… Also “often a waste”??? always a waste. People (myself included) need to get better at planning meals so there’s less food waste generally. I’m guilty of wasting food sometimes, and I get really cross with myself.

No, some things last for a long time, others don’t.

For example:

1. We bought 3 pallets of Almond milk (by mistake! I only wanted 1) at an auction a few years ago. It is all in 1L tetrapaks, and although it went out of date in August 2024, it is still good, and we use it every day.
2. Crisps - We have a pallet of Walkers cheese and onion crisps in “aluminium” (mylar?) bags bought at a similar time. They are still crunchy and taste fine. Some Morrisons own-brand dorito-type corn chips in normal plastic (with see-through section) bags which came in the same package, didn’t fare so well. They lasted less than a year after their BBE date.
3. Organic Seaweed sheets - these were also packed in “aluminium” (mylar?) bags too (with moisture inhibitor “pillows”. They lasted well past their BBE date, but don’t taste nice when eaten straight from the bag - maybe this is something to do with the oil that was used (and possibly the same reason as why the “doritos” didn’t last long)?
4. Beer - different types age differently. I don’t like beer, but I had loads of Fosters and Stella left over from a party. Both had similar BBE dates. After about a year past their BBE, the Fosters cans started frothing when opening (even though they weren’t shaken), and made my stomach feel a bit weird (I was trying to make shandies out of them as I can cope with that!). Stella Artois, on the other hand, was still fine at the same point, and for several months after.
5. Pepperami - I ate one that was 10 years out of date. It tasted fine, and I didn’t die, which was a bonus.

I don’t risk it it with meat so much, but you can usually tell as it changes colour obviously.

As I’m trying to eat less meat and more vegan alternatives, a lot of the alternatives to sausages and burgers etc. last a long time after their BBE. Recently one vegan burger had a bit of mold on it, so I scraped it off before cooking it and it tasted fine - I wouldn’t have done that with a meat version :/

It really annoys me when people throw stuff out the day after something goes out of date. Whatever it is won’t become immediately radioactive/poisonous, are they that stupid?? grrr

Some induction hobs have a timer function which could help. Our cheap oven also has a timer on it, and the rice cooker flips to “warm” mode when things are cooked.

Also, we have all our kitchen appliances connected to one of these: https://www.netio-products.com/en/device/powerbox-4kx, which you can program to turn off and on at certain times.

I’ve got mine set up to the travel kettle, so i can fill the kettle, press the kettle button and then leave it ready for when I want a cup of tea. I then have a small script I run from my laptop to turn the power on. When it’s boiled and turned off, I get an alert that it’s time to go to the outdoor kitchen and make myself a cuppa 😋

Over-engineered? for sure. Does it feel good? also, for sure :)

We have a small flight case on wheels that we use as an outside kitchen with the following appliances:

• 1 induction hob - 1.9KW max
• 1 rice cooker - 400W, which also works as a slow cooker
• 1 small oven / grill - 800w
• 1 “travel” kettle (0.5l) - 900w

They are all plugged into a 2500W low-frequency inverter which is connected to a 48V 5KwH LiFePO4 battery, and is serviced by 3 PV systems, two 800w and 1 360w in various position.

I would recommend not using 12 or 24v for cooking, as your cables will have to be really short and thick.

We can use all the appliances at once on the inverter (athough the inverter is rated for 3kw over 4 minutes max which helps) without problems.

Last year, we cooked on it every day for around 2 weeks when the weather was good (and I was working from the garden), and it was very reliable.

All those ratings are max, and the induction hob worked really well, and pulsed from 900w to 1.7kw during cooking pasta sauce once it got up to temperature, for example. It was only £35 from some dodgy chinese make, which has an advisory on it from our regulator about fusing problems, but we use it outside and there’s various fuses between it and the battery, so we should be ok :/

I really wanted to get DC equipment so I wouldn’t need to use an inverter, but finding any is difficult. The best DC kettle I have found is only 1L and 24v with a “din” connector, and I haven’t had chance to try and set that up with a DC-DC converter yet. A friend of mine modified a little oven like we have to work off ~42v DC, which worked, but I don’t know how he did it :( I did buy a 48v immersion heating element, which I wanted to use to heat water for washing up etc, but I’ve not tried that yet either :(

There are various DC fridges you can get for camping, but we don’t use them on the system .

Hope that helps!

It’s just started getting warm and sunny here, so we will start using the system again when I am working outside. We have only used it once this year so far.

There’s also plasma hobs coming out from China, which look interesting, and might behave more like cooking on gas. I would like to try one sometime, but they aren’t very common yet.

I set up OpenFire (https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/) for my XMPP server, and it was very easy on my recent version of Ubuntu. It’s also easy to update when new versions come out.

I’ve heard good things about Prosody (https://prosody.im/), but I’ve not tried it myself.

Done, but I feel there could have been more questions about the sustainability aspect.

Just “will your instance be running in 12 month’s time” wasn’t really granular enough imo

He may have a point, but as someone else pointed out, a lot of these self-hosted services are running on out of date equipment that wouldn’t be used for anything else.

I run all my Fediverse stuff on an old Dell R620 that a friend gave me. Mine is totally specialised for hosting… Yes, it is overkill for my ~10 users, but hopefully more friends will join. Also, it’s not the most efficient way of doing it - the device is probably 10 years old and uses ~130w 24/7. A newer NUC or equivalent would probably only use 40-50w. However, who else is going to use this machine? No company would touch it, “everything” is going cloudy, so it would either be stripped for parts and the rest dumped either in landfill or sent to some 3rd world country.

You can claim it’s a waste of electricity to use it, but a lot of energy and materials were used to create the server in the first place, and most of that will be lost, even with recycling.

People run Fediverse (and other services) on a Raspberry PI - fine for a couple of users, but too restrictive for my use. These things only use 5-20w, which is amazing.

My electricity supply is from a “green” supplier, and I have a local SolarPV system that powers the system when there is enough sun. Last summer I managed to run it for over a month using my local system only. There’s no reason that we can’t build more renewable sources of electricity. Here in the UK there’s a proposed 140 DCs in in the planning phases, which is ridiculous, all for AI BS.

Self-hosting isn’t for everyone of course - not every household should do this, but there’s no reason why groups of friends, families or “activity” groups couldn’t do this effectively.

It’s absolutely optimized for the long term - how many Google services have been discontinued when there are still users, just not enough to be profitable? Self-hosted services can run as long people are interested. A mail server created 20 years ago is still compatible and useable today because it uses ratified, slow-moving standards.

Haha! I reported it to ebay. Man that was a faff, there’s no category to report dangerous / lying listings. The chat system was crap too. I had to say “I want to speak to a human”, and it put me through.