All Linux Things

I went to an estate auction on Saturday with my son. The day before Easter seemed an odd day for an auction. It was chilly and drizzling so there were not many people there. My son wanted to go for a few items that caught his eye in the advertisement. I went for the ride.

Misc Box #4 caught my eye. It contained an Apple Time Capsule, an Apple TV and a few other non tech oddments. Because of the low turn out I assume I got the box for ten bucks. The Apple Time Capsule is a wifi router with hard drive which functions as a NAS. It works well. Reading the specs though I see the input is rated at 110/220V at 1.5 A. That is a lot of power. I need to borrow a power gauge to see exactly how much it uses. The Pi NextCloud just sips power and I am not going to replace it with a real power hog.

The Apple TV uses 6W of power and is a newer model than the one I have. It works well to, and is already in service. I watched Con Air last evening, a real piece of action fluff. A hooting, foot stomping, popcorn tossing 2 hour waste of an evening.

I love checking out yard sales and estate auctions as well as pawn shops. There is so much unique hardware out there for cheap its a shame to see it wasted or thrown out.

I setup the Apple Time Capsule, but have not yet checked on its power consumption. It is pretty nice. I have it setup as its own internal network, with no connection to the outside world. It has 5 gigabit ethernet ports as well as wireless A/C. To access files you first need to login to the device. The drive is encrypted, so to access the file you need to enter the password for the files. Different users can setup their own space and have a different encryption for their space.

Apple has software for Windows and Mac users to more easily access their spaces. Linux requires a couple packages to be installed and the setup is a bit more convoluted, but once it is configured it is as easy to use as just showing up as a network drive in the file manager. Linux users can also encrypt their private file spaces.

Using wireless A/C data can be transferred between the NAS and the computer or between computers @ ~400MB/sec, and since it is an independent network moving data around does not impact any data moving to and from the internet.

I am really hoping that power usage is low and I can keep using it full time.

Im working hard to reduce power usage with all my hardware choices whenever possible. Its partly to save energy but also, the condo has only so much headroom with the electrical service so I have to be careful or Im popping breakers all the time.