Cloud Storage Tiers

Cloud Storage Tiers

Byrichard

On the 17th of February I will stop using Google One Drive and I was looking at the smaller tiers. You have 15 gigabytes for free, 100, and 200 gigabyte options, and then 200 gigabytes. At the moment I have 200 GB on Google Drive for documents and three hundred GB for photos. All of those photos are now backed up with Immich, PhotoPrism, and possibly one or two other storage solutions.

The Chasm From 200 GB to 2 TB

The issue that I, and others, come accross is that there is a massive leap from storing 100GB, 200GB or 2TB. There are no 500, 750 or 1TB tiers. You go from three francs per month to 10 CHF per month. I’ve had Google One with 2TB of space and used no more than 800 GB except for a day or two when I backed up my photos to Google Drive while migrating them off Google Photos.

Infomaniak is Cheaper, Microsoft 365 Offers A Better Tier

It turns out that Infomaniak’s Kdrive and Microsoft 365 Personal are two of the best options available. They’re priced with a 2 CHF difference. 67 CHF and 69 CHF per year. One offers Office Suite, as well as one terabyte of storage to use as you like, and the other offers two terabytes to use as you see fit. Both make it easy to backup photos from your phone to the cloud, and from the cloud to your laptop or external hard drive.

Self Hosted Replacements

As I mentioned above Google Photos has been duplicated via PhotoPrism, Immich and to some degree kDrive so I can delete those photos without concern, in theory. Google Drive is backed up to Kdrive so in theory I can delete that dat from Google Drive safely.

No Perfect Tier

My reason for moving away from Google is not based on conspiracy theories, or a moral problem with Google. It’s based on financial considerations. if they had a 500 GB or one terabyte tier then I would just downgrade my account for that tier size. This option does not exist so rather than downscale I might just jump ship.

Crowded Environment

The online backup market is huge. You have the choice between self-hosted solutions and cloud hosting solutions. Their pricing is quite similar but the question is whether you want your data to be in Europe, the US, or your own home, or the home of a friend or family member.

  • Google One – Google/Alphabet
  • iCloud – Apple
  • kDrive – Infomaniak
  • myCloud – Swisscom
  • OwnCloud
  • flickr – hosted
  • nextCloud – self hosted or hosted
  • PhotoPrism – self hosted or hosted
  • Immich – self hosted or hosted
  • Mylio – self-hosted or cloud hosted, although once you pay to backup to an exteran drive you have both

And Finally

I was happy to use Google One, Google Drive and Google Photos for years. The reason for which I decided to leave their service is that I saw the same experience, but for cheaper from Infomaniak. It has the added benefit that the data is stored closer to where I am. It’s nice to support local providers when the option exists.

Now that I have a local backup of my photographs, rather than depending on cloud services I can shop around and switch from the current cheapest to the next most affordable. I only need to check once per year, when the current contract is about to be renewed.

Wearing A Casio GBA-900
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Wearing A Casio GBA-900

Byrichard

For years I have worn Suunto, Garmin and Apple watches. During this time I have tracked hikes, climbing, scuba diving, snorkeling, swimming and more. Recently I felt the desire to wear a Casio watch as I used to do when I was a child.

Over the years these “watches” have given you live information about barometric pressure, altitude, depth, and other information but with time they gave you the chance to track what you were doing by GPS. After this they started to track your steps and your heart rate 24 hours a day, except for when you’re charging. It went from being a watch that you used for the time, and to track acvities. Now they track everything.

The only time they do not track you is when you’re charging the watches.

The advantage of a Casio watch is that you can wear it for years in a row, without ever taking it off, except for when you’re flying, before you need to replace the battery. You get to the end of the day and you don’t need to charge it.

Of course, you don’t need to wear it for three to five years in a row. You can take it off when you’re showering, sleeping or other. You can even take it off for a tan, if that’s what you desire.

What sets the GBA-900 apart from other Casio and smart watches is that it gives an analogue display, rather than a digital one. it gives the time with a digital display but it’s small and hidden behind the hour and minute hands at certain times of day.

The advantage of an analogue watch is that you know the time as fast as a digital watch, once you take some time to re-habituate yourself to reading a less precise time display. I say less precise because you need to re-learn the art of reading analogue time.

Tracking

It automatically counts the number of steps you take in a day and estimates the amount of energy you burned in a day. If you want to track a walk then it’s simple. You start the timer when you start your walk, and stop the time at the end of your walk. It then uses the time information and your phone’s location data to extrapolate the track of your walk. You can then get it to sync with the phone and keep track of your walks over time.

