I still have my original Game Boy that was a gift from my aunt and uncle. Still works but I rarely play it; need to find some of my other games for it.

Wow! I’m paying 10.5¢/kWh for electricity at home here in the US; it’s a little below the national average but not dramatically.

I can’t comment on Linux, but IIRC SMB was best for situations needing both Mac and Windows, so I’d guess that’s the choice. Totally off memory, though.

Wait, this app is free, has no ads, and does not give any info to the developer? It seems like it’s basically a hobby, created by a guy who wanted the app and decided to learn how to code so he could write it himself?

I would think something that sends text messages would be hard to implement as self hosted

It even says as much in the bonus text!

I’m using Namecheap but I have had this suspicion that they’re the ones holding it this time. If I could confirm that it would definitely have me looking for another registrar. That feels like it should be against ICANN rules.

I accidentally let my personal domain expire because I was using PayPal with my registrar but they couldn’t use that for auto renew. Someone else bought it but they’re not doing anything with it. I can’t see who owns it because they’re doing a private registration with the same registrar I used, so as far as whois is concerned it’s the same registration it’s always had. This happened once before to me years ago and the people who bought it that time put up a fake YouTube clone in French but I just waited them out and they abandoned it a year later. This has been going on two years now and it still hasn’t been abandoned. It’s not critical to have but it’s annoying that someone’s squatting on it hoping I’ll pay a premium to get it back. It’s not that valuable to me.

Are you looking to measure draw for one specific device or across circuits in your whole home. I’ve been considering two systems: IoTaWatt and Lantern Power Monitor. Both are open source and open hardware.

IoTaWatt uses entirely custom hardware for the actual device but serves its own webpage that can be accessed easily at home from any device and if you’re technically savvy can pass to other services. My reservation with it is if at some point in the future the hardware dies, how easy will it be to recreate if the main project goes dormant, even with the hardware open source? What if a chip manufacturer goes out of business or discontinues a part?

In contrast, the Lantern Power Monitor runs on Raspberry Pi with a relatively basic custom board you can solder yourself with minimal skill; I suspect you could even make it work with a breadboard. Recent shortages notwithstanding, Raspberry Pi seems to keep their models pretty available for a long time, so that inspires a little more confidence. On the flip side, the software primarily runs on a mobile app. There is an iPhone app but it doesn’t have as many features as the Android app. But what happens if the project is abandoned and the app is no longer updated to stay compatible with newer phones or operating systems? And the app by default sends the data to an outside server maintained by the main developer. He doesn’t charge for the hosting and it makes it easy to access from anywhere, but some people might have concerns about that. You can also configure it to self-host from the Raspberry Pi but then you need to have the know-how to make it accessible outside your home (if you want). Underneath it also relies on some other open source data analysis components and I assume if you really know what you’re doing you can pass it out to other software.

Of course, in the end I don’t have the budget to do either project right now.

I actually didn’t know the Pi can do PoE; that gives me some ideas!

This looks interesting; is anyone here using it?

Years ago when my brother lived with me he started ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and running a Plex server that pulled them from a NAS. It worked great on the Xbox in the house. When I got married and he moved out it didn’t work as well, but that probably had more to do with his network connection than anything else. Haven’t even tried in years though.

I remember we bought a third-party controller as an extra for our SNES back when that was a current system, but don’t remember the brand. We got it because it was less expensive than an official controller, but it also quickly became noticeably less reliable.

Were any ever good? Is somebody making good ones now for old systems?