dan

They're reliable, but overpriced for what you get, especially after the Akamai acquisition. Akamai are not known for affordability :)

I use GreenCloudVPS for a bunch of things. They used to have VPSes starting at $15/year for 2GB RAM and 20GB disk, but their current budget deals are still good (starts at $25/year for 4GB RAM and 35GB disk). These are on older hardware (mostly AMD EPYC Rome Zen 2 systems, ~5 years old) which is why they haven't been affected by increased RAM and storage prices yet. https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale

They also have "premium" plans which are newer (AMD EPYC Milan Zen 3 or Genoa Zen 4, and PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage in RAID10): https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/premium-kvm-sale

HostHatch is good too. Their regular pricing aims to compete with Hetzner, but in 13 locations worldwide. https://hosthatch.com/products. They do sometimes have sales on LowEndTalk with pricing similar to GreenCloud's "premium" plans.

RackNerd sometimes have good deals, although they've discontined quite a few of them recently. You can use https://racknerdtracker.com/ to see currently active deals. I still see a 2GB RAM + 35GB storage deal for $35/year for example.

I suspect all the very cheap ones (<$50/year) will eventually increase pricing. GreenCloud and HostHatch own all their hardware. Right now they use older hardware that's already reached break-even, but all hardware needs to be replaced eventually, and the replacement cost for things like enterprise SSDs is a lot higher than it was in the past.

If you want to stick to big names, OVHcloud and Hetzner both have pretty good VPS pricing. OVH runs theirs on very old hardware like Haswell (2014/2015 era) Xeon E5 CPUs which is the main reason why they have cheaper pricing that Hetzner.

There's also AWS Lightsail that's essentially Amazon's version of a VPS. Storage and data transfer are included in the monthly price, unlike EC2 where it costs extra. I'd only use it if you like AWS or want the comfort of using a very big company though - performance is notably worse than a provider like GreenCloudVPS or Hetzner.

I'm not affiliated with any of these companies. This is just my personal experience :)

I wish more modern TPUs were available for purchase. Google's TPU v8i is very powerful, but you can only rent it via Google Cloud. (that and they're most useful in big clusters, and the pricing for such a cluster is definitely out of reach for anyone that's not running their own data center)

For small options, there's mini PCs with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, and the Nvidia DGX. Their memory bandwidth is quite low compared to a GPU though, so expect slower performance.

No... A convection oven's fan just circulates the air. It doesn't blow it directly onto the food. It's similar, but not the same.

Do you want to run TensorFlow Lite / LiteRT models? PyTorch Mobile? TensorRT? onnx? YOLO? vLLM? Something else? The recommendations will vary based on your use case.

Google Coral was decent for TensorFlow Lite, but it's EOL (end of life) now. I've got the dual TPU Mini PCIe version in my home server, via a PCIe adapter board. I use it for object detection with Blue Iris + CodeProject AI and it works pretty well for that use case.

Hailo-8 is supposed to be like a more powerful version of the Coral, but I don't have experience with it. It supports a bunch of frameworks: TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite, Keras, PyTorch and ONNX. I'd be interested in hearing other people's thoughts on it.

I don't know if any of these work over USB though. They're usually internal devices. Google marketed the Coral USB as being for development and testing only, pointing people to the M.2 and PCIe versions for production usage.

As for something totally different... There's the Nvidia Jetson single board computer which supports TensorRT, but I don't have experience with it either. I also think it's a bit older too. You could also consider getting a newer mini PC with a AMD Ryzen AI processor in it, or an Nvidia DGX Spark.

Google's latest TPUs are only available in their cloud - they're not selling the hardware to end users any more.

What?? It's strange to see Australia do something worse than the USA in terms of health care. In the US, the COVID vaccine is free with pretty much all insurance plans, and people get it at the same time as the yearly flu shot.

The government should always subsidize preventative things like vaccines.

Baking is letting the food sit in hot air for a while. Air frying is blowing the heat directly onto the food. They also vent the air to release excess steam and moisture, which is why air fried things are crisper.

Use it like a regular oven but reduce temperature by 25°F or 15°C and reduce cooking time by 20%.

Just power it using solar panels?

They're closer to impingement ovens than convection ovens.

Convection ovens (or "fan forced ovens" in some countries) use a fan to gently and evenly circulate the hot air, whereas impingement ovens and air fryers use higher velocity fans to blow the heat directly onto the food.

It heavily depends on proprietary Google and carrier infrastructure in practice.

This is the same as practically every carrier feature though. Carriers are a pain to deal with and all their infra is proprietary, so usually only the big companies like Google and Apple have the motivation to integrate with them and build out new services.