No False Inputs

I found that with the Xiaomi activity Band 7 and the active band eight I would get false manipulations with the touch screen. With the casio that’s impossible, due to it using button presses.

Playing

If you’re playful then, at night, you can charge the fluorescent paint on the hour and minute hands with a flashlight or your phone’s light. At night you can then check the time, by looking at the glowing hands, rather than pressing a button.

Beep Beep

Do you remember that 80s or 90s sound. The Beep beep that we would hear once an hour, every hour? This watch allows you to live with that signal notification. It could be useful, if you want to keep track of time, without constantly staring at your watch. “Beep beep”, time for lunch soon.

And Finally

The Apple watch nags you about washing your hands for long enough. Garmin and Apple nag you about being too static for too long. By using a Casio watch you escape the gamification that makes Apple and Garmin so annoying to use. It was fun, until you realise how unforgiving they are, streak wise, and until you realise that they’re designed to get you adddicted, rather than interested in your own progress. I like wearing a simpler device, especially while I walk more than I cycle, hike, or other.

Listening to Podcasts While Walking
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Listening to Podcasts While Walking

Byrichard

Recently I have been listening to plenty of Late Night Linux podcasts. I like them because they’re half an hour long, the adverts are half way through the show, and in general I don’t feel that they’re filling time to fill one and a half hours of podcast time.

Plenty of other podcasts last for an hour and a half or more, which if you listen to one episode a week is okay, but I don’t do that. I find a podcast that I like and I listen to the most recent episodes and then I listen to them in chronological order. This takes a lot of time, but it also provides me with an evolutionary appreciation of how things have changed.

I want to listen to them in chronological order because I feel that they provide me with a timeline of what changed, when, and how people reacted to those challenges, as well as how this made them feel.

There are occasions where I skip episodes, either because I don’t like the topic, especially for Linux Extra. In one case I got annoyed because they spoke about “We weren’t taught A in school” or “we weren’t taught b in school”. I was never taught how to use a computer. I learned by trial and error, after trial and error, after trial and error. I learned by RTFM if I got stuck, but also by experimenting. I only RTFM if I get stuck.

Online Learning

I have paid for Lynda.com which then became Linkedin Learning and I have paid for courses on Udemy and Coursera but that’s courses that I chose to study, rather than formal tuition.

Self Taught Editing

I was never taught how to use Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premiere, or Avid Media Composer. I learned by having a PC with Adobe Premiere on my computer at home. I learned to edit tape to tape on a DHR-1000 editing deck. I learned to edit with FCP because that’s what we had at uni. I don’t remember whether we had it in Weymouth and Harrow, or just Harrow. It’s two decades ago.

With Avid I spent half a day trying to figure out how to do a simple edit. I eventually figured out that you mark in where you want a video to end and out where you want the next one to start, cut, and then your edit is done. It’s the type of editor where you do everything with keyboard shortcuts so it’s very fast, once you learn how to use it.

That’s why I hate the notion of “I wasn’t taught it at school so I don’t know how it works. I experimented with Linux in the 90s because Windows was constantly getting virused, so I eventually switched to Linux, and then windows, to linux, to mac, and then back to Linux.

Sunset Mac Book Pro

In Autumn of this year my Mac will no longer be supported by Apple. It already isn’t supported for Final Cut Pro X. I can use an older version, but no longer the latest versions.

NixOS and PhotoPrism

Recently I heard plenty of mentions of NixOS in one podcast so I installed and experimented with the OS and it took a while for me to be able to do anything but eventually, yesterday, I got PhotoPrism to work. I installed mysql/MariaDB and PhotoPrism, but I had to setup mariaDB to play nicely with PhotoPrism. I had to do that part manually. Eventually an old HP laptop running NixOS was running PhotoPrism and I was able to transfer photos from my mobile phone to the laptop and it felt extremely fast, compared to the same experiment on a Pi 4 and Pi5.

And Finally

In the past when listening to other podcasts I have found that they are more enjoyable. They’re shorter. They’re edited, and they have fewer adverts. As you get up to date with podcasts adverts become longer, and more intrusive. I stopped listening to a few podcasts just because I got so tired of listening to adverts. I could skip them, but when you’re walking you don’t want to skip the first minute or two.

At the moment I find that I learn a lot from a variety of podcasts about Linux, and if they’re half an hour long then that’s perfect. My walks are one and a half hours long. It’s because they have less time for off topic chatter in short podcasts.

