Gadget 1 - For Consuming the Internet -> Cheap Chromebook

For this, I want a portable computer that I primarily use to consume content; if I want to do any creation more complex than writing or spreadsheets, I'm happy to use it to connect to another device (ssh, vnc, etc.).





So, portable, low power, high battery life, keyboard:

An Acer Chromebook bought a couple of years ago (new) for $US100. Admittedly on special, but you should be able to find a decent Chromebook under $AUD200 or $US150 if you look around.

chromebook price / 48 months + 5W * 3 hours/day ~= $3 / month





Gadget 2 - For Actual Computing -> Google Cloud

Google Cloud Preemptible VMs, now available in Sydney - Google has been rapidly expanding the available regions.

Why are these great? Well, they're effectively just another computer, so you can run everything you want (and ssh/mosh/vnc/... in), Google make it trivial to have a boot drive that is used repeatedly (unlike AWS spot instances, which also don't offer spot pricing on t2s), and you can provision as much capacity as you want whenever you start work. Moreover, they're insanely cheap and billed in 10 minute blocks, so even if you do manage to burn through the generous amount of free credit Google's doling out - I've received over $US340 - as long as you're only using them occasionally the cost will hardly register. Finally, the 24 hour limit is actually useful, because if you forget to shut it down when you finish...

Some costs in Sydney, which is one of the most expensive locations, and sadly where you can't take advantage of the free f1-micro. All pricing in US cents:

f1-micro - 0.46c/hour. I find this is good enough for simple CLI work; if you only need occasional compilation bursts, you'll probably get more single core performance than you would out of a laptop.

- 0.46c/hour. I find this is good enough for simple CLI work; if you only need occasional compilation bursts, you'll probably get more single core performance than you would out of a laptop. n1-standard-4 - 5.397c/hour (10 times the price, but still, 5c?). 4 cores, 15gb of RAM. Given that most decent laptops are still stuck on 2 cores, and you'll have to pay through the nose to get more than 8gb on something half-portable, this is a pretty good price.





On top of that there are going to be disk charges. You'll almost certainly want to keep a 10gb boot drive around permanently (54c/month) - though for extra data you can save money with snapshots, Google Cloud Storage, or Google Drive) - and you are going to have to cough up for network egress (~20c/gb), but most traffic is going to be ingress (free). Still, say I did the following in a month, which is actually vastly more than I'm using at the moment:

10 * 2 hour sessions on an f1-micro = 9.2c

= 9.2c 2 * 2 hour sessions on an n1-standard-4 = 21.58c

= 21.58c 10gb boot drive for the month = 54c

500mb of network egress = 9.5c

4 hours of 375gb ephemeral local SSD storage (non-network, fast) = 17.7c

I did probably miss some minor charge, but still... cheaper and more reliable than running your own desktop for occasional use, perhaps?





Cost:

$1.12 / month





Gadget 3 - A Home Server -> 'Broken' Android Phone

An old Android phone - I grabbed my partner's old (broken screen) Xperia V out of the drawer, and installed Linux Deploy (if you don't have root access, you can use GNURoot Debian instead).

one month of 1W usage ~= $0.20 / month





In short...

That's less than $5/month for both power and purchase - assuming that you can acquire an old Android phone for $0. Even if you can't, in Australia at least you can probably pick up a new locked prepaid phone with 1gb of RAM for under $AUD50 (or less on sale), though you may need to add a MicroSD card for more storage.

As a programming father you need to be concerned about your budget. This means resisting the temptation to buy the most amazing hardware, and not running power-hungry CPUs all day.Ok, I lie - I'm not really that concerned about our budget, and I could afford to buy a new computer. I must admit to reading a pamphlet for our upcoming council election... and part of the reason I can afford a new computer is that I enjoy cost optimisation (ok, stinginess). But what's even more fun is that the best way to be stingy is to use three different gadgets instead of just one.Why a Chromebook? Because all you really need for this is a browser, and they're designed to run one consistently in a low resource environment, generally 'just work', and have hardware video acceleration of HTML5 in the browser (sadly unlike Linux).Here I want access to the most computational power. But it would probably be a little wasteful - in cost, space, and marriage related friction - if I were to build a high-powered cluster at home. Happily, the modern world has a solution to this in the cloud:That's all great, but sometimes you just want a computer always running at home. My requirements of this computer are fairly low - run a cron job or two, and maybe serve some MP3s or web pages occasionally. So obviously it shouldn't use much power, and there's no reason for it to take up much space.If you don't have one, someone around you probably will, and suddenly you've got an incredibly low power linux machine with built-in networking and battery backup - and even a display if you want to get really fancy with status messages! Better than a Raspberry Pi, no?As a side note, I'm not joking about the rough equivalency between environmental consciousness and stinginess. In most circumstances, what costs the least is what is most efficient, and what is most efficient has the least impact on the environment (and you transfer less purchasing power to others who might use it to buy an F250). This is only not true when 'negative externalities' aren't properly addressed - i.e. when we lack a carbon tax...