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Comment by Xoros | Hacker News Reader

So the choices stated are Google or Google or Google ?

Nah, gonna keep my rapsberries.

Rpi's have their own drawbacks. I'm beginning to worry I am purchasing new pi's for collecting rather than practical reasons.

It's started for me too. I just got a Pi Wireless Zero and I stumbled trying to explain to my misses what particular reason I purchased. I think I sounded like a sales engineer because I mumbled something like "Cloud", "Decentralized Internet" and Bitcoin. She just walked away.

You have to admit that being able to just reach into your desk drawer and pull one out whenever you need a computer for <insert thing> is super nice.

My problem is that I never seem to have an available microSD to go with my unused rPis.

Set up a RPi to flash disk images via a USB SDcard hub! I got tired of keeping track of the cards so I threw a small pile of them in the drawer and a script to pick from the handful of images I use & flash them.

Why can't you just spin up a VM?

Like the parent, I tend to use them for servers/services on my LAN at home. So a VM on DigitalOcean or Vultr etc. would be on the wrong side of the firewall, and a VM on one of my 'real' computers wouldn't be available 24/7 since they are often sleeping. Plus it's nice be able to hook sensors to the GPIO pins.

Yeah, I can't bring myself to "upgrade" to a RPi3 since I know my threshold for a desktop I might regularly use is 2gb in 32bit. Upgrading to a RPi2 was a pretty marginal benefit while I'm just playing with GPIO via ssh.

Some of the clones look better but the community is too biased toward the RPi brand.

What are the rpi clones that look better?

The one I'm considering is orangePi, for example, their 2plus is available with 2gb.

Everything bellow that is probably going to be headless and then the only meaningful differentiator for me is physical ethernet.

I have 4 Pi's running in my flat, they're great!

I have 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running docker that has the following containers running

- A service I wrote to control my TV

- A service I wrote that sends commands to a smart plug that turns my lamp on and off (I can then invoke it via curl and have setup Alfred workflows so I can do it from my mac)

- GOGS to store private code repos and mirror ones on github

- ZNC (IRC bouncer)

- A service I wrote to present a dashboard of common things I like to glance at (e.g. twitter feed, pocket, pinboard, the weather etc)

- A service I wrote that hooks up to Twilio to manage my voicemail

- Portainer (a gui for managing docker containers)

- A docker registry to store my custom images

I have another Raspberry Pi 3 running Pi-Hole to block internet advertisements at the DNS level

Then I have a Raspberry Pi 1 (model B) that runs NGINX to act as a reverse proxy to services in my network that I want to be exposed. These are all protected by SSL (LetsEncrypt) and client side certificates authentication. It also runs a service that updates a DNS record on AWS Route53 whenever my IP changes as I don't have a static IP.

Then the last one is this https://github.com/djhworld/blinkt-tube-status I can't take credit for the case etc, but it's super handy in the mornings!

> A service I wrote that hooks up to Twilio to manage my voicemail

Love to learn more about this.

It's very simple at the moment, I have my phone forward all missed calls to a Twilio number, which has a webhook to my service.

The service just says a message to the user, gives them the option to leave a voicemail, then I call the transcription API to try and transcribe the message into an SMS message (sort of like what Google Voice and Apple offers on iPhones but I don't have an iPhone and I believe Google Voice is only available in the US)

I plan to do more with it soon, Twilio's transcription API is a bit rubbish, I think it might be geared towards American accents so it fails quite miserably with British ones with hilarious consequences.

Just wanted to say thanks for mentioning GOGS. Somehow I hadn't heard of this before. It looks perfect for my local private repos.

I lost lots of nerd cred when I bought an intel synology nas, but it is truely a turn-key solution. 20-30W idle, docker, vm's, and I hve it set to do crash consistent offsite backup of all that (and my data) to the cloud. It supports many storage services, vanilla rsync, other synologies, etc.

It also lets me vpn into the house and stream locally stored music / video to my cell phone.

This took a day or so to set up.

Can't recommend it highly enough, but cost / performance / functionality are all > 10x a raspberry pi. The only thing it's missing is hdmi out + retro pi.

Which Synology model did you purchase?

I got the DS916+. If I were buying today, I'd consider the DS1517+ (which has a faster cpu, can be upgraded to 10GBit, and supports m.2 slots for flash cache).

These are the high end home/smb choices. You can go much cheaper and get 90% of the functionality from other synology models.

Thank you for the response!

My thoughts exactly. I keep seeing posts in Hacker News promoting Google Cloud through innocent looking blogs. Do not know if that was the case here, but there was another also from Australia, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14809102

I'm pretty sure the platform can hold its own being a Google product and all, but this reads a lot like the posts from Microsoft MVPs back in the day.

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