The Nicest Pi Setup Yet

The Nicest Pi Setup Yet

Byrichard

There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.

Over a few weeks I have experimented with installing Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi OS on several Pis and then added docker containers, and tried installing straight to the system. In the process I have iterated and iterated until I developed an effective work flow. Yesterday I spent an hour or two preparing an Ubuntu SD card, snap installing Nextcloud, and then docker, and then Photoprism, Immich, Home assistant and maybe one or two other apps. I also set photoprism to boot automatically at start up. When I tried to do the same with Immich it failed. In the end I settled for a shell script, thanks to Chat GPT help.

I kept a copy of the 48 commands I got to setup the system but ignored the trial and error part, for now. Ideally I should setup a script that can do this configuration automatically. I would install ubuntu, boot it up, and then run the shell script to install what I want automatically, so that a system is quick and easy to setup.

Centralised

Initially I had one Pi per service/server. This gave me the freedom to experiment with one service/server without destroying everything else. As I began to understand how the apps/services/servers work I was able to move them together on the same machine and have them run side by side. I go from needing several Pis with dedicated roles to a single Pi that can do it all, if I feel like centralising everything. Before I centralise everything I want to be able to migrate the logs and data from several apps to a central point.

I like that Home Assistant has weather data for several weeks. Part of the learning process is learning to move data between systems without losing their history.

And Finally

By installing a system, and then re-installing it over and over I learn with each iteration, and with each iteration I see something that could be improved so I improve it. Eventually I get a work flow that is fluid and does what I want with relative ease. I kept those 48 lines of commands so that when I do this again I can refer to my “notes” rather than several pages from two or three sites, and Chat GPT. That I managed to install Immich and Homestation counts as a success, because I had tried and failed to install both of them recently.

Almost Linear Walks

Almost Linear Walks

Byrichard

Twice in the last two weekends I have done linear rather than circular walks. By linear I don’t mean that I walked from A to B. I mean that I started walking along a loop but when I saw that the routes I wanted to walk were either crowded by couples or people with dugs I will either turn around, or walk across a field to a parallel path that is less crowded.

Busy Weekends

Yesterday I went for my walk. I don’t like walking on weekends, especially sunny warm weekends because that’s when people who don’t walk alone are walking their dogs or with others. It reminds me of my solitude. I also got into the habit of avoiding people during the pandemic, and the pandemic never ended, so I never went back to walking the same paths as others.

Walking Fast

I walk fast, very fast. Nothing says that I have to walk a loop for every walk. Plenty of people walk outwards, along one path, and walk along the same path. Their walks are just a straight line, back and forth. I just got into the habit of walking loops because loops are quite a bit longer than linear walks. They’re also more interesting.

The need for an Easier Walk

The thing I don’t consider enough is fatigue. I believe that I build up fatigue, from walking up to eight kilometres a day, every single day. I could have walked my ten kilometre loop yesterday but I didn’t feel that I had the energy. It’s when you’re tired, and need a rest day that it’s good to go back and forth, rather than push. I still got 10,000 or more steps and I still walked further than most people. It’s just that it wasn’t much by my standard. A rest day is one where I go for a slightly shorter walk than usual.

The Lure of the Project

It’s not just that it’s the weekend, that makes me want to skip my walk. It’s also that I’m task driven. I am currently working on consolidating all of my media drives but this is time consuming, and every time I leave it unattended a messsage pops up, that I need to agree to, before it continues working. If I go for a one and a half hour walk and a message pops up ten minutes into my walk, when I am not there to agree, then the system waits for my return, and I’m stuck with one hour and 20 minutes of transfers.

If I followed my key desire I would just skip the walk but the walk is important for my eyes. They need to focus into the distance, and I need to stay healthy.

And Finally

If my habits weren’t so consistent veering from them would be normal. It is because I am consistent that I feel bad for turning around, rather than walking my usual loop. Fitness wise it’s still a one hour walk, but it’s just shorter than if I walked my loop.

Today is a weekday so I will do my normal walk loop.

Exploration on Foot

Exploration on Foot

Byrichard

Walking is an easy activity. You put your shoes on, and you go for a walk. Sometimes you walk from home. Other times you walk from a car park. Sometimes you walk along rivers that are full, and others you walk along streams that are almost dry.

A few years ago I did the same Via Ferrata by a waterfall two or three times within a few weeks because I liked it so much. The beauty of waterfalls is that sometimes they’re erupting with power. They’re roaring and sending a mist of water outwards. Other times they’re running dry and you can really get a good look at the underlying rock beneath.

