For use cases like attaching to an SBC or really any other computer, I'm sure this is great, but there are also USB crash cart consoles that can be gotten pretty cheaply like the NanoKVM-USB[0] or Cytrence's KIWI[1]. This gets you both video, keyboard and mouse.
This is my current pick - simple, works exactly as expected, very small. Only thing I ever fight with is remembering to accept Mac OS's warning about connecting a USB device.
For just video (or w/ separate keyboard/mouse), the Genki Shadowcast devices work really well.
Is there anywhere I can buy a NanoKVM-USB? The page you linked has a 'preorder' page linked, but I'm not sure how long I'd have to wait and whether it's an actual product that people have successfully used.
I use Comet in remote field by plug the ethernet it expects to the laptop. Both will set up the link local IP and accessible in browser without internet
Is there a VGA "story" for these devices? Most of the Dell and HP servers I'm physically proximate to don't have HDMI video. VGA connectors abound on the gear I work with.
I've had poor luck with the couple of VGA-to-HDMI I've ever used over the years (latency, poor video quality) so I guess my question was more "Are there any known-working good adapters for VGA for these?"
Those both look very nice, but I am disappointed that neither lists support for DP alt-mode as an input despite having a type-c port on the input side. If I were to buy such a device, I'd want it be future-proof while also supporting legacy video input like HDMI, but these are legacy-only. Good for my old raspberry pis and my ancient sandybridge NAS, but these days I only buy computers capable of single-cable operation (with exceptions for power cables for power-hungry devices like desktops).
I feel like this is kind of looking a gift horse in the mouth, especially for the cost of these units. Certainly not impossible to add, but an increase in the BOM vs. the loads of off-the-shelf super cheap HDMI capture chips available, and questionable compatibility (DP Alt Mode is getting better, but plenty of devices still have interesting quirks with it depending on implementation). These devices aren't made with daily driving a system in mind so much as for installation and recovery of a system.
Would it be handy to have this all in one cable on both ends? Sure, absolutely, that'd be killer. I personally don't think it's too big of an ask to use two cables in an installation or recovery case though, and if your devices only have USB-C ports for video out, an active USB-C to HDMI via DP-Alt cable can be had to meet that need.
Following the Obsidian model, which I love and support. Give folks the best part of the product, offer a paid option to enhance it, but allow folks to use alternatives as first class options.
This doesn't address everything, but I thought I'd chime on specifically on the chat history question. It's still early days for support from most IRCd's, but IRCv3 has been slowly bringing protocol level support for many of the same features that Slack, Teams (chat), Mattermost, etc. have, including chat history support. It's likely not reasonable for the public IRC networks to ever support history, but for a self hosted IRC server to service your team/company/community/whatever, it would be totally feasible to connect and receive scrollback.
I did not know about IRCv3! These are the HN insights I love. I wonder if IRCv3 is still semi-usable from a raw telnet session like old IRC is? I remember using that in the early 2000s when I wanted to get on IRC but didn't have a real client.
Hack Club is a non-profit community, so the bulk of their user count isn't non-profit employees or even volunteers or mentors, it's a bunch of kids hanging out and making cool stuff.
Maybe that doesn't move the needle on whether they're a small non-profit or not for you, but it's different than a massive non-profit like, say, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which also receives millions of dollars per year to facilitate their mission.
This is a good point to know about. I'm not too sure about how non-profits can be categorized in terms of "small" or "large", but typically when we are talking about SaaS costs, well that would depend on the number of seats or licenses. So for example, the Prevent Cancer Foundation might have millions of dollars in assets per year, they only have 26 employees[0], so in a way, they are a "small" nonprofit compared to others that might have hundreds of employees.
“But why” is an ever present question on Hacker News, with the announcement of Dropbox being rebutted with “But why, we have FTP”.
Not every idea that rethinks an existing system will have the same merit or success of course, but I think it’s fair that sometimes a potential user will say that they think their existing system is fine and that others should adopt it vs consider something new.
Not as little as you'd think, not as widely as it once was. But the reasons for that have little to do with the "but why?"s thrown at it when it was first promoted.
With my v.92 soft modem, I was able to regularly connect at 48k, and sometimes 53.3k. I never connected at theoretical max of 56k.
Worthwhile to also mention that ISDN was full duplex, instead of half-duplex like dialup. The modems on either end would need to time-slice to allow bi-directional communication, which in a TCP laden world like the web meant that every interaction was orders of magnitude more latent than on ISDN, in which you had symmetrical, full-duplex 56k of bandwidth between you and the ISDN modem. That's the biggest reason why you had a significant decrease in latency.
I also vaguely remember there being FCC power limitations on (some?) 56K modems, limiting them to ~53K max. Also, even with a 56K connection, upload speeds were still limited to 33.6K max.
Fortunately, I got cable internet around 1997 and never looked back.
One of the big questions that I haven't seen a compelling answer for re: heat pumps in the US is why heat pumps are so expensive compared to AC exchanges. The amount of equipment differences between an AC and a heat pump are largely a valve to reverse refrigerant flow and the small bit of electronics to control said valve. Yet heat pump units in the US are significantly more expensive for effectively the same COP and operating efficiency ranges as their cooling-only brethren.
I'm a Pulumi user myself, and I haven't seen a Pulumi provider for Incus yet. Once I get further into my Incus experiments, if someone hasn't made an Incus provider yet, I'll probably go through the TF provider conversion process.
[0] https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/kvm/NanoKVM_USB/introduc...
[1] https://www.cytrence.com/product-page/cytrence-kiwi