Too hot to work

Summer has brought a lot of heat this year, with a dizzying 40 degrees Celsius affecting not only me but also my electronic equipment. To protect the house from catching fire and the server from flying away to warmer climes (the fan was running like a rocket), it has been temporarily turned off – and I was left with a dilemma of what to do next.

Minimum Plan

After turning off the home server, several services automatically stopped working:

• FreshRSS,
• converting YouTube into podcasts,
• recording radio broadcasts,
• my own local Spotify,
• home NAS,
• and the web server.

Most of these are incredibly nice additions to daily life – but nothing strictly essential to function. Nevertheless, I concluded that losing the web server caused the biggest drawback. Therefore, to end the embarrassment, I moved the blog to FROG, which is a free VPS. It is absolutely perfect for hosting simple websites.

Plan for the Future

A year ago, I was very happy with the HP 600 G3 I bought for a small amount of money. Well – a lot has changed since then; a 1TB SSD no longer costs 200 PLN but around 700 PLN, and a used 16GB DDR4 RAM stick costs 200-250 PLN instead of 100 PLN. As you can see, my home server has gained quite some value. All of this calls into question whether it would be better to sell it for parts and head out into the wild buy a used Mac with an M1 processor.

For a relatively small amount of money (up to 1,000 PLN for an M1 Mac Mini or a barebone-like M1 MacBook Air with a broken screen), you can get a powerful and energy-efficient machine. True, I would lose out on RAM and lose Proxmox support – but the experiment would still be well worth the effort. A laptop with a damaged display would also be resilient against brief power outages – could one really ask for more?