Yeesterday I walked in a different region than usual so we explored. We walked a little bit, and then to decide to go a little further, and then a little further again. In the end it was an 8km loop.

For the most part the walk was about walking along the indications from L’I’sle to Le Puits and then on to Montrichet, and then back. For the outward journey we followed the paths, but for the return I wanted to explore if there was a secondary path.

The secondary path led along a path, until you hit some woods. You could head down, back towards a road, or you could head upwards and then across a field. At this field there was a lot of water flowing so it required finding clumps of grass not to submerge shoes and soak socks. This time my feet stayed dry.

The reason for exploring a secondary route is simple. I like my walks to be loops, rather than a bounce. I like to walk in a circle so that my outward and homeward legs are different. Yesterday’s walk could have been a loop but it would have required walking along either of two main roads, and main roads are not designed for people to walk alongside them, which I think is a shame.

When you walk three to five kilometres it is easy to find loops that do not expose you to cars, but once you walk across several villages you have to walk along roads, and deal with traffic. It’s because I like long walks that I encounter so much traffic. With short walks I would encounter dog walkers and normal people, with normal lives.

I have cycled around where I walked yesterday. On foot you more. You can look through windows. You can stop to read signs. You can go to look at the collection of books that are available in lending libraries. You also get a feel for the ondulations of the landscape.

And Finally

I tracked this walk with my old Apple Watch and a casio. The casio tracked the entire walk, via the phone, without issues. The Apple Watch ran out of power without saving the walk, so I lost the track with that device. I am frustrated by this. If I wear a watch, I don’t want it to lose my track.

Pi-Holes and Cloud Syncing

Pi-Holes and Cloud Syncing

Byrichard

Two evenings ago I was trying to sync files from Kdrive to the local drive and it kept getting blocked. I wasn’t clear as to why this was happening until I saw that Pi-Hole had throttled the IP address of the computer that was attempting to sync from Kdrive. It did this one in the morning, and the second time in the evening.

I suspected that for some reason the computer might go to sleep when it isn’t used, but a Pi doesn’t sleep, so that wasn’t it.

Temporarily Disable Pi-Hole

When I disabled blocking by the Pi-Hole and tried to sync once again it worked flawlessly. It took hours but the data was transferred from the remote machine to the local machine over the next twelve hours, or so.

Rate Limiting by Pi Hole

Pi-Holes will tolerate up to 1000 requests per minute from a device under normal circumstances. Usually a system would make a few dozen requests at a time depending on the website being visited. When you’re synching gigabytes of files via a cloud client it might send several thousand requests as it receives requests, and provides status updates on whether packets are received and when to send the next one. This is a generalisation. I could not find specifics for Kdrive.

The Wrong Assumption

Aside from considering a computer going to sleep and stopping data transfer I also considered that the cloud provider would throttle download queries, and speed. When I tried to download data from iCloud I did encounter a similar problem and when I tried from one or two other providers I seemed to have the same problem.

 Interesting to Know

When I tried to download several 2 gigabyte files manually with the Raspberry Pi I found that it sometimes saturated its 8 gigabytes of ram before slowing down to a crawl. It doesn’t like downloading large files in bulk. I came across this bug several times.

And Finally

In normal circumstances cloud synching is a few files at a time, rather than several hundred gigabytes at once, so you don’t run into this issue. If this was a normal situation then I would modify Pi-Hole to have a higher rate limit, but for now I will leave it as it is.

Nextcloud and the Open Web

Nextcloud and the Open Web

Byrichard

Two evenings ago I played with setting a No-ip host, setup the Swisscom router to make a Pi available in the DMZ so that I could access the apache server and Nextcloud from the open web and it worked. I had it all done within 15-20 minutes. Now for those with the “But why nextcloud?” the answer is simple. It offers two factor authentication and it is trusted by various EU institutions and governments. It is also trusted by Geneva but I don’t remember by whom, at this point.

Multiple Hacks Due to Vulnerable Apps

I have had a website and web presence on the web since 97 or so but in recent years some of my older projects, but also WordPress, were repetitively hacked to the point that I deleted all the old projects that I had on the site because they made my website vulnerable to attack. Several times my website was locked and I had to spend several hours, or even days to restore access. After a few experiences I streamlined recovery, but I also increased security. Now all my accounts have two factor authentication and each site has a different password.

