Power considerations for fifth wheel living

General
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Hello all,

I’m beginning down the road to sovereign computing and taking charge of my own data but feel my living situation may be somewhat unique so I’d like to ask for insights or opinions in regards to that.

Firstly, what I’d like to do -
Id like to disconnect from Google. I use social media and post content but plan to have grapheneOS on my phone. I’m planning to setup a server with startOS and would like to move as much of my personal data into my own hands as possible - nostr, nextcloud, proton suite and vaultwarden.
I have bitcoin as well and am unsure at this time what exactly that means in this regard but I am researching and learning more every day. Running a node, lightning network? I’m hoping to eventually have all of my fiat in Bitcoin and perhaps use something like a Gemini credit card for daily expenses. Definitely need to research more here.

So now for my unique situation -
I don’t live in a home. I work on the road and live in a 5th wheel full time, traveling and moving from trailer park to park sometimes once a month to sometimes once a year.
My Internet situation WAS starlink but most recently service was flat out unavailable in the PNW and so I cancelled it. Currently running ATT hotspot for Internet while I’m home.

Clearly this cannot work for a home based server, as my connection needs to be consistent. I need to find a service that can provide me useable speeds with nomadic capabilities. Open to suggestions.

Secondly, the topic of uninterruptible power comes up. I’m typically camped somewhere with shore power on tap and between parks I can run minimal equipment off my house batteries in the camper, but this all feels rather risky if I am running a lightning node with a hot wallet on it, and to lose my BTC node and have to restart that is a headache id rather avoid as well.

I’m just beginning down this road and have no problem doing my own research, but I figured some of these solutions might be well tested just not well documented, so I wanted to ask her first.

Thanks for taking the time to read, hopefully see you on the road
-roger

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If I was in your case, I’d setup a server and leave it at a trusted friend, or family member’s house. You could also run StartOS on a VPS. This does defeat some of the point, but it’s still better than using Google drive, or other cloud services.

1 Like
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I have worked within your set of specific requirements before, @R0GERC0PY; interestingly also in the PNW for several years, as well as across the continent.

Nice work on thinking proactively about sovereignty.

From what I have seen, there are many “don’t actually need that” tools/systems which find their way into our “must have” expectations. I suggest stepping back a bit:

What are you truly trying to accomplish? What are your actual essentials to “make it work” for your digital life? After that, what are “this would be great but are not essential” … etc.

When we migrate out of Google systems for example, we often times bring with us the old way of seeing things, which must be removed after that. It sometimes takes years, unless you have a “diving buddy” who already made the shift. From what I see, NextCloud is really a polyfill, not an alternative or replacement, because it just continues the same way of thinking, with all the limitations, just without one set of non-negotiables swapped out for another.

For example, there is a preconceived notion floating around about what ‘server’ means. >99% of ‘applications’ use this assumption of what ‘server’ means and so we just operate within that set of limitations, but one assumption.

I would follow this thought through to the end with you if you are willing to think again on what you truly are looking to accomplish, rather than listing off tools which may or may not accomplish that for you.

Have a great time out there in the meantime //

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@migrator thank you for the thoughtful reply.

In my current paradigm I am using mostly my phone for everything from email correspondence to Bitcoin acquisition, social content and online shopping. I bought this pixel direct from Google with the intention of eventually putting graphene onto it and have recently began switching my gApps to the proton universe which I believe should get me into a favorable position.

The comment above about leaving my server at a trusted home site is valuable consideration, but having access immediately should something go wrong seems imperative.

As for my end game, I’m visualizing a home server architecture protected by a guardian AIgent that provides support to me for everyday tasks like organizing incoming information and planning my associated corresponding events, as well as firewalling my online activity to would be data collectors, anonymizing my web queries and traffic and helping to keep my data stream organized for potential sales and revenue opportunities. An effective middle man that can be aligned with my personal expectations and help me to achieve my goals online without sacrificing my privacy.

Following current AI progress, it would seem we are witnessing the infancy of true agent-like behavior. It would then seem plausible that very quickly these agents will become competent and viable, and soon after that be indexed and compressed for local storage and personal use. Hoping for the best outcome here, fingers crossed.

In order to take advantage of this potential I want to have my personal, financial, real world and social lives moved into my own control, which brought me here to Start9.

