In linguistics, the terms “theme” and “rheme” refer to the status of information in a sentence [1]. The theme of a sentence is something that is known or can be assumed from the context (that is, old information), while the rheme is information that is newly introduced in the sentence, often as a comment on the theme. The tendency in many (most? all?) languages is for the theme to precede the rheme in connected discourse.
Without context, a reader is therefore likely to assume from “my X is a Y now” that X is something the writer had previously and that Y is something new. Because most people have a phone but few have their own servers, I was initially confused by the title “My server is a phone now.” I had to read the article to realize that the word order is in fact appropriate: for the writer, the server is old information (something he has had for a while) while the phone (as a server, at least) is new.
In English, theme and rheme might be inferred not only from the position in a sentence but also from how a noun is marked. Possessives like “my” are generally used before nouns referring to things that are previously known or assumed; the definite article “the” is similar. In contrast, the indefinite article “a” (or “an”) usually marks information being newly introduced, so it is more common with rhemes.
I worked as a Japanese-to-English translator for many years. Because the grammatical structure of Japanese sentences is very different from that of English, sentence-by-sentence translation often ends up with paragraphs where the information flow is awkward and unnatural. I gradually learned that I could produce smoother translations by reorganizing my English sentences into an old-to-new information sequence.
PS: fascinating insight.
LXC does provide a security boundary, more than Docker but less than a full blown VM.
would've been better
--
> built in battery backup
Isn't it always recommended to remove battery if you plan to use a phone or a laptop as a server? ( Fire hazard )
or is it fine to just limit the charging to 80%?
See also, this atomic clock wristwatch: http://leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/
By saying "my server is now ..." implies a change of server platform to a phone but not where it came from.
Your offering: "my phone is a server now" implies a change of phone usage but does not indicate where the server came from.
The article itself tells all.
When I read the title, I literally thought "wow, I've seen a lot of people make servers out of old unused phones, but this is the first time I've heard someone make a phone out of an old unused server!"
Except the original title is "my server is a phone now", not "my server is now...".
Edit: Or I should say, it was 20 years ago. Maybe modern stuff is worse, but my M2 MacBook Air and Framework 13 Intel Core both power on without a battery.
LiPo batteries will fail over time if left fully charged. If you don't need the battery it's best to keep it somewhere around 40%. If 80% is the only option, that's usually good enough.
The primary failure mode starts when the cells are charged near their maximum voltage and kept there.
In normal conditions, you use the product while it’s active. But with a server you are not daily checking.
You might have a bug in your changing limit. I think the constant higher temperature could also become an issue.
But in other hand, it is probably a pain in the ass to remove the battery and do some workarounds to make sure the phone correctly behaves without it.
'Very quickly' seems to be measured in decades from what I see
Most people I know have their laptop docked, either near-permanently at home or taking it between home and a desk with dock (so it's nearly always plugged in when in use)
The 'servers' I've had were all old laptops - yes, with battery (don't have to buy a separate UPS if one is already included). I've now also had two non-server laptops that were plugged into power pretty much all the time. I treated my first laptop perfectly: taking out the battery anytime I'd be in a classroom for several hours and it was already full enough (you know, back when sliding out your battery was possible in the first place), but I'm not noticing any faster degradation on the systems I treat poorly. I'll activate the 80% cap function where it exists (that is, in the latest phones and my work laptop's UEFI config panel), but the evidence of it being helpful has yet to materialize
I have read that studies show that charging to 100% causes degradation and I trust those more than random people's anecdotes (and I'm a random person), but I'm starting to wonder if I've maybe just misunderstood the study results. Maybe it's like how smoking increases your chance for some cancers but you might also be fine in the end. I see people with plenty of much younger and better-treated batteries that can't sustain literally 30 seconds of use whereas mine are reasonably close to the new state (some haven't had many charge cycles, just sat at a stressy high voltage all the time, which was indeed supposed to destroy them), and I don't know how to explain that otherwise
The phone's battery can be reported to Home Assistant, where an automation can be triggered to turn off power to the phone when the battery gets above a certain percentage and turned back on when it goes below.
Not the best solution, but certainly an alternative from messing around with trying to get the phone to work without a battery.
Agree! But do get one or two of those "small automatic fire extinguisher" or whatever they are, that you can attach on stuff, for electrical panels and what not, and put right next to it together with a traditional fire alarm, and you're good to go :)
Putting the phone into a metal box, and the box, onto something not flammable, would help.
Not really. No sign of a phone. Just a computer — same as what all other servers run on.