PhotoPrism Unvetted

In theory PhotoPrism would be fun to have on the open web, because I could upload images, and share them more easily. The drawback is that I haven’t RTFMed (Read the fabulous manual) on two factor authentication for PhotoPrism.

WP and NC Two Factor Authentication

WordPress and NextCloud are both designed with the option for two factor authentication so those are the two sites that I have running. For a while I thought “but if I run it through the tailscale VPN that’s good enough for me” and it is. I’m happy to block off full access to these services, so that only I, and those I share these devices with have access but at the same time it’s good to learn and to experiment.

Easier than Expected

I expected that punching a hole through the server would be complicated but it was easy. I intuitively knew what to do without RTFM. I should add that I have spent the last three years studying related topics so “intuitive” means “put in the hours”.

Firewalled

I also set up UFW the morning before attempting this experiment and I tested whether I had SSH access from the World Wide Web. It’s when I saw that I didn’t that I setup two factor authentication. If that wasn’t the case I would have deleted the no-ip address.

The Advantage of the Open Web

The advantage of having the servers on the open web is that I can share links to files more easily when required to do so. It also means that I can backup photos whilst I’m out, without having to log in through the VPN.

The disadvantage is that I need to verify that my setup is secure and I need to spend time checking that SQLi attacks, among others are not possible. I added wordfence for the WordPress install and brute force protection and two factor authentication to NextCloud. Having done these things I still want to do some more research to ensure that the sites are secure on that one server.

The VPN Advantage

The VPN advantage is that I control access and it’s behind security protocols put in place by Tailscale. It should be harder for people to gain malicious access.

And Finally

Now that I have seen how simple it is to make a home server available to the World Wide Web, rather than hidden behind a VPN I might setup a smaller instance with less storage that is setup to back up photos and videos while I’m hiking and walking, but that would be emptied and moved to a more secure instance within my personal network.

Time for more experimentation.

Kdrive and PhotoPrism

Kdrive and PhotoPrism

Byrichard

Yesterday I configured PhotoPrism to work with my iPhone photo album that was being synced to Infomaniak’s Kdrive, before then being synced to a drive that I could access via the Photoprism docker-compose config file. I then used No-ip to make that PhotoPrism instance available to the world wide web.

For several years I have had an Infomaniak Kdrive account but did not use it much, until I noticed that what costs 100 CHF with Google Drive costs 67 CHF with Kdrive. That’s a 34 CHF franc saving.

Migrating Data from Google to Infomaniak

This is interesting because of two things. The first one is that you can easily migrate your Google Photos Albums to Kdrive, and from Kdrive to your local machine without having to spend hours doing so manually. I am in the process of migrating from Kdrive to my local drive, for my Google Takeout album but this is slow.

What worked well was telling Kdrive to download the iPhone photo album from the Kdrive cloud to my local machine. I then edited the docker-compose config file but it took some trial and error before I understood how it works. It’s simple.

Telling PhotoPrism Where to Look

In my mind it should be “label: destination” but this is wrong. With Photoprism config files it is destination: label. To explain this more clearly: 

volumes:
 - "/mnt/photos:/photoprism/originals"
 - "/mnt/videos:/photoprism/originals/videos"

“mnt/photos” is the folder location and “photoprism/originals” is the label that docker and photoprism recognise. This is important because when you understand this you can set an external drive to be the photo gallery main drive, run index, and catalogue everything.

Ingesting Photos and Videos

If you export your Google Photos albums via Google Takeout, you can unzip the 2 gigabyte files, and as they unzip the files and their related JSON files are all brought together. Tell PhotoPrism that the Google Takeout folder is the import folder. After this mark “move files once ingested” and press import. PhotoPrism will then ingest all those files, delete what has already been ingested, catalogue everything, and leave you with an organised folder of photos and videos.

The indexing stage is very fast but can still take time, depending on album size.

The Next Step

There are two possible next steps. The first is to access this gallery from anywhere using tailscale, or using No-IP to access your photo album remotely. I recommend tailscale for this stage, because I haven’t seen much information about how secure PhotoPrism is so I’d rather not risk it.

I setup no-ip before telling my router about it and within a few minutes I had access to PhotoPrism and Nextcloud via No-Ip. I will write about that experiment tomorrow.

And Finally

When you’re playing with linux, and experimentating with projects like PhotoPrism you need to take time to understand how they work, to adapt them to your use case. I did this. Now I can get PhotoPrism to behave as I want it to. Now I can use external hard drives, and index photos, without having to import them. Within minutes I can plug in a drive, tell PhotoPrism where to find it, index it, and then use it.