Secondly, is the matter of infrastructure. My position as a nomad and my expertise in electrical and construction could help me learn these mesh networks and eventually create a system for harnessing the power of our communities to design and implement systems that remove us from the conglomerates entirely. Much more research is needed here, but a boy can dream.

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Thanks for more detail @R0GERC0PY;

If we apply the Pareto principle ( 80/20 rule ) to the above, and look for that key set of valuable and guiding, salient points of focus, your design requirements… there is a tension between privacy and performance, or quality and sovereignty. I would say >80% is circling the 20% and trying to get what it wants, knowing underneath there is something or someone missing; there is a lot of hope there, but it requires someone on the other side to make the right thing.

All that you described, including the ( local-only ) ‘AI’ aspects, and ability to use a phone if that is all you want to use; that rough 20% description was also my path out, after having the circumstance you describe now. I thought your framing of that hope was in and of itself a great contribution.

Curious what you mean by “our communities” and enheartened to hear you have real expertise in offline applications. It seems there are common threads, especially in your last paragraph, and it seems like you have a lot of genuine care, or at least real anticipation/expectation an would “know it when you see it” when it comes to ‘computing’ on the other side of digital captivity, and what freedom might look like.

There are a lot of underlying assumptions below a lot of the phrases we use, still deprogramming ourselves from the centralitist mindsets. I would always appreciate more detail in terms of what this or that means to you, as with revenue opportunities or potential sales, real vs. social life, web queries, traffic, etc. Underneath those phrases is a particular life you plan to continue, and that is what I am trying to imagine. From there, it is a matter of tuning the right design that anticipated a more-correct understanding of “human being” … even a degoogled phone is not going to add that necessarily.

We mop the floor with muddy water still, when it comes to the specific privacy / performance / quality / sovereignty requirements ( and rights/due ) of a natural digital person with an online and offline life.

Interesting to see so much below a ‘simple’ power question!

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@migrator you asked, so I expanded.

You’re right in that my ultimate vision doesn’t yet seem entirely possible with our given tech. For the time being, and to draw back to my original question i think I can use these things effectively (for others who may come into this later)

For power to and from campsites and parks I have house batteries. These are sufficient to run the fridge and my server between stops, so I’ll build myself a switched outlet for dedicated server power.

Trailer park power can be real dirty. Something like this can clean things up and make sure equipment remains in good working order

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I’m currently working through different methods of Internet connectivity. There’s a new phone service in town that’s preaching privacy
https://www.really.com/plans

There’s also folks on YouTube that talk about running non-aligned llm models locally

Cheers

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Hi Roger and mitigator,

I’m enjoying this thread.

A couple of quick thoughts:

-run all devices hardwired to battery bank where possible. All computers, servers, phone, etc run off of DC; cut out the inverter and subsequent wall wart middle-men efficiency losses and you see a >30-50% reduction in energy use and thus more battery life. Plenty of options for this with USB-C PD now, can buy 12V USB-C to 5.5mm barrel plug, etc. I have solar + battery banks at my house and just hardwired all of the computers and devices without built-in transformers (laptop, dock, servers, network switch, phone, etc) to my battery bank. Next up will be figuring out how to bypass the built-in transformers in my desktop and monitors (though they have USB-C monitors now). I’m planning to to a blog post on this setup soon amf will share when I do.
–I took this a step further when traveling nomadically and had all DC appliances in my rig - refrigerator with DC brushless motor, etc. Only thing I would have needed an inverter for would have been an A/C unit had I had one, but there are even models with DC brushless motors now. This all enabled me to run off of just 200w of solar and a 210Ah 12V battery bank in my 24’ rolling home.
Never needed shore power.

-internet: GL-iNet X3000 Spitz AX configuted with Starlink as primary and failover to one (or even two!) 5G sim cards. Roof-mounted Starlink and 5G waveform antenna. Can take this a step further and flash OpenWRT on it if you want an open-source operating system.

-as far as AI; this is a cool project. I’m building my own version on my desktop but using open-source models like mistral instead of Gemini. I then plan to wake-on-lan and access via tunnel when remote. Doing that because I don’t need instantaneous 24/7 access otherwise I’d put it on a server. I do have FreeGPT-2 running on StartOS on my FriendlyElec CM3588 which is fun but slow with the limited resources.