“Bluesky” itself is trademarked and all the rest, but it uses AtProtocol which is a completely open federation protocol. AtProtocol doesn’t have the support of ActivityPub because it’s much newer and also more complicated (for good reason, but still).
As it happens, I’ve just finished setting up a system exactly like this for a completely off-grid setup. I needed a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to be completely self-contained to monitor an adjacent, larger system that is only powered up intermittently (close enough that the two systems have a common ground).
Short version: the Raspberry Pi and the Huawei LTE router I’m using for connectivity draw a steady 9W between them (there’s a lot of monitoring going on). I went with an old pair of 80W panels in very suboptimal positioning, a simple MPPT charge controller and a 110Ah deep cycle leisure battery which costs about €45, €30 and €120 respectively. The system has been running a few months now and the battery had never, ever dropped below 12.4V. The Pi uses WireGuard to connect to my VPS so Home Assistant can be accessed with a web browser since the network I’m using on-site doesn’t do public IP addresses.
Also, one of the reasons the EU waited for USB-C is that it specifically supports Alt Mode, which allows non-USB-standard protocols - like this new video connector thing - to be encapsulated within it.
The whole point of USB-C is that it’s a standardised connector that allows anyone to shoehorn their own protocol down it if they want using Alt Mode. Moreover, they can do that without breaking compatibility with other USB-C - or even just specific features - if one of the devices doesn’t speak their crazy-ass moon protocols. This is a benefit of USB-C, not a failing.
Graphics cards come with as many ports as the manufacturer wants them to. My home PC’s GPU has two HDMI and two MiniDisplayPort. Also, there are cheap lossless adapters that will convert between MiniDisplayPort, DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI, etc, etc.
I disagree with the more than 4K being a theoretical need thing but, regardless, where I work, every desk has a pair of 4K monitors that connect to the user’s laptop via a single USB-C cable. That cable also connects a keyboard, mouse, gigabit ethernet and, depending on the desk, 10Gb ethernet, multiple cameras and conference audio. The cable also charges the laptop, of course. At the moment that’s mostly done using USB-C docking stations, but we’ve started to deploy monitors that are USB-C native and can be daisychained together.
In case anyone is wondering, yes, this is utter nonsense. The EU made USB-C mandatory only as a charger for portable devices like phones, tablets, headphones and mice. That’s all. This new standard, unwelcome as it is, has nothing to do with charging phones so there’s no reason why it can’t be used in the EU.
But let’s not allow measley facts get in the way of having a moan at nothing, shall we? Fucking EU. Forcing us to [checks notes] charge all out things using a single connector, reducing e-waste, and, uh, ensuring there’s lots of futureproofing built-in. BASTARDS.
Yeah, but I’ve not got two hundred Firefox tabs open on Voyager.
Sawme here! Honmestly I dom"t thinkl I coukd ever go vack tp a mormal keyboard ¶¶¶¶
“Modern Teens Killing Travelling Minstrel Industry”
They’re clearly under the control of Big Train, Loom Lobbyists and the Global Gutenberg Printing Press Conspiracy.
One thing about the Pebble - and, I assume, these watches - is that they didn’t have WiFi or LTE, only Bluetooth. So it wasn’t possible for them to do any communication except through the apps already running on your phone. So, broadly, it’s a no.
Preordered here too, for all the same reasons. I went for the Time2, even though it’s not due to ship until later. I’ve waited nearly ten years, I can wait another six months…
Ten years ago this week.
GNU pTerry
The headline makes it sound like the heart was a reward. “Congratulations on your operation, here’s your prize: a titanium heart.”
Eutelsat are aimed at a different market: infrastructure. Their intended customers are larger and more demanding: research outposts, small villages, oil rigs, mobile phone towers, ships, and so on, as opposed to Starlink who focus on consumers directly, which is much more low-stakes. I’m genuinely curious if Eutelsat can move into Starlink’s territory.
Exactly this. People who buy crypto with Real Money only do so in the expectation that they’ll later be able to sell it for more Real Money. By design, it doesn’t represent labor, materials, services, anything of actual worth, it just sucks the value out of fiat currency like a parasite.
Yeah, a lot of people say things like “a BloingCoin is worth €1000” or “1 PissBux is worth more than a barrel of oil” but, like, so what? I know how many apples I can buy with €1 (about two). How many apples can I buy with a BloingCoin or a PissBux? Or, for that matter, a barrel of oil?
Can I introduce you to your new best friend, Yunohost? It’s a self-hosting platform based on Linux designed to run on a shitty old laptop, SBC, USFF PC or such plugged into your router. Browser-based, loads of extensions and tools, the hardest part it installing it - it’s no more or less tricky that installing Ubuntu, but that’s still involved for many people.
To be honest, I used to have an ISP with dynamic addresses and it wasn’t a huge deal. The address only changed every month or two. I used afraid.org’s dynamic DNS service to get a dynamic address that followed the changes and created CNAME records for my real domain pointing at that. The actual connection was fucking awful but the dynamic IPs never caused any problems.
As for services: Nextcloud is well worth looking into for file sync and photo backup, especially if you’ve already got a file server running.