They Should Have Bought A Hard Drive - WAN Show August 14, 2026
Summary
The hosts discuss a PBS station losing archives due to a cloud provider shutdown, reinforcing their skepticism of third-party storage. They then reveal a major internal project to become their own ISP and move infrastructure to a colocation center to save $400,000 over five years amid rising hardware and service costs. The episode covers purchasing IPv4 addresses, acquiring high-end networking switches, and evaluating self-hosted alternatives like Nextcloud to replace expensive SaaS subscriptions.
Topics discussed
Intro: Birthday robot and GeForce Now exploit
Sponsors: Vessi, Whisperflow, XSquare, Ahrefs
9PBS data dispute and simple IT solutions
LMG becoming its own ISP to save costs
Network redundancy and earthquake preparedness
Self-hosting Nextcloud vs Google Drive search issues
Badminton feeding machine review and costs
Kids' phones, repairs, and family content
Badminton machine details and shuttle costs
Sponsors: Vessi, Whisperflow, XSquare, Ahrefs
YouTube monetization changes and live streaming
Meta public nuisance ruling and badminton rules
Running local AI on GeForce Now cloud PCs
Data centers in space and Starlink latency
Tor Snowflake app and Android sideloading
Sponsor: Vessi and Unclinus event announcement
Brain tissue controlling robots and AI slop detector
Windows 11 memory usage and old Word versions
LMG history: GPU testing and early days
Chickens, Chromebooks, and Google's past ethics
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