Oh, I know, I was more hinting at the probably austrian flag that’s forming next to it. “Keine Angst” is a nice song :)

That sounds awesome! All rays at once? Or one after the other?

Yes, same effect. I’ll just ignore it for now :D As long as everyone else says it’s looking nice I’m fine with it. Just wanted to make sure I’m not missing something

Yep.

I also just found out, that it depends on the settings - the “template style” source and one-to-one look differently to me, and I don’t know which one is supposed to do what

I might be going crazy - is the colour picker getting the colour from the template or the actual value? If it’s from the template, then we might be slightly off colour with the flag of the indigenous peoples of the americas… Or I’m totally missing something.

It’s also kind of annoying, that the templates can be overlapping. Is there a way to get separate templates? (I don’t mean our templates)

I like the idea with the plants! But I’m not sure if I’m capable of coming up with a template

Looking quite good for now. Let’s see where those flags are going 🤨

Almost missed it. I’m doing my part! :D

Thanks!

Damn, that sounds like something to satisfy the doomer in me. Do you happen to have a link?

Hab mich schon gewundert, ob ich was verpasst habe, und das zwischenzeitlich nicht mehr so war. Zeitweise wurde (oder passiert das auch immer noch?) auch tagsüber in ICEs an der grenze kontrolliert

Quite some time ago I found this article somewhere here on lemmy, it tries to cover both sides, i.e. pro-AI and con-AI, with a lot of sources. I still haven’t managed to read through all of them. It provides some very good arguments, while not outright rejecting AI. Granted, it focuses on a lecture, but the arguments still mostly hold, and the sources apply no matter what.

https://emergingethics.substack.com/p/why-were-not-using-ai-in-this-course

Since we’re already drifting off topic - all big tech companies make a lot of money by selling hardware, compute, or some other service to the oil and gas industry, they just don’t go out bragging about it. Before the AI boom the oil and gas industry was among the biggest customers of the tech industry, just a quick search gives:

https://www.amd.com/en/solutions/energy.html

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/energy-resources/oil-gas

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/industries/energy/oil-gas-operations/

https://cloud.google.com/solutions/energy/oil-gas

https://www.ibm.com/industries/oil-gas

https://www.intel.co.uk/content/dam/www/central-libraries/us/en/documents/2025-06/aramco-executive-brief.pdf

All of this sounds great, especially +1 for avoiding unnecessary travel! A lot of people start to drive more once they get an EV, as it’s “more eco-friendly”, in the worst case creating a rebound-effect. It takes willpower and thoughtfulness not to fall into that behaviour

Glad we could be of help :)

Using it as an on-demand machine sounds like the perfect middle-ground! My jellyfin-server is also not running 24/7. Sometimes I think I could as well host jellyfin on the same machine that I’m watching/listening stuff on, as I’m the only one using it. But I started similar as you - I had a machine laying around, and wanted to do something with it.

When it comes to upgrading your machine, which I guess is still years in the future, as you asked for 0$ tips, I’d suggest first seeing how much “compute power” you actually need. People tend to oversize their machines (that also is a problem in data centers [or at least used to be, not sure about AI data centers]), so before you upgrade your machine, check how high its utilization is.

The hill I’m willing to die on is saying that people have too much RAM, and underestimate swap.

As for beginner-friendly Linux distributions, I’m not sure if I can help there, I feel like I’m still somewhat winging it. But there seem to be articles and wikis for everything, or someone somewhere had the same problem and others with more knowledge helped out.

In general, and I’m not sure if that’s blasphemy, I’d say that most Linux distributions are interchangeable. They mostly only differ in the packaging system, the default desktop environment, and the preinstalled software. At most you get a different init system. (Please someone correct me if I’m wrong :D)

I sporadically tried Ubuntu ages ago, then “seriously” started with Manjaro (should have gone for Arch, in the long run Manjaro seems to be just causing problems), and then switched to Void Linux. Arch has a nice wiki that is useful independent of what distro you run. Void Linux also has a nice handbook.

I like the minimalistic approach of Void Linux, and I think it was recommended for old computers somewhere (any distro coming with xfce by default probably is recommended for that, but Void Linux really comes with basically no bloat). It requires some tinkering, as the base install is, well, pretty basic, but it’s doable. I can play games on my desktop PC and have jellyfin running on it in a docker container on my old (now headless 💀) laptop. My recommendation for it would depend on how well you are versed in using Linux in general.

Otherwise, as I said, Linux distros are pretty interchangeable. Point at one that looks nice and shoot. If you don’t like it, just try another one, reinstalling (at least when you don’t have a lot of data stored on it yet) is not really a big deal.

Probably. Anecdotally I can say that I have an Eastpak backpack that served me well for the last 15 years, and still does. However I’ve recently been shown this beautiful website, which I think fits this community pretty well:

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-backpack-got-worse-on-purpose

Granted, they even kind of say, that Eastpak is still good, and I also couldn’t recommend other brands.

I’m really wondering what your situation is then. That sounds like a worst-case scenario. Do you have a tree in front of your panels? Are you only running electrical equipment at night? 10-15 cents a day in summer either means your electricity is damn cheap, the panels don’t generate much for whatever reason, or you are not using it when it is being generated.

Also for 500 Watt peak a battery does not make much sense, if at all it should be a small battery to buffer peak demand (the refrigerator compressor turning on or other similar high-power short duration load, but that’s definitely not worth it unless you are trying to go off-grid, but that’s a completely different topic.). That’s obviously gonna decrease your ROI.

