Charge time depends on the UPS. The cheap consumer grade ones usually have a float charger that takes forever.

Nickel iron is typically used for off grid solar energy storage. Weight doesn’t matter at all since the battery won’t be moved. The most important thing is lifetime. Traditional nickel iron batteries last for decades and can be refurbished.

UPS batteries need to be fully charged all the time. Lead acid batteries like to be fully charged. Lithium batteries need to be stored around 50% charge to have a long lifetime.

Mumble will do all of that except screen sharing. Only the server has to deal with NAT.

That worked when TV was analog and they were running megawatt transmitters. It doesn’t do so well with the low power digital stations unless you are close to the transmitters.

Wow, grabbing a base64 obfuscated URL with curl sending the output to bash is a huge red flag. I guess Mac users must not know anything about the CLI.

Never pipe the output of curl or wget to bash. You can’t inspect whatever it downloads before it gets run. If the URL is obfuscated, there is basically a 100% chance that it’s malicious.

There’s Mumble for voice, text and images. The server is self hosted and there is no chat history so it’s private. It uses Opus so the audio quality is very good without using a lot of bandwidth. For gaming, it supports positional audio and a HUD that shows who is talking.

For the projects using Discord for support, they should move to a forum.

You used to get a fairly significant upgrade ever few years for about the same cost as the old hardware. Transistors aren’t really getting much smaller anymore, so more performance needs a bigger die and costs more money.

Rockbox supports modern codecs including Opus, so you can fit nearly 4 days of decent quality music on a 4GB iPod.

CCA cables break if they are moved a lot. I’ve had trouble with CCA ethernet cables breaking.

It’s an ultralight. You don’t need a pilots license to fly one in the US. You can even build one yourself if you want to. You don’t even need any inspection or airworthiness certificate. Since they can’t legally be flown over populated areas, it’s unlikely for anyone except the pilot to get injured or killed.

IMAX film is equivalent to 12K. Their digital laser projectors are only 4K.

Wine has support serial and parallel ports. They work fine. In recent versions of wine you don’t even have to set anything up. Just run ls -l ~/.wine/dosdevices/com* after running something in wine to see what the com port number is for your device. The ttyACM and ttyUSB ports are USB serial ports. The ttyS ports are hardware serial ports and they will probably show up even if your computer doesn’t have any.

MeshCore runs at 2.73 kbps and it can send a short text message in a fraction of a second. The short turbo preset on Meshtastic is 21.88 kbps, but that’s still too slow for images. The higher speed reduces the range by quite a bit too.

For images, you would be better off using WiFi HaLow, which runs several mbps on 900 MHz.

If you have a ham license, there is HamWAN and ARDEN as well. They are fast enough to stream live video. They can work over long distances, but the high gain antennas have to be aimed carefully.

It’s not going to make a very good NAS. It looks like it only has USB 2 and 100M ethernet. That’s going to be slower than the NAS I built with the Pentium 4 desktop I got for free in 2007.

The list of vulnerability mitigations for those old CPUs is going to be a mile long. They will probably have their performance cut in half or worse. Even a much newer CPU like Zen 1 takes a big performance hit.

You can disable mitigations, but then a malicious website could potentially steal sensitive information on that computer.

For home use, all I can think of is wireless video. 15 GB/s is faster than the fastest DisplayPort or HDMI versions. It could handle any resolution and refresh rate currently in use without any compression. That would be useful for VR headsets since they need low latency.

The DNS authoratative servers are what hold all of the records for your domain. With Cloudflare, you are stuck with theirs. As for why you want to use a different one, maybe you need more than the 200 records Cloudflare limits you to. Maybe you don’t like the way their API works for automating updates. Maybe you don’t want to set up all of your records all over again if you transfer your domain to another registrar. Maybe you just don’t like Cloudflare.

A .com domain should be under USD $12 a year with WHOIS privacy included. If someone is charging more than that, they are ripping you off. Most web or VPS hosts will charge a significant markup if they sell domains. Make sure you check the renewal price too. Some registrars will give you the first year cheap, then charge significantly more to renew it.

Cloudflare is the cheapest, but they force you to use their DNS servers. Porkbun is a dollar more, but you can use your own DNS if you want to.

It stands for Neural Processing Unit. It’s a processor for running AI. They multiply lots of small numbers really quickly.