Is this a good or bad thing?
Is this a good or bad thing?
Biggest cost then would be electric. Older PC, probably…70 watts. So about 600kWh/year. Maybe about between $60-$150 per year.
Much cheaper than any hosting I know and bandwidth costs are absorbed into your monthly bill.
The real risk would be hardware failure. Hopefully you’ll have backups or a user base that won’t care if the instance goes offline for quite a while.
There’s also a risk of unexpected security vulnerabilities letting an attacker compromise your public facing machine to get into your home network if you don’t have it physically firewalled off.
Personally, I’ll just let someone else deal with all the hosting issues. I’d rather donate if they requested than deal with all of that indefinitely.
One concern I have with these things is that device can be built in a way where the batteries can be replaced, but there may not be any batteries available for the device when it’s old enough to require a new one.
Standardized batteries could really help with that, but with small devices often the batteries are custom built.
This is a nightmare scenario.
It’s bad enough when you get something cloud connected and the company disappears, leaving you with expensive e-waste.
Now it’s in your body and you likely have to pay to remove it (plus surgery risks) or leave it there knowing no one will help cover costs if there are complications from it.
😬
Hrm - would you want federated wikis? What’s the benefit vs wikis run independently?
For example, wikipedia has a corner on encyclopedia type knowledge. No reason to federate as the central moderation on Wikipedia seems to work well. To be honest, I wouldn’t trust encyclopedia type information from another wiki site as I don’t know how active the community is there to maintain the accuracy of the information.
Then there’s other wikis I know about like for games (thinking fandom.com) - but again not really a reason to federate between those that I can think of.
To be honest, my gut reaction is that I want fewer wiki sources, not more.
I’m open to suggestions for alternatives for functional part 3D modeling.
I use Fusion 360 because it’s free for hobbyists and it’s features for functional 3D modeling blow away any other software I’ve tried in the open source/free/low cost market.
Fusion 360 handles parameters beautifully, has a very flexible timeline editing system, and generally is very forgiving about how you use the software.
I’d happily pay up to $120/year for hobby use. It’s that good. I can’t afford $600 a year for a hobby tool though.
The closest alternative I know is FreeCAD. It has a notable following, but compared to Fusion it’s slow, clunky, buggy, and fights you every step of the way you use it. In FreeCAD, there is usually one right way to do something, and dozens of wrong ways that all end up with you having to redo tons of work.
TLDR: I’ve created all sorts of useful things in Fusion. All I’ve created in FreeCAD is tears.