5 KILOwatt hours is a typical laptop battery? Aren’t they more like 50-100wh?

Love the idea and article, but…

just 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop,

I want to see a laptop with an 800w charger.

Ah, ok. The Unifi stuff is a bit weird like that. I recommend installing the controller on a computer if you continue to have issues. You don’t have to run it all the time, just use it for config and then turning it off is fine. It’ll give you way more information and control over exactly how the AP is set up.

Which model is it? As far as I’m aware all the Unifi APs need the controller for config. It doesn’t need to stay running unless you want a couple features for large deployments but you do need to run it to set things up initially. The Air Max / uisp lines are the ones with web based config.

Do you have a continuously running unifi controller or is it only running when you do the config? Does it do the same thing with the controller opposite to how it is now (ie if you aren’t running it does it do it when you leave the controller on)?

Are you running the 2.4 and 5 as separate SSIDs or the same one?

Are you on the latest controller and firmware?

This is the correct answer - I know because I was there 10000 years ago and had to decide between this and buying a special case from koolance. Amusingly they still sell one for the outside.

They can also be handy if you have to do anything weird like route display cables from the GPU to the motherboard like for a thunderbolt display.

It entirely depends on how much and what you’ll use them for. They’re going to be around $200 USD all in, so if they’re for occasional use probably not. If you’re going to use them a lot like for work or a regular hobby then it’s not a crazy amount to spend. They tend to be more comfortable than flange earplugs, and a little better than foamies, but for me at least I don’t want them in for more than 3 hours.

Etymotic makes a few different ones for general noise, sleeping, music, and they also do ones for their earphones.

Look for a local print or embroidery shop that you can get like work shirts and business cards and whatnot made. Unless you’re really in the middle of nowhere, there’s probably a local print shop that will at least be able to point you in the right direction. If you want a one off instead of a small batch look for a place that offers embroidery - it sounds more expensive but because they can just throw whatever on the machine and do a one off, it’s usually actually less expensive than traditional screen printing. Specifically for hats in not sure if you can get them digitally printed in most smaller local shops.

If you are working with a specific company to produce a personalized / custom product, they will generally have at least one person on staff that can do design, or at least deal with any file conversion and technical stuff like that. They should be able to quote you a price.

If you are working with an artist first, they may have a company they’re familiar with to have the item produced, and if they do, should be able to handle most of it themselves. If they don’t, or you would like it produced somewhere specific, just let the artist know - most places will have all the information the artist will need on their website, or the artist can just get in touch with them directly.

In general, if you’re going to an artist or design shop they should be able to give you some kind of quote with a very rough idea of what you want - especially if they do this professionally, talking to people who don’t have an art background is basically half their job. If you want to be specific it’s much more useful to send something like a mood board or a collage of similar things than a bunch of text. It’s also generally a good idea to be open to their ideas, as they often have experience that may be helpful and will see some problems much quicker than you might.

We use a few Schlage connect zwave deadbolts, and they have been basically rock solid. We’re using them through Smartthings, but home assistant should work just as well. We have hardwired zwave light switches next to all of them, apparently that can help with the reliability since they will act as zwave repeaters in case the lock doesn’t pick up the signal first time - especially for changing the codes.

Are they a perfect lock that no one will be able to pick? Probably not, but it’s a lot faster to just put a brick through your window no matter how good your locks are.

Propaganda from who? Big newspaper? Big book publisher? Big stick and wheel?

Have them printed from a service. A normal deck of cards should run about $30 USD. The paper, laminate, ink and maybe sleeves will probably cost the same or more and will come out with way lower quality especially if this is your first time crafting them.

I’ve done both and unless you want really quick and dirty prototype cards or something that is super handmade that you drew on yourself instead of designed on a computer, the ones from a printing service win hands down.

Basically, it’s “why not both?”

So first, kubernetes is a different ball of wax than containers, and if you want to run it on one machine you can, but it’s really for running containers across a cluster of machines. I’m guessing you just generally mean containers so I’ll go with that.

Containers are essentially just apps running on a virtual os. Virtual machines are an OS running on virtual hardware. You can abstract both layers and have virtual hardware running an os that runs a virtual os for your containers, and nothing will really mind - in fact that’s kind of the way to do it if you have one big machine you need to run a bunch of services on. You might cut up a server into a Linux VM, a Windows VM, and a BSD VM, and run containers on each one. Or you might run 3 Linux VMs and have the containers for 3 different services split between them.

It really depends on what you’re hosting and trying to do for how exactly to go about it. Take for instance a pretty common self hosted stack:

Plex Radarr Prowlarr Deluge TrueNAS

Now you could install TrueNAS scale and run all of those as containers on it, and it would work ok, but TrueNAS scale isn’t really meant for managing a ton of containers right now. You could make a vm on it for each service and have them all talk to each other but then you’re probably wasting resources by duplicating the OS 5 times. Also, what if you want to run TrueNAS core instead of scale? Can you get everything else working in jails – maybe? – but it’ll probably be a pain.

Instead, you might install proxmox and pass through the drive controller, and set up one VM for TrueNAS core. Then you might make another VM for the arrs containers, and a third for Plex itself.

It gets you the best of both worlds. TrueNAS can run on BSD instead of Linux, your arrs are easy to deploy and update in containers that keep everything separated, and Plex is sequestered in a hardened os with read only access to everything else since it gets a port forwarded and is more of a security risk. Again that’s just one option though.

VMs get you a ton of really handy things like snapshots and for simple VMs, very easy portability between relatively similar hardware. I’ll probably get ruined for saying this but they’re also a security tool that you should probably keep in your belt. If someone manages to break out of a container and your files are just sitting there for the taking that’s not great. If someone manages to break into your VM and “the good stuff” is on another VM that’s another layer of security they have to break through.

Containers on the other hand use way fewer resources, especially ram - and are much easier to wrangle than many OSes for updates and config.

There’s really a lot of self hosted stuff that assumes you’re running docker and treats regular install as a kind of weird edge case, so you’ll probably run docker even if you don’t want to.

Kubernetes on the other hand I would argue isn’t really meant for self hosting where you probably have a one or two servers that you own. Its meant to deploy containers across various cloud servers in a way that’s more automated to manage. If you need storage in a kubernetes cluster you’ll probably use something like s3 buckets, not a hard drive.

If you want to learn it you can totally deploy it on a computer running a few VMs as nodes or with a few laptops / SBCs as a cluster, but if you just want the services to run on your server in the closet it’s a bit like using a sledgehammer to nail a chair back together. That’s why you don’t tend to see it talked about as much - it’s a bit of a different rabbit hole.