"My server runs on a computer with a form factor that is atypical for server workloads" gets a little closer to the heart of the article, but even then it seems the real meat of it is about Android, not the hardware (although that is mentioned too).
How about "My server runs on Android"?
Even in this environment of inflated hardware prices, you can get one for a reasonable price.
Although I do see the appeal in getting unconventional hardware to do what you want, just for the love of the game.
For a home sever that's mostly idle, it is almost like commuting in a pickup truck.
I had a Nuc 9 extreme with a 10gb SFP card in it.
It averaged 69w. The Mac Mini I replaced it with uses just under 5w.
A Mini is possible the worst bang for buck. Also, the horror that that is Desktop Docker can’t be over emphasised. I know there are better ways of using Docker on a Mac, but having got something working I can’t face rebuilding it.
I also have some Fujitsu office machine I picked up for $50 as my "I need to run some random task on a physical linux box" machine with an i5-7500 and it idles at 15W
Some mod Xeon systems to use regular PC PSU like Be Quiet! ones and Noctua fans, etc. but my HP Z440 workstation is so quiet already I didn't need to.
In my case it's an headless server and is sits between the vacuum cleaner and the cat's food: there are literally only two cables connected to it, the power cable and the ethernet cable.
I can live with the footprint of one tower.
I run many VMs and containers inside those VMs: Git server, pastebin, NAS, containerized/VM-isolated AI agents, etc. but I don't need it to be up 24/7. I basically only need those when I'm working. So electricity usage ain't a big concern to me as it's more like running 8/7.
I don't feel like I'm commuting in a pickup truck: I feel like I have the perfect machine for the task.
Because there are so many of them (at least in Denmark where I live) they are pretty cheap and it's easy to get one with an I-processor.
My current machine's idle draw is also very low at 5-6w.*
*Based on some quick research it does seem that I was a bit lucky with mine, so I guess it's fair to mention that mileage may vary.
My first home server is a 2nd hand gaming PC that I bought for 500$ with 32gb and 7700rx video card that I use for GPU based tasks but it's quite audible when it's working so wife and I agreed it has no place in the living room anymore and is being deported to the corner of my office.
You can still find really good bargains for home servers from refurbished good computers, and given how well solved tech reliability is now, it's really not worth buying new.
I'm using a PCIe expansion card to get double NVMe drives for the cache disk, and then three (up to five) 3.5" spinning 8TB drives for long term.
I tried really hard to get it on 32GB but sadly the motherboard only has two slots and only supports 8GB DDR3 modules. I literally ordered some of the rare late-generation 16GB ones and it refused to boot, with no firmware updates available from the vendor (Advantech, board is an AIMB-274).
Buy a refurbished Xeon workstation with DDR4 RAM. If you're in the US or China they're basically free and if you're in the EU, they aren't too pricey (like you can definitely find ones for less than 200 EUR). Slap your double NVMe expansion card, your two NVMEs and your 3 3.5" spinning rust in it. If the workstation doesn't come with a Xeon with lots of cores, just buy one on eBay for $25.
ASRock H67M-ITX, i3 2.5GHz, 16GB DDR3 1333Mhz, 2TB+4TB SSDs, DVD-RW, in this Mini-ITX Antec case[1].
without root, you also can't bind to ports on any android phone, and rooting often requires an unlocked bootloader and not all android phones support bootloader unlocking. You also need an unlocked bootloader to install postmarket os.
so without binding to ports you can't run a web server unless you run it through a proxy server which the author did, or containers at native speed on postmarket os because you will not be able to flash the phone with postmarket os if you have missing kernel syscalls on android nor root the phone for the speed increase on android depending on your android kernel version i assume.
so with android containers may or may not work without emulating x86, and without root chances are it will be slow specially if you are forced to emulate it as x86 because it turns out you have missing syscalls, nor root to make them faster if they exist on android. again no chances to install postmarket os nor rooting to make containers faster, without bootloader unlocking.
not all android phones can have their bootloaders unlocked unless you find an exploit. https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame
I’ve wondered for a while if they could be used as an extension to your laptop like the old 80s PCs where you would plug in hardware.
So ‘make it a server’ is the obvious way I guess, and then you could do things like render webpages on there and then stream them as images to your actual computer (like the now shutdown Mighty app), or run ffmpeg on there to convert a video, etc
Any day now!
A real html page maxes the cores easily but it works. Keeping the pages open instead of closing / reopening tabs helps.
For reference I tried running it in a container inside my low end Synology DS223j but any container running, even doing nothing, ruins disk performances, weird bug.