Dave.

Something like a raspberry pi or equivalent, and use reverse SSH set up to connect to a server with a known address on your end.

This means that ports don’t need to be opened on their end.

Also if you go with a gateway host, shift SSH to a randomised port like 37465, and install fail2ban.

I don’t think there’s anything commercially available that can do it.

However, as an experiment, you could:

• Get a group of photos from a burst shot
• Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
• See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
• See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.

True. Hence my caveat of “most cards”. If it’s got LEDs on the port, it’s quite likely to signal which speed it is at with those LEDs.

I haven’t yet come across a gigabit card that won’t do 10Mbit (edit: switches are a different matter) but sometimes I’ve come across cards that fail to negotiate speeds correctly, eg trying for gigabit when they only actually have a 4 wire connection that can support 100Mbit. Forcing the card to the “correct” speed makes them work.

For later reference, the link light on most network cards is a different colour depending on link speed. Usually orange for 1G, green for 100M and off for 10M (with data light still blinking).

I have not cared about or terminated A-spec after network cards gained auto MDI/MDIX about 20 years ago.

Yeah , it’s really a little strange in OPs case, I can’t really recall changing a CMOS battery in ages, like decades of computer use.

1. Replace CMOS battery.
2. Get small UPS.
3. Discover that small UPS’s fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
6. Get small generator.
7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

Directly from the nginx home page:

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server, originally written by Igor Sysoev.

Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.

When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.

Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn’t expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you’re not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.

Added edit:

Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You’d want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.

The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can’t read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.

M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn’t use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I’ve got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?

I think we’re going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.

not only claim the right but also apparently claim ownership of any content you publish there, while providing no consideration (payment) in return.

That’s not entirely true.

The payment is hosting your content for free on their servers that provide reasonable uptime and unlimited retention. You can choose to carve out your own place on the internet and post your content on your own hosting if you want, but a lot of people choose Reddit, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, because the tradeoff is agreeable.

2"If we raise prices by 10 percent and make things a little bit shittier, we’ll lose 5 percent of our user base to pirating and the non-tech-savvy users left behind who don’t know how… Well they can just take another 10 percent up the ass next year! It’s win-win!"

I remember helping a teacher at school who had installed a CopyIIPc card on one of our computers. They used it to make everyday copies of the master disks of the copy protected educational software we used in our room full of Sperry IBM compatible PCs.

The card went in between the floppy controller and the drive and could do a pretty good job at duplicating all the physical copy protection tricks of the time.

They copied a lot of stuff, not for pirating reasons but simply because they were literally 5 1/4" floppy disks back then and school kids were not kind to them. Either it was simply jamming them into the drives, or touching the exposed disc surface, or chucking them around the room, those disks didn’t last long.

Chrome mobile put up a pretty good fight. I have been meaning to put Firefox + ublock on my phone, maybe I’ll stop being slack and finally do it today.

Accessing that from my phone shows the actual site content for about 3 seconds and then an endless array of “popup and notification blocked messages” as well as the usual combination of “oh noes your PC has three dangerous viruses click here to resolve” type redirects.

Is this just a cunning way to weed out the normies or can I expect the same kind of thing from their allegedly-excellent app? Because they’re not leaving a good impression right now.