rmuk

"Here's your WiFi. Oh, you want the password? Next you'll be asking for DHCP."

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.

"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).

The hardware is good and I like the idea in principle but Fairphone's support and software QA is dreadful and you need to hope you never need the former because of problems with the latter. My FP5 was bricked by an update they pushed out and after six weeks of trying to get a solution from their support (four weeks of which they didn't respond at all) I ended up claiming on insurance and buying a Pixel. According to the forums this problem is far from unique to me.

A firmware update from Fairphone bricked mine last year. Not impressed. Apparently it's happened to a lot of people who went to an alternative OS (Lineage) then back to stock. I just woke up one day to a paperweight on my bedside table and the support was horrendous: it took over six weeks to get any response and after another month of back-and-forth with responses taking a couple of days at a time I ended up just claiming on insurance.

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.

Something, something, neighbour's lawn, sprinkler, something.