Tim

Just throwing this in here as another thing to consider - instruction set. From a quick check (so I’m happy to be told I’m wrong) the Celeron & Pentium options don’t support AVX. That means some stuff - and I’m giving a hard stare at MongoDB here, but there will be others - is not going to run, or at best you’re going to be either stuck with old versions or recompiling yourself from source.

(I don’t know if any of your apps require Mongo or AVX, but I was bitten by this in the past and it was one of the main reasons I eventually upgraded one of my small clusters.)

I just read the manual for the Euro version; basically, they assume you take the power strip/PDU with the computer.

So, you plug the special UPS into a spare outlet on the PDU; it monitors the power supply, and as soon as power from the PDU drops it jumps in and starts supplying. So plug into an outlet, then unplug the PDU from power, and the UPS takes over. Since at this point the pins on the PDU plug are live, they provide a safety cap to put over the end of the cable. The computer itself is never unplugged.

Ah damn, I loved that book when I was a kid. I can probably blame it, at least in part, for my career…

(I was a massive nerd and a FidoNet sysop back in the 80s & 90s, and got my first VMS and Unix experience hopping onto academic networks over dialup and X.25 gateways using, err, “unconventially obtained” credentials… This experience helped me convince my interviewer at Imperial College to overlook my less than stellar academic record to admit me to their Computing peogramme.

That book - and the movie WarGames - were definitely inspiring, if not life-changing.)

Annnnnd that’s why I downloaded a snapshot of Wikipedia a few months ago and host it locally.

Sad that it’s necessary, but with modern AI tooling, we have everything we need to destroy knowledge on an industrial scale.

This is a very good point - in books/dramas it helps the exposition to have a character you can relay half the plot details to. Similarly in radio dramas, every conversation between characters starts with saying each others names and a full recap of whatever the subject is… But nobody in the real world does or wants to talk like that.

Real people just say “hey, is that thing fixed yet?”, not “hello Chris, you remember yesterday we were discussing the il problem with the Thing, and you proposed Cornfootling it; what happened?”

When I want Alexa to turn on the lights, I want to just say “Alexa, turn on the lights”, not have a goddamned debate. And when I want to search for whatever the hell Cornfootling is, I just want to type “Cornfootling” and hit search.

China’s VPN blocking is actually very, very effective, and the vast majority of people don’t go around it.

And that’s kinda the point - the controls don’t have to be 100%, they just have to cover the majority. And for the few that do circumvent - well, that’s just one more easy crime for the authorities to charge you with if they ever feel the need.