I really like the idea of an in-wall home control panel - the guy who converted his whole house to illustrations & animations was awesome - but when I try to imagine situations where I’d really use it, I struggle. Definitely not going to get up from the couch and walk over to a control panel when I can just use the phone app, so it’s got to be circumstances where I want to control something, while I’m in a specific place or can’t easily use the phone. Maybe walking out the door, just to see if lights or whatnot are on (if I didn’t have an automation linked to presence). Maybe in the kitchen, to fix music when my hands are too dirty for the phone, but voice control seems like a better solution there.

World is full of gadgets that seem cool, but then you get them home and it’s just easier to do things the old way, and the gadget ends up being a techy Hummel figurine.

I got an N100 motherboard with 4x GB ports and installed ubuntu. Configured 1 port for the ISP, 1 port for a guest network, and bridged the last two with a WIFI PCIe card for the trusted network. hostapd to manage the wifi, and it took a couple tries before I found a card that really handled AP mode well. dhcpd, radvd. bind 9 for DNS, integrated with dhcpd so clients can declare their own hostname. There’s a separate pihole in front of that. Took a while to discover that I had to specifically configure dhclient to the ISP to request IPv6 prefix delegation. The guest network port goes to a ddwrt router.

It also runs a mythtv backend, a couple web sites; immich, jellyfin, and paperless ngx containers. In my head, it’s more of a server with router functions glued on, where […]sense is more of a router with server functions glued on.

I was comfortable with cli administration, and the router side sort of grew organically, with a little victory each time I could unplug another appliance - first a WAP, then a switch. opn/pf-sense is probably an easier way to get into the DIY space, especially if you want to replace your whole infrastructure at one time.

My impression is that commercial loan securitization is a little different.

When you’re talking about residential mortgages, you’re talking about loans of a few hundred thousand, which is kind of too small for capital markets to bother. So the banks bundle them, like you say, and sell them in $1e8-1e10 offerings… Pension fund’s gotta park $100,000,000 somewhere, and that MBS is easier than actually managing 500 separate loans.

When you’re talking about commercial real estate - and especially things as big as data centers - it’s the opposite problem. They need such big loans that only a big bank or even consortium of big banks can get all the capital together, then the big bank turns the loan into a bond offering, so investors can buy them in slices as small as $1e4… That bond may only have one or two loans in it, so it can’t necessarily get broken into risk tranches like the MBS.

I don’t think it says anything about specific data center risks: capitalizing loans is standard operating procedure for these banks. It gets the loans off their account books, so they don’t have to hold capital to balance the risk, but they still get to collect management fees on the loans, regardless of whether they default. The big stories back in the 00s were residential real estate loans, but they do the same thing for commercial and industrial property.

All these people saying 500, 600, 700+ watts - it’s almost hard to believe. My “gaming” computer, with two monitors, peaks around 400W on graphics-heavy games, and the monitors are like 120 of that. I suppose, though, if you’re running a server-class CPU, a half dozen HDDs, and a GPU for continuous transcoding or mining, the it wouldn’t be too hard to get there.

I run a dozen containers on an N100 with a couple of HDDs, VOIP device, router & cable modem on 63W, and I’ve considered that a pretty fair deal for a home lab. Of course, that only serves the household - nothing really offered to the public.

Removed by mod

I’m happy with 90 day certs for homelab stuff: I’m not worried about anyone MITMing my network. I figure the short lived certs are more important for people who provide services with a significant external user-base, or who process sensitive transactions.

I have my certbot set to check every 12 hours and renew at 60 days. Renewing every 3 days would be 20x more load on Let’s Encrypt systems, and that feels like abuse of a free service for my use case.

Calibre-web and calibre can share a library directory. You can edit the .kobo/kobo/Kobo ereader.conf file to wirelessly sync to calibre-web instead of kobo.com (while still using kobo.com to buy new ebooks)