If it had two factor authentication and more security measures then I would consider having it on the cloud, but for now I’m happy to use it via Tailscale’s VPN, as this is more secure.

Experimenting With the Pi5

Experimenting With the Pi5

Byrichard

The Raspberry Pi 5 is twice as powerful as previous Pis according to various sources. For the last 24 hours I have been using a Pi 5 running Ubuntu and the experience has been good. Despite being a small computer it feels as comfortable as some of the computers I have been using.

The Pi 5 feels comfortable

I have loaded several webpages at once, in various tabs, tried importing images via photoprism, whilst writing this blog post and running VS Code. So far I feel that a Pi running Ubuntu can run Nextcloud, PhotoPrism and be used to write a blog post simultaneously.

I struggled with installing VS Code but that was due to not being used to dealing with Debian packages. That was quickly resolved and that’s how I am able to experiment with blogging from a Pi 5.

The Fan Gets Quieter After the First Boot.

After the first boot the Raspberry pi 5 was noisy, with the fan running at full power until I rebooted it. On the second boot the fan started to vary in strength according to what I was doing. If you’re doing something intensive, like indexing and importing photos to photoprism then it will be noisy, but if you’re writing a blog post it will be quiet.

FrontMatter is Faster Than on a 2016 Mac Book Pro

What I especially like is that Front Matter, on a 2016 mac book pro is slow to load. On the Pi it loads all the posts within a few seconds. It helps that I moved all 2023 posts to the archive.

The point remains that if you want to write blog posts in Markdown for Hugo to generate static web pages then the Pi 5 8GB is fine.

Remembering the Recent and Distant Past

In 2008 or so I bought an EEEpc for about 300 CHF and it was relatively crap. In 2020 or so I bought a Chrome Book and it was fine for web surfing but costs about 270 CHF or so. With the EEEpc you could feel that the machine was underpowered, cheap, and huge, mainly for the battery to fit on the back. The keyboard was tiny so you had to re-learn to touch type on this device.

With the Chrome Book you have a simple laptop but not much freedom so it’s good for web browsing, but not much more, in my experience. I didn’t experiment with running it with the Linux features enabled.

Small And Light Weight

With the Pi 5 you have a computer that could fit into the small pouch of a Domke satchel. With an aluminium apple keyboard teathered by a power cable, and a mouse, you can use the Pi 5 and forget that you’re using such a small and relatively small computer.

It isn’t portable. It doesn’t have batteries, or a keyboard, or anything else, but when it’s plugged in it works well for web browsing, and hosting docker containers, and running VS Code, for blogging at least. If you’re a writer then the Pi 5 could be enough.

Bluetooth Tethering

I tried pairing a bluetooth rapoo keyboard and that worked as well. Just open the bluetooth tab, tell the keyboard you want to tether by pressing the pairing button, find it on the Pi, type in the pin, and you’re tethered. This means that you can keep the ports free for hard drives or other items.

Power Adaptor

I tried using a Pi 4 power adaptor and it worked but said that it would restrict the amount of power third party devices could draw from it. The Pi 4 has a 15W power adaptor whereas the Pi5 has a 27W adaptor.

Laptop Replacement

My Mac Book Air is old and needs replacing. By Autumn of this year it will no longer be supported by Apple. That’s why I didn’t bother to replace the battery a few weeks ago when I was considering giving it another two years of life.

I was playing with an H Elite Book recently. I have cooled to this machine because it has killed two USB devices. It killed a hard drive and a USB stick. Due to this realisation I think I will use it for experimentation, and nothing more. I don’t mind that it killed the old USB stick because I expected that it was already dead when I found it after it had been dormant in a drawer for years. When it killed the SSD I didn’t know whether the drive had died because it was cheap so I was worried for it’s twin which I am using photoprism with at the moment.

I’m happy that it’s the USB port that killed the drive, rather than a faulty drive, but I would prefer not to kill any more devices. I don’t trust the right USB port not to kill it’s own USB devices, if given the chance.

I will install NixOS on that machine and experiment with it.

And Finally

Although I bought the Pi 5 to work as a server I have realised that it can be used as a desktop for web browsing, playing video and more. I like that the Pi 5 has a fan that speeds up, or slows down, depending on how intense the work load is. This means that it can be quieter when you do simple tasks. I feel that it could replace my 1600 CHF eight year old mac book pro, with relative ease.

I should try to run kdenlive.

I’m happpy with the Pi 5, so far, after a day of experimenting.