But just straight up saying that you doubt whether balcony solar is making its money back is detrimental to the whole cause, especially since there are enough people out there using it that are easily getting their money’s worth.

I feel the 500kw balcony vertical install won’t cover 20% of a household.

That depends on your household, but again - since you were emphasizing ROI - the balcony solar not being able to cover a lot of your consumption means their ROI is better! This does not mean, that one shouldn’t install bigger systems, I’m just trying to convince you, that balcony solar does have a very reasonable ROI in most cases.

Use it as my gaming rig

sent from my i5-750 with 8 GB RAM

Only somewhat kidding. I don’t use that machine to browse the internet as it uses too much electricity for idling 90% of the time, but I do actively use it for games that require a “beefier” GPU than the iGPU of my laptop (which usually just means needing more VRAM. Damn modern games).

Pre-post edit: Sorry for the long text, this definitely got out of hand and might not even be very useful 😅

[…] use it for experiments […] Turn it into a local server, NAS, self-hosting box

I’d be curious what kind of experiments require additional PCs. Networking stuff and self-hosting comes to mind, but that doesn’t necessarily require additional PCs, and desktop-PCs tend to have too high power consumption for letting it idle >90% of the time. NAS servers or even something like jellyfin also don’t need a lot of compute power. My jellyfin server is running on a 15 year old shitty but very trusty 18 Watt E-350 APU. Then again, don’t listen to my negativity - if you have a use case for that PC, use it!

Use it to learn more about local AI, although I assume the GT 730 is far too limited for most modern models

I’m not familiar with local AI, but I wouldn’t expect to get far with that GPU if you mean LLMs. Maybe if you have the 2 GB version, but even then, it will be slow. It has, even for its time, very slow memory and seems like it was never designed for any intensive workloads. That GPU only has compute capability 2.1, no Vulkan support and only OpenCL 1.1. That’s good enough to start getting into GPGPU programming if you wanna play around, but LLMs sound like a stretch, not just performance-wise, but also software-support wise. But I have never tried running local LLMs myself, so maybe software-support isn’t that much of a problem.

Also, and this is definitely just opinion from my side, but I would say running AI, even locally, might be somewhat against the idea of permacomputing glancing at the side bar

Sell it cheaply and put the money towards a newer, more energy-efficient machine

Thing about this is, that if you sell it so that you yourself will get a more energy-efficient machine, that PC will still be out there being used by someone else, so not much gained efficiency-wise. However, and I am contemplating writing a post about this topic here at some point, the production of a PC is responsible for the majority of the energy required in a PCs whole life-cycle. Selling (or trashing) this PC to get a more energy-efficient one might not save energy overall at all, at most it would reduce your power bill, but even then the question is whether it would be worth it compared to what a new PC costs (electricity really is cheap, you really have to run it 24/7 to be worth it). Efficiency is kind of a scam when it comes to reducing overall power consumption, but that’s a topic for me rambling another time. You have to use a computer very long to make up for the energy required for its production with the efficiency gains.

What I want to say: if you want to do the environmentally friendly thing, use this PC as long as you can, instead of replacing it with a newer one (assuming you have a use-case for it).

What would you do in my situation?

If you already have a new PC (which I somewhat expect), then… errr… I don’t know. I have a similar problem - just last week I have been cleaning three PCs that a friend of mine wanted to throw away. I’m even considering using one of those as my new gaming PC, but I’m not sure yet if I can separate from my PC after all those years. I’m probably just going to fix them up and bring them into good shape for the next LAN party, but otherwise I also have no real use for them. Kind of sucks letting all that hardware go to waste, I can’t use four PCs at the same time, and other people usually want the latest hardware.

For real though, probably a mixture of salvaging parts and still keeping the remains, if it’s a PC that is not in active use. SSDs and HDDs are the easiest to reuse, and SSDs also tend to require a lot energy to produce, so reusing it makes sense from that point of view. 24 GB of RAM is a very good amount, some new PCs don’t have that much. RAM speed is not as important as the amount, so it being DDR3 is not really a problem in my opinion, it just limits how modern the next mainboard/CPU can be.

If it is a PC that is in active use I’d upgrade the GPU and call it a day.

For further reading and motivation, see https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stopped-buying-new-laptops/

Sorry for the rambling and that none of this is really answering your question

What kind of refrigerator are you running? Around 100 Watt should be enough to run a decently sized refrigerator. Solar panels are somewhat forgiving when it comes to the proper angles, 100 Watt peak should be easily achievable with an 800 Watt setup, even if they are very badly angled. Sure, not 24/7, and maybe not all year round, but that’s not the goal.

Also, since you focused on ROI, that’s the nice thing about small installations - basically all the energy generated is directly used by you, meaning it directly replaces energy you would have had to buy otherwise. This is the more expensive kind of energy, and you “make” more money with that as if you sold the electricity. The ROI of solar power (for everyday people) goes down the bigger the system gets, as you won’t be able to use all the peak power when it is generated.

Completely agree, saying that solar is heat sensitive when talking about not being able to power ACs is pretty far out there.

Adding to what you said, ambient temperature only has a slight impact on solar’s efficiency. Solar’s efficiency usually mainly goes down due to self-heating which is due to higher irradiance. So in some sense they are less efficient because they generate more power.

However your example numbers are way off, solar panels generate much more peak power during summer than during winter, they aren’t close to being similar (depending on lattitude, but I guess that’s a given when talking about “summer” and “winter”).

^[1]

And the other part that should not be overlooked is that there tends to be some correlation between hot weather and long sunshine, which can also be seen in the plot. So not only is peak power of solar higher during the time when heatwaves are more likely, they also generate power longer.