My Need -> eBay -> [server part search term] -> Multiple inexpensive listings with large quantities available -> Buy -> My Need Met
Replace "server part search term" with full rack servers, switches, SFP+ modules, RAM, power supplies, pulled HDDs/SSDs, and/or any other part I've bought used that was a corporate/data center pull.
She's got an attorney and they're trying to stop it based on that, but it just seems like everyone involved (edit: besides her) just doesn't give a fuck.
It's a lot like another commenter mentioned about eminent domain. It can be used for good (roads, fiber deployments, district heating, etc) but also for things not so good (data centers, etc).
I went out of my way to find a house that didn't even have a vestigial HOA deed restriction, so I get that. But when a private citizen donates something to the local municipality, it's pretty egregious to not honor those restrictions, especially for things that may take a while to develop.
I'd donate my share of my family's farmland to build a park, but I wouldn't sell it for all the money in the world to build a datacenter or landfill or anything else, really.
Even if they didn't do her dirty, she wouldn't. She donated it to the city and relinquished ownership of it. The expectation, even written into the deed, was that the land was to be used as a park, but they turned around and sold it multiple times. Despite the stipulation in the original deed to the parks and recreation department, the data center is still going forward.
The story is just such a tragedy all around.
Not sure about the buildings themselves, but I'm pretty confident at least their contents will flood the secondhand market with cheap secondhand gear. I won't say the crypto bubble has burst, but a lot of the mining rigs are being parted out and sold fairly cheap, and one specific crypto mining board has become popular as a DIY gaming system. (Currently doing a BC-250 "DIY SteamMachine" build myself).
As for the buildings, maybe we'll see some creative uses like indoor farms or something. Or, perhaps, it'll just be a mundane "AI datacenter becomes a generic data center".
I'd guess they'd be repurposed into business centers or office space like we've seen with old malls, but malls were usually in populated areas where datacenters aren't.
I loved PIC S3 and definitely seeing Ro Laren again, but yeah, I did notice the makeup was a lot more subtle than in her TNG appearances.
Now I wonder if it was always supposed to be that subtle but had to be "exaggerated" a bit back then to show up on older TVs. Kind of like how the Addams Family set was mostly pink so it appeared correctly on old black and white TV sets.
This is approximately where it is in the print. Every time the head moves over any of those support bases, it sounds like nails on a chalkboard 😆
Agreed.
Not sure about current generation, but the Gen Z people in my life do seem to understand the concept but are absolutely terrified of it. Like, if they don't have cell service when we go camping, they are just super agitated like they've lost their sense of smell or something. Could just be those specific people, but that's the only sample I have to gauge on.
IMO, peak internet experience was when you had to make an effort to log on. i.e. dialing-up and tying up the phone line. Yeah, the speeds sucked and sometimes you got the dreaded "all circuits are busy now" message during peak hours, but everything else about the experience was better.
When you logged into AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo, etc, you did so with a purpose. You never worried about bothering someone by messaging them at a bad time because if it was a bad time to do so, they wouldn't be online in the first place.
"Back in my day" (lol), the internet wasn't always on, it wasn't demanding your attention, it wasn't pestering you with constant notifications, it wasn't in your face all the time, it wasn't constantly recommending or suggesting things at you (not "to" you, at you) etc, etc. It was there when you needed it but didn't butt into your life every second when you weren't.
You could disconnect.
I honestly don't know what we can really do about it. Personally, I turn off pretty much anything that can send a notification except SMS/MMS and check manually when I want to. Some people hate that and get annoyed that I rarely respond instantly to IMs and such, but I hate being constantly "on" as well as the expectation to be.
Saw an article posted about Tim Cook calling the launch of Apple Maps his first big mistake which reminded me of this.
TGG: S3E06: Letter to Gorbachev
I've dealt with my share of disk expansions and failures, and it's never taken 3 weeks.
EAS (emergency alert system) alerts are issued for various local and/or national emergencies, and are frequently issued for severe weather events. As we enter tornado season in the US, I wanted to be able to receive and relay those over Meshtastic, specifically severe weather alerts, as an extra precaution since cell service often goes out after big storms.
I first setup a prototype setup on my laptop, but am planning to move the setup to a PiZeroW2 or a Banana Pi if the Raspi isn't up to the task. In addition to monitoring/relaying EAS alerts, I'm also going to pipe the audio to an Icecast source and then to an Icecast server so anyone on the local network can listen to it.
