My off-site backup is a thinkpad x230 with a 1 TB HDD. It's currently at my friends house, and I access it with tailscale. 7 eur/month to colocate this in a datacenter with stable (and fast) Internet + power seems like a pretty good deal.

I can understand some of the concerns with user-provided hardware. Maybe a better model, would be for CoLaptop to offer hardware themselves. This would allow them to standardize on a few models, which opens up many possible improvements such as central DC power, power efficient BIOS settings, enclosures with cooling ducts, etc. They can still follow the "old laptop as a server" model by buying off-lease laptops from the corporate world.

Still keep a second monitor around, but it's exclusively for screen sharing. Speaking of, having a dedicated monitor for sharing is really nice:

- It can have a standard resolution and aspect ratio (1080p) which is perfect for sharing

- It is a clean slate. I only share stuff I consciously move to that monitor. No need to clear my screen or burden my colleagues with unrelated windows in our call.

- Yes app sharing exists, but screen sharing is just more reliable and works better for sharing multiple things sequentially/simultaneously.

Dell, Lenovo, HP will gladly send a technician to your house, and their NBD warranties cost about the same as Applecare. And they don't care if you're an enterprise or an individual buying one measly laptop.

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That being said, 20-50m is a really long run even with 24V LEDs. Even using this trick, you'll run into significant voltage drop and heat in the LED strip's copper traces since they're only so thick. There's a reason why manufacturers specify a maximum length. I would check the datasheet and split the strip into multiple segments depending on this value. Maybe there are some LED strips designed for this use-case, with an even higher voltage and/or thicker traces.

1. Pay the patent trolls, giving them power and hurting your margins

2. Move manufacturing to a more expensive, less competitive country

In the long run, you could argue that point 2 will lead to domestic manufacturing which everyone wants. But unless you can find a way to make these companies actually competitive (e.g. tariffs on chinese printers), I think the more likely scenario is these hamstrung companies will wither and go out of business.

Bash scripts are so hacky. With any other language, my though process is "what's the syntax again? Oh right.." but with bash it's "how can I do this and avoid shooting myself in the foot?" when doing anything moderately complex like a for loop.

- You're now a competitor. Stop using our software (you can still sell on gumroad.com, hint hint)

- Give us 20% for 1 year (next year, who knows...)

- We won't give you a license, but we'll buy you out for next to nothing.

You might save a little bit going with 4 pairs instead of 24. But that goes out the window as soon as you need to run a single new cable. If you want to be stingy, pull the cables but leave them unterminated.

Artificial sweeteners do not need to be as safe as bottled water.

They just need to be less harmful than sugar. Which they are, because sugar is unequivocally, very very bad for you.

But if your business has customers in China, and wants to retain them long-term, this is untenable. Not only do you risk getting blocked on a whim, but without local servers latency will suffer as well.

Do you have a separate .cn version hosted in China?

Are you using a specialized CDN like CloudFlare China Network?

Are you using a GeoDNS service with servers in China?

Something else?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43264954

Points: 1

# Comments: 4

Maybe it's time for a class of repairable laptops/desktops, similar to what Intel did with their "Ultrabook" branding a decade ago. Call it an ecobook, and require upgradable storage, RAM, and access to replacement parts for 10 years. Something that lets companies say "this is thicker than a macbook, but not because it's worse".

My desktop PC from 2018 is still going strong, on account of using the AM4 socket (AMD). That allowed me to upgrade to the 5800X3D a while back, a whole two generations or four years newer than the original CPU.