For maximum efficiency we’d better delegate that task to an intern or newly hired jr dev

You.com was pretty good for highly technical topics, otherwise Google

Edit: use a VPN from the EU for Google, you’ll get better search results

Honestly you’ll find more beginner resources for Python than anything else and it’s worth learning because it’s used everywhere. Lua is also extremely beginner friendly (even if it has some bad habits like 1 indexed arrays.)

If you’ve got a math background LISP is a good place to start as well, particularly the old MIT/UCB Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) book, that was the start of a formal CS education before python took off.

You don’t need any kind of special computer to learn programming. Find an introduction to programming course in Python that works for you and just go for it. Eventually a nice laptop will be useful but you’re not writing the kind of code that’s going to take hours to compile for the first couple of years anyway.

Played through the entirety of FFT:WotL via PPSSPP on my tablet. Great game, first full playthrough since the 90s.

Where I live 100W would cost me something like $25/mo to run, continuously, for the life of the device. I think my 8x10Gb + 24x1g switch draws around 15-20W if I’m not using PoE and I spent around $260 on it. Inside a year the commodity switch becomes cheaper to own even if I were given a whitebox equivalent for free.

If I lived somewhere with lower kWh costs I’d be happy to roll my own whitebox but it’s just not viable here.

Surprised I’ve never seen this DIY approach mentioned anywhere or thought of it before 🤔 - usually people end up going for those mini PCs that have multiple network cards soldered to the mobo itself

Rolling a whitebox router is so much :effort: when decommissioned enterprise gear is dumped on fleaBay so cheaply. Plus it’s almost impossible to rival the power efficiency of a commercial switch without blowing more money than you’d pay for one.

I’ve kicked the idea around as a way to hook up multigig devices to my network (managed 2.5Gb + 10Gb switches are still expensive) but by the time you’ve built the machine you’re looking at the same cost and you have to maintain it, plus your network is down for however long it takes to reboot the thing after kernel package updates.

Check out decommissioned Brocade or Ruckus switches on eBay if they’re available in your region. There’s a thread over on ServeTheHome with a licensed feature unlocking method that’ll get you fully enabled hardware for cheap cheap cheap prices.

On my ICX6450-24P I see like, <20W power use while shoveling packets through four 10G ports. PoE drives usage up, obviously, if I’m supplying power to things with it.

If you can find them the ICX7250 is a baller homelab switch, I paid <$250 for mine and I’m putting the 8x10Gb ports to good use. Low power draw here as well.

If you want bigger the ICX6610 is a power hog but offers a couple of 40Gb ports as well as 8x10Gb. These draw significantly more power, they’re powerpc rather than arm, and are loud compared to home gear but they’ll let you link a bunch of machines at 10Gb as well as two at 40Gb - which is awesome for a NAS and/or firewall. I want to say mine drew like 50W at idle so they’re not cheap to run over time.

I’ve also considered rolling my own whitebox router so I can connect 2.5 and 5Gb gear to the rest of my network but it’s not that much cheaper than just buying a cheap chinesium $200 dumb switch with 4-8x 2.5Gb ports and a couple of 10Gb uplinks.