I’ve got z-wave monitoring plugs from both minoston and zooz, and they give the same readings as Kil-A-Watt.

It looks like your source is focused on loads that switch on and off frequently, which is probably important for laboratory, but not really for home. The reporting interval for my plugs ranges from maybe 3s to 30s, and I can imagine that there’s internal lag between measuring and reporting, but it’s not relevant to anything I can imagine using the data for.

Super easy, as it turns out. I run my own DNS and web servers, so I pointed quicken.com at my web server to capture the request, then used curl to capture the response. Both turned out to be plain ASCII, request like

stk.1=SMCI;.2=NVDA;.3=INTC;

as POST data, and responses like

qwin.quotes.ASTM.symbol 4 ASTM
.last 7 18.7400
.time 10 1573074000
.time.str 5 16:00
.change 6 0.4000

plus a whole slew of other optional fields for fundamentals, dividends, etc. It was a simpler time on the internet, when no one cared about leaking data and companies didn’t care if a handful of geeks reversed engineered their data structures.

This won’t help you, but I want to brag. I started using Quicken to track my finances at the turn of the century, back when it was all local storage. Quicken 2012 was the last iteration that used http (not https) to update stock prices. When they discontinued support, I captured the interaction and deciphered the formats. Wrote a proxy to intercept the request, look up the security info, and send back the data.

So, I self-host quicken.com. It’s saved me having to update Quicken or submit to their subscription model.

Find out how much you’re spending on what. That will let you determine whether the amount you spend on which things is actually worth it to you in the cold light of day, and show you where you can make the most effective cuts. Diagnosis is the first step: treatment without diagnosis is not helpful.

Tons of expense tracking apps out there that will download straight from your bank & credit card. You Need A Budget/YNAB seems t be pretty popular.

Yeah, don’t let the bashers get you down: wasting stuff just because it’s cheap is how we got here. Measuring your power use is the only way to make informed choices, and sometimes the results are surprising.

Like, I was surprised to find that my audio gear uses exactly the same power whether it’s playing or not. The subwoofer alone uses twice as much power as the RPi that feeds it signal. It’s maybe 0.02 USD/day (for the sub), but I’ve got extra smart plugs from a multi-pack, and it’s easy enough to put together an automation to power them all down if they’ve been idle a while.

Exactly. I’m just here to say that regulation isn’t a solution to corporate malfeasance - at best it is a patch until the corp lawyers figure out where the loopholes are or how to accomplish the malfeasance in a different way.

Sensors. Especially sensors in your living space where fans or other noise from the proper server would be distracting, or in a tight space - inside your HVAC, for example - where a proper server wouldn’t fit.

Media front-end. Most of those SBCs are more than enough to run a kodi or jellyfin frontend, fanless for minimum distraction.

Robot. Low power requirement so it could be mobile; but there are lots of stationary possibilities. GPIO libraries are great for running servos and there’s tons of libraries to facilitate.

RAID is more likely to fail than a single disk. You have the chance of single-disk failure, multiplied by the number of disks, plus the chance of controller failure.

RAID 1 and RAID 5 protect against that by sharing data across multiple disks, so you can re-create a failed drive, but failure of the controller may be unrecoverable, depending on availability of new, exact-same controller. With failure of 1 disk in RAID 1, you should be able to use the array ‘degraded,’ as long as your controller still works. Depending on how the controller works, that disk may or may not be recognizable to another system without the controller.

RAID 1 disks are not just 2 copies of normal disks. Example: I use software RAID 1, and if I take one of the drives to another system, that system recognizes it as a RAID disk and creates a single-disk, degraded RAID array with it. I can mount the array, but if I try to mount the single disk directly, I get filesystem errors.

CPUs have so many cores these days, that seems like a perfectly reasonable option. Declare a process ‘security sensitive,’ give it it’s own core & memory, then wipe it when done.

And X-windows. There’s a few server tasks that I just find easier with gui, and they feel kind of laggy over 1G. Not to mention an old Windows program running in WINE over Xwin. All kind of things you can do, internally, to eat up bandwidth.

Yeah, it’s the screening that’s free. If that turns something up, then it transitions to “care.”

I’ve had the same experience with “wellness” check-ups: if I mention some complaint to the doc during the visit, it suddenly becomes “visit with complaint” and costs me $120.

Fun fact: for people over 45, colonoscopy screening for cancer is always free. If your insurance tries to make you pay for it, report them to your state insurance commissioner or the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. ACA made a lot of preventative medicine & screenings free.

I’d say colonoscopy, esp if you’re over 45, but those are required by law to have no out-of-pocket costs, regardless.

I got my current number around 3 years go, and the vast majority - easily 95% - of calls I get are still real estate, political, or job search spam for the previous owner. It’s on permanent DND, but I’ll check the text log every day or two.

University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.

The Android app should still be fine. I’d expect Apple’s move to be followed by a lot of creators adding a “Don’t use the iOS Patreon app” to their profiles.

I mean, apps that are just the website are a bad idea in the first place, but this specific problem is entirely contained to the iOS app. If some people prefer an app to a bookmark, that’s on them.

2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.

I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it’s cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.

I came to MySQL and Apache because they were the backend for other services I wanted to start,. Later, when I wanted to build my own, I already had Apache running, so why would I add nginx? I did let other services add sqlite, but have (in most cases) figured out how to switch those to MySQL.

All of that has been running for 20 years. I’m sure it would be good for my dementia-risk to learn how to start ngnix and migrate all those services, but it’s far more attractive not to mess with what works.

The CO2 sensor calibration thing is inherent in the technology. They drift, a lot, and without occasional reference to a known standard, there’s no way to know whether “1000” is really 1000, or 500, or 2000, but exactly how that gets implemented seems to vary a lot. I have an SCD30 board from Adafruit, which internally records CO2 minima and, over the course of week or so, adjusts its calibration so that minimum is 420. That means no special calibration procedure, but it does have to be somewhere that it gets periodic fresh air exposure.

There’s a newer, photoacoustic sensor technology that doesn’t seem to require continuous recalibration, but (at least this one: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/22956 ) require an extensive initial calibration.

My CO2 sensor has dramatically changed my routines. My space isn’t small - maybe 1200 square feet/100 sq m - but it must be pretty well sealed, because I can easily see my own breathing add to CO2. Nevermind cooking on the gas stove. Treadmill time adds 500+ ppm.

Now, I open windows every chance I get (which isn’t super often, because the dewpoint is 70 oF/20 oC in Atlanta), and I’ve shifted a lot of my cooking to an electric tea kettle, hot plate, and toaster oven.