nixusg

Solar power works very well in summer and can be used for cooling.

For a period I was a digital nomad and stayed in a few cities for ~1 month each. Airbnb allowed us to immerse ourselves in the local neighborhoods and get a real feel for the places. If I had to stay in a hotel for that same period I probably would have chosen a different destination.

Paris was not one of the places we stayed though.

So to provide some real numbers I just did this with a dishwasher. The circulation pump broke on a 4 year old dishwasher and would cost around $180 to repair but a new one with a 5 year guarantee would cost $350. Given the repairs came with no such guarantee and the price different was not too crazy we just got the new one. FYI: Prices converted from South African Rand.

A couple months ago I setup an old Android phone to be a 3G hotspot for some ESP8266 devices. It also created a SSH reverse tunnel so that I could access the devices from the internet. After rooting the phone, compiling autossh & nginx and getting the whole system setup, the phone broke. At this point it was cheaper and way easier to just get a RasberryPi with a 3G dongle. So unless you have lots of the same old phone lying around this can be a lot more work than the alternatives. Using something like http://janos.io/ may have made things a bit easier but device support was an issue.

Just adding some ram is also not so easy in an embedded system.

Lower birth rates? Short term economic pain of a graying population for a long term gain.

South Africa is down too.

One more reason to have your own IP addresses.

For those heading to Cape Town at any point there are fellow HN readers living here that you can contact if you need any information.