Got lucky in that today was the day they did the weekly EAS alert test and that I happened to have this running during the test. Everything surprisingly worked, which was nice. However, I wanted to tweak some things and needed a way to run my own tests. So I grabbed the audio sample from the Wikipedia page for SAME and piped that in which worked beautifully.
rtl_fm
If you want to test the setup without having to wait for a weekly test, you can download a sample SAME audio clip from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Same.wav). You'll need to convert the sample rate before you can use it, though.
$ ffmpeg -i Same.wav -ar 48000 same48.wav
$ cat same48.wav | Meshtastic-SAME-EAS-Alerter --test-channel 0
2026-04-02T15:32:31.172Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Successfully connected to the node.
2026-04-02T15:32:31.175Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Loaded locations CSV
2026-04-02T15:32:31.175Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Monitoring for alerts
2026-04-02T15:32:31.175Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Alerts will be sent to channel: 0
2026-04-02T15:32:31.175Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Test alerts will be sent to channel: 0
2026-04-02T15:32:31.201Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Begin SAME voice message: MessageHeader { message: "ZCZC-EAS-RWT-012057-012081-012101-012103-012115+0030-2780415-WTSP/TV-", offset_time: 47, parity_error_count: 0, voting_byte_count: 69 }
2026-04-02T15:32:31.201Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] No location filter applied (locations empty) or no locations in alert
2026-04-02T15:32:31.201Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Attempting to send message over the mesh: 📖Received Required Weekly Test from WTSP/TV, Issued By: Broadcast station or cable system, Locations: Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, Sarasota
Connected to radio
Sending text message 📖Received Required Weekly Test from WTSP/TV, Issued By: Broadcast to ^all on channelIndex:0
Waiting for an acknowledgment from remote node (this could take a while)
Received an implicit ACK. Packet will likely arrive, but cannot be guaranteed.
Connected to radio
Sending text message station or cable system, Locations: Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, to ^all on channelIndex:0
Waiting for an acknowledgment from remote node (this could take a while)
Received an implicit ACK. Packet will likely arrive, but cannot be guaranteed.
2026-04-02T15:33:11.227Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] End SAME voice message
2026-04-02T15:33:11.251Z WARN [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Program stopped, no longer monitoring
This is the bash one-liner to start rtl_fm, tune it to the local NOAA frequency, and set the rate. That gets piped to tee which does 2 things currently:
play so that I can listen to the broadcast on the laptop's speakers. This will eventually be piped to an Icecast sourceWhen a SANE message is detected, the program decodes it and broadcasts it to the configured channel. Fun fact: the Screech. Screech. Screech you hear before a severe weather alert is actually the encoded version of the emergency alert and what this program decodes.
When I move this all to whatever flavor of Pi I end up using, that'll be wrapped in a systemd unit file so it can run headless and unattended.
$ rtl_fm -f 162.400M -s 48000 -r 48000 | tee >(play -q -r 48000 -t raw -e s -b 16 -c 1 -V1 -v 4 - sinc 125-3.2k) >(Meshtastic-SAME-EAS-Alerter --host 192.168.1.236 --test-channel 0) > /dev/null
Found 1 device(s):
0: Realtek, RTL2838UHIDIR, SN: 00000001
Using device 0: Generic RTL2832U OEM
Found Rafael Micro R820T tuner
Tuner gain set to automatic.
Tuned to 162652000 Hz.
Oversampling input by: 21x.
Oversampling output by: 1x.
Buffer size: 8.13ms
Exact sample rate is: 1008000.009613 Hz
Sampling at 1008000 S/s.
Output at 48000 Hz.
2026-04-02T14:20:49.702Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Successfully connected to the node.
2026-04-02T14:20:49.704Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Loaded locations CSV
2026-04-02T14:20:49.704Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Monitoring for alerts
2026-04-02T14:20:49.704Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Alerts will be sent to channel: 0
2026-04-02T14:20:49.704Z INFO [Meshtastic_SAME_EAS_Alerter] Test alerts will be sent to channel: 0
Context: https://thebutton.lemmy.zip/
"Homelab nerds" are a market unto ourselves. We get most if not all of our gear secondhand from eBay or similar, and those storefronts on ebay are run by electronics recycling companies that get their inventory from data centers or corporate offices when they shut down or do hardware refreshes.