VPN and have them punch in to a cheap or free cloud instance that acts as a hub router.
You give them a config file and they feed it to their device or router, use a private subnet in the 10.0.0.0/8 range because everyone is on 192.168.1.0/24 and then they just hit it at 10.0.0.1 or whatever.
I like Wireguard but you might have to use something with layer 2 support if you want service discovery to work for true zero config.
Install a modchip, or as we used to call them a “remote starter” lol
I’m sure someone still makes a product that you can splice into the wiring harness. And if they don’t… There’s a market for it
For free tier, Google Cloud is more transparent about what you get than AWS IMO.
The only catch is to make sure your persistent disk is “standard” to make it totally free as it defaults to SSD.
However if you do mess up the disk you’ll still only be paying $1-2/mo. Been using GC for years, and recently they finally started offering dual stack so you can do your own 6to4 tunneling or translation if you want, depends on your usage case.
AirVPN also are legit and will let you forward ports to expose your local services if you’re worried about DMCA type issues.
I finally got IPv6 here through Starlink, it’s nice to have full access to the internet again after a decade behind CGNAT
Ballsy? He’s an outright copyright troll and anyone celebrating him here in the comments should read the article…
He wrote a knockoff book and then tried to claim Tolkien’s characters as his own and sue his estate? Does nobody remember the days of BS software patent trolls trying to claim they invented “the app” or “method for clicking on things with the mouse cursor?” Do we remember how mad we were at those shysters?
This guy deserves whatever he gets.
Personally I live in a very rural location and I farm, so I can spend a lot of time on the road or in my tractor. 1gb wouldn’t get me through a day in the field, so I have a pretty big collection with a lot of variety. We don’t even have reliable FM radio here, so it’s bring your own music or listen to the diesel roar.
We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.
I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.
Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.
However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.
Futurama did it too. Though I remember it being actually funny, without all the associated culture war baggage.
More of a commentary on Bender’s poor impulse control and minimal ethics than on society I would say
You can download from Spotify using Zotify. Albums, playlists, if you set it to Artist unfortunately you will get a bunch of singles and EPs that you have to clean up.
If you have Premium you can download at high bitrates, otherwise you get Ogg Vorbis at around 150 ABR. You can automatically transcode to whatever format you want, then I feed it to beets to catalogue and deliver it with Ampache.
I like the moderate bitrate OGGs myself, as I often stream from Ampache to my phone and our mobile service is quite slow. So this system works great for me.
As the other commenter said, it’s all about depth of discharge. A 10kWh Lifepo4 bank gets you almost 10kWh every time while you should treat a 10kWh lead-acid bank as if it was a 2kWh bank for any sort of decent life, with deep discharges being limited to emergency situations.
All lithium chemistries are practically maintenance free while you are probably familiar with water level monitoring and equalization of lead acid.
Note that all site built lithium banks MUST have a balance mechanism as this is their “automated maintenance”. Without balancing on every charge, lithium cells will be rapidly destroyed.
“Deep cycle” batteries are the best of the lead-acids for the task. But they are still obsolete and you should source lithium if at all practical.
However if power interruptions are short, loads are low or you have an external power source like solar or wind, inferior batteries can do the job.
I use a bunch of old car batteries at my house for my battery bank. It’s more of a big capacitor, but it’s almost always sunny here and kW of solar are pouring in.
My critical equipment i.e. starlink, home and farm automation and monitoring, cell booster and HMI/SCADA only take a couple hundred watts, so no big deal. Most of the solar power goes to keeping the freezers cold.
Zotify works very well at downloading Spotify lists, from playlists to whole discographies. You have to sort the output a little as you’ll often get multiple copies of tracks due to remastered editions, songs released as singles etc. But overall it’s an incredibly easy way to download music.
Honestly I do all my IoT stuff in plain code, it’s actually simpler IMO than trying to use a graphical functional block type interface like NodeRed. And it’s a good way for you to get into coding in a way that you can work with real systems in a fairly safe way.
Check out Python’s MQTT library, you can build an event driven MQTT handler pretty easily. You set a list of topics you want to subscribe to and then when a message arrives it will call the message handling function. You can check the topic/payload and act on it as you want, publish other messages or perform other operations.
I like distributed control systems myself where individual nodes subscribe to each other and communicate directly (through the MQTT broker) when possible, plus a couple Python scripts running on the broker system to coordinate operations that can’t be easily managed that way.
For example an “sundown” topic can be published by a light sensor in the evening, and then either individual lights can subscribe to it and respond, or a script subscribes and iterates through a list of all the lights that are supposed to be on and sends them a power on command. The first option works with custom built endpoints, the second works to integrate Tasmota or similar where several different node devices may exist with different command schema.
Even with external volumes, I don’t think there should be any mechanism where a container can escape a bind mount to affect the rest of the host fs? I use bind mounts all the time, far more than docker volumes.