I’m feeling very lucky now!

We have a national grid that is shared by all power companies, and is open to all. Power companies just buy and sell power on the grid based on a spot pricing system. Because of this, we have very easy movement between power companies, and have dozens to choose from, leading to a lot of competition. Mine is a tiny company that specialises in solar, having sell to grid rates well above most companies.

The company that did our solar install had their top recommended companies, they worked out the best for us, and organised getting set up with them. Was I pretty nice experience to have everything taken care of like that!

Interesting! Your power seems super expensive.

We pay a daily lines maintenance charge of 60c, then 29c/kWh during the day and a little under 27c for off peak night time. Then add 15% tax to these. These are in NZD, so almost halve them to get USD (e.g. 60cNZD is 35cUSD)

We also get about 17.5c for each kWh sold to the grid. So to sell it in the day and buy back at night is a 10c additional cost. A 10kWh battery can save a max of $1 per night, meaning it’s really hard to make your money back on a battery that’s $10-15k NZD on it’s own.

What an odd pricing structure! I would normally expect higher usage to mean lower prices per unit.

I guess that gives you a large incentive to have at least a little solar, as there would be a big financial benefit.

Wait, it gets more expensive when you use more?

Net metering is potentially better, as you are effectively getting free night usage based ob day generation. My setup pays me, but I get paid 20c per Kw (NZ dollar) and pay about 30c to buy, so there’s a 10c difference. Just as long as whatever you lose on 31st Dec is not too high, you’d be better off than me.

I recently got a solar system and came to the conclusion that if you can sell power back to the grid (not everyone can) for some reasonable percentage of what it costs to buy it, then it will always be worth it to be connected (assuming you already are).

Quite simply, if you have enough solar capacity to get you through the winter (no house is going to have months of battery storage), then you will always be creating far more than you need in the summer. Selling this excess will easily cover any costs associated to being on the grid.

Also at current prices batteries are good for backup power only, it’s always cheaper to sell excess power to the grid in the day and buy it back at night than it is to have battery capacity to get through the night. I worked out it would take 40 years for our battery to pay for itself (assuming the battery kept a constant battery capacity for 40 years…) but less than 10 years for the rest of the system to pay for itself.

Made up spellings are bad, but good luck searching for anything that isn’t a made up spelling or two words put together.

I think versioning is the better option.

are you writing about losing the backUp drive?

No, losing your main version. Imagine you have a computer with syncthing and a server where it syncs to. If you chose no deletions, then it will sync all files to the server but all the stuff you deleted (draft documents, random files, photos from that time your kid held the camera button on your phone down and took 3000 photos in 30 seconds) will be deleted from your computer but still there on your server.

When you computer gets struck by lightning and everything is destroyed but the server is fine, now you have to re-sort out all your files because all the stuff you deleted is still on the server version.

Your suggestion of enabling the option to keep previous versions is probably cleaner. Personally I prefer to keep previous versions and deduplicate to save space.

Yes, if you go with something like syncthing, have it also sync to a server where you run borg backup so you get the incremental backup.

Yip you can do that but then it’s messy! And what if you overwrite a file by accident?

And if you do lose your hard drive then you have a weird state to restore from.

I’d much prefer the ability to restore to a point in time that comes with something like borg.

Remember sync isn’t a good backup. You’re thinking of loss of drives but if this is important data you need to also consider mistakes.

If you accidentally delete files you shouldn’t, you don’t want this deletion to sync to all your copies so it’s gone for good and the backup doesn’t help.

Personally I use borgmatic to keep incremental, deduplicated backups. Then I can go back to previous states.

If you install nextcloud all in one, it comes with a backup solution (also borg based). Then devices don’t need a copy of every file. But you’ll want your server to have a backup drive for this.

I then sync my borg backup to a backblaze b2 bucket for offsite, encrypted backup using rclone. That then meets the 3 2 1 backup plan.

I notice you mention Jellyfin. I don’t back up my Jellyfin media, the cloud storage for that could get very expensive and I could get it again if I needed it.

Yeah cause my work computer limits onedrive storage to like 100mb and downloads is one if the only places where I have write access and it doesn’t go to onedrive.

I think PieFed has only recently got an API for apps to connect to, hence the surge.

No that’s expected, as part of your profile info. But if the original authors delete the comments, then they will also be deleted in your saved items.

Yes with ActivityPub there’s always failed federation. But Lemmy will send the delete request out when you delete your account. Other software or instances might not honour it, but the intent is there.

As opposed to reddit who do not remove comments when an account is deleted, only mark it as a comment from a deleted account.

I’m not against Lemmy’s implementation, but it does require you to collect information you need at the time not assume it will always be there.

Bookmarks won’t help if the content gets removed. You’ve got to copy the important information elsewhere.

I tend to use either a note app (Joplin) or a self-hosted wiki for that.

Are you literally just wanting to see the location of family members?

If you’re a self-hoster there are options, and that’s pretty much the only way you can know it’s private.

Two that come to mind are:

The PhoneTrack NextCloud app. If you run Nextcloud you can install this in nextcloud, then install a location logger on the phones. I’m more familiar with Android which has options but from a search I think OwnTracks can send to Nextcloud and supports iOS and Android (someone reported their iOS success here).

Home Assistant let’s you see locations of people on a map that is tracked with the Home Assistant mobile app on Android/iOS.

I have found uLogger or the old PhoneTrack app (that connect to GPS on a schedule) to be more accurate than apps that rely on Google telling them when the location has changed (Home Assistant and I think Owntracks). But also much more of a battery drain.

So it depends how often you want the location to be updated. I find running uLogger or PhoneTrack on the phone actually makes Home Assistant get location updates much quicker(I run both for different reasons).

Deleting your account deletes your content, unlike deleting your Reddit account. Hence the linkrot.

I learnt pretty early on that saving posts using the save button was not a good way to save the information 😮‍💨

Many of the .ee communities are in the process of migrating, so hopefully the list can be updated with their new homes.

2 years for me as well!