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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • As far as analogies go, is pretty far off. It doesn’t hold even for basic behaviors of the two cases, let alone complex ones. A better analogy would be that you buy a (small) car that always happens to come with an included, free trailer for more cargo capacity. You can of course take it off and have a small car. And it’s also as magic trailer that doesn’t take up any space at all when not in use, but can also not be sold.

    I’m actually not a fan, an am also using it somewhat reluctantly personally, though self hosted. I’ve had my issues with it, but an still using it because it solves some issues that are much harder to solve without it. I’m not using the contacts/calendar functionality.

    But your original statement was that you couldn’t understand who would need calendar and contacts (in their file sharing app). There’s enough I object to in this statement that I wrote my comment. First of, in this context, specifically in their article/blog/whatever, it’s about nextcloud as a whole, not the fact that it can do file sharing. That’s what it evolved from, but not all it is any more, more better or worse. Secondly, it’s about an advertised alternative to O365, which includes the very common and almost universal requirement for teams (be it a company, family, …) to have events (=calendar) like schedule meetings with people (=contacts). Even if you work with just like 5 people you are probably gonna need that. There you probably want to share files, but probably more so it’s about the office functionality and collaborative, simultaneous editing of files. Obviously replacing Word, PowerPoint, Excel. And yes, Outlook (calendar,& contacts, also email).

    This isn’t meant for individuals who need a few GB to store some files. It’s for teams of some description that need office like, cloud based tools.


  • Your analogy doesn’t make any sense, so I assume you really don’t know. So let me explain:

    If you buy a 4wd, it’s always a 4wd, usually that means s relatively large vehicle. You might be able to turn it to 2wd, but it doesn’t make the car smaller. If you just needed a tiny car in all (or most cases), you can’t push a button to make it smaller. You always drive around the extra equipment to possibly make it 4wd.

    Nextcloud is plugin based. Assuming this isn’t locked away on an instance like this, you can literally push a button and make that whole functionality go away everywhere. You can fully remove that ‘clutter’, if that’s of no use to you. They are offering it always, as it adds no additional effort on the hosters side: they don’t need to add gear boxes or whatever to make it have calendar & contacts. If you don’t want/need it, turn it off and it’s gone.





  • Doing the calculation isn’t hard. It’s harder to know how much energy (be it electricity, gas, or whatever) you actually use. It also varies wildly with meals, as some need multiple stove tops (is that the right term?), possibly for varying lengths of time and/or the oven.

    Please note that you can not really deduce the energy consumption from a power rating, as those usually are max values and not what it’ll actually need.

    I have good enough energy monitoring that I can measure the usage (sort of), and having rather high electricity cost at around 0.40 €/kWh I do pay some attention to it. Running the oven for like an hour will be roughly 1€. Boiling water for pasta or something is probably more like 20 ct (includes cooking the pasta). Just using a lid actually helps a lot here if you make use of a lower power setting after reaching a boil and putting in the pasta.

    It’s gonna have to be a very elaborate meal to break 3€. So while it does matter and add up, compared to buying fully prepared food from a restaurant, it isn’t that dramatic even with very high energy prices like these.

    Cooking appliances use a lot of power, but they don’t run for whole days at a time, so the energy used also isn’t that dramatic. There’s a relatively recent video by technology connections that goes into detail, and might be of interest (link).










  • I disagree with those saying that you can’t do a build for that budget, but I would suggest looking into used parts, at least for some things, to improve the result significantly.

    Since your system goal doesn’t seem to be storage related, as nextcloud includes storage obviously, but typically isn’t used to house multi-terabyte data sets. So assuming you can make that work for the “future homelab projects” to with dual 500gig NVME as storage. Search for a used mITX board+CPU that can accommodate that (has the slots), and go from there. Things like CPU cooler, if not part of a possible mainboard+CPU bundle, should be selected after the case at that is the limiting factor for it. Didn’t skimp on RAM size if you can (new or used is fine, depends what you can get in your area).

    With this list you’re basically done to get it up and running.





  • The CPU is perfectly happy sitting at 50°C. It is slightly happier at 30, but it doesn’t actually help in any way unless you run into throttling, or run (much) hotter for longer. It’s fine.

    Some might state that the CPU is probably gonna live longer, but seriously have you ever had a CPU die on you cause it was old (or even die at all, even)? Again, it’s fine.

    Having something that mostly agitates the air (not even really moving it) like a low-hundreds-rpm fan would also work. As would using one of those passive heat pipe coolers that are also overkill (especially with a fan, but just leave that off), but have the same “number looks better” effect.