which extend over the western sky radiating from the position of the sun below the horizon. They form only when the sun has set behind an irregularly shaped cloud or mountain which lets the rays of the sun pass through a cloud in bands.

In this case, I think the light is making it look like the cloud is dark bands, when in fact the entire cloud is probably all dark but being lit up by the rays. (And yes, this affect can be seen both at sunrise and sunset.)

Ugh they sure screwed up the code on that page, I’m not sure how you viewed the article. I got the same results on firefox and chrome… a short paragraph ending in “CNCERT released a report on Friday regarding the attacks. Here are the details:”, followed by a full screen width banner “Summer in Paris”, and then I guess the footer for the site. I had to disable a max-height style on the article to actually read through it. Still not much detail unless there’s even more hidden blocks on the page, but thanks for trying.

Weird, I guess I had bad timing because I’ve been unable to reach this site for a bit, but it just came up again. Thanks for the info!

[Edit] The documents on that page ALSO do not actually provide information about the IP addresses carrying malicious content. Maybe they just don’t publish that information, despite how useful it would be to everyone?

Well this article is less than worthless. Where is the list of those IP addresses? I’d be happy to implement blocks on my servers with that information.

Since I’m 57 and have paid some attention to how I’ve changed over the years, perhaps I can add a little insight? Quite frankly, you get tired. I’ve been on the scene since the home computer revolution took off and I’ve seen so many things come and go. It’s not that we can’t learn new forms of communication, etc., but rather that after awhile you start asking yourself why bother when the “next big thing” is going to be another forgotten memory in 5-10 years. It’s not you who are being criticized for wasting items, it’s all the people like you over the years who have collectively wasted so much. Our brains remember all those things and they add up, causing us to fixate on the wrong info (although this last bit isn’t really something that comes with age).

Last night I re-watched The Fifth Element. Afterwards I was thinking about when it first came out in 1997. My god, that’s 28 years ago. I remember things from the 90’s. I remember things from the 80’s and from the 70’s. I remember that after 9/11 the 00’s were boring as fuck. But when you put all of that together, and start thinking about how much you’ve experience… holy hell that’s quite a lot to face squarely. And if I tell you something inappropriate about a co-worker… what? HR will pull me away from the monotony and have a talk with me? Experience tells us what we can get away with, and sometimes it’s fun just to see what people’s reactions are.

So yeah, I’ve observed these things, but I refuse to be pulled down into misery and monotony. Keep yourself busy doing things that you enjoy. Never be afraid to go down the rabbit hole and learn crazy new things. I’m working on assembling a couple swords from parts, looking into bluing some steel pieces I made. And just this week I learned about “rust bluing” which is a crazy concept but is easy to do at home. I learned something new and fun, and I refuse to ever stop learning. I may not care about Instagram or Facebook, but I installed Signal on my phone and I love being able to create my own 3D models and printing them out.

The future is always amazing. Age doesn’t make us care less about it, it just makes us more choosy in what parts are worth investing in. If you don’t want to become a listless old geezer, then don’t… all you need to do is keep enjoying the wonders of the world.

But why doesn’t it ever empty the swap space? I’ve been using vm.swappiness=10 and I’ve tried vm.vfs_cache_pressure at 100 and 50. Checking ps I’m not seeing any services that would be idling in the background, so I’m not sure why the system thought it needed to put anything in swap. (And FWIW, I run two servers with identical services that I load balance to, but the other machine has barely used any swap space – which adds to my confusion about the differences).

Why would I want to reduce the amount of memory in the server? Isn’t all that cache memory being used to help things run smoother and reduce drive I/O?

And how does cache space figure in to this? I have a server with 64GB of RAM, of which 46GB is being used by system cache, but I only have 450MB of free memory and 140MB of free swap. The only ‘volatile’ service I have running is slapd which can run in bursts of activity, otherwise the only thing of consequence running is webmin and some VMs which collectively can use up to 24GB (though they actually use about half that) but there’s no reason those should hit swap space. I just don’t get why the swap space is being run dry here.

This right here is the main reason why Trump might succeed… The media has been beaten into submission and refuses to report the actual events that are occurring which make Trump look bad.