Daily Dose of English 185
Home Servers
Daily Dose of English 185
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on BensLanguageLab.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about home servers, which is not a topic very interesting to most people in the world, but I think it's really cool. And I wanna talk to you a little bit about why, and also what a home server is, and why I am so happy with mine. So let's just start with the definition. What is a home server? So, home you probably know, so we'll come back to that, but a server, Actually, there's a lot of different terms for it. In sports, the person that starts with the ball and serves it and starts the game in tennis or ping pong or sports like that is called the server. Somebody that brings you your food in the restaurant is also called a server. But today I am talking about a technological server, right? So a computer, that's what it is basically. It's a computer, but instead of being a computer that you interact with, that a human interacts with, it's basically a computer that other computers interact with to do something specific. And so they usually have some kind of information or program running in some way. If you've seen on your phone ever like an error that says like could not connect to server, that's because every time your phone does something like on the internet, it basically needs to talk to a bunch of different servers all around the world. Usually they're fairly close to you, but depending on the information that you're getting, there's various other computers that your phone is talking to at all times. And those are called servers. generally because they serve up information or requested whatever. And all those servers combined and lots of other stuff create sort of this interweb, this internet of things, of all this information, of all this stuff. And servers also kind of serve as a central point or a hub. Not central, sorry. They serve as a point on this network, basically, on this very large, very connected network. And so you can kind of think of them almost like as big cities, right? So if you were to fly an airplane between big cities, their airport is sort of like the server. That's the better way, I think, to think about it. The airport can serve you all of these different airplanes and you can do whatever in the airport, but that's always the point that you go to to get out of the city to another place. It's not a perfect analogy. Anybody that actually knows sort of how servers work is probably like upset right now. But that is the gist of what is happening. And there's a lot of useful stuff that goes through servers. And a home server is a server that you have in your home. Most people, most households don't have a home server, because most people don't really need them or even think about them, right? You have to make them and maintain them. So why would you have a home server? However, it's actually quite simple to set up a basic server and like for mine, for example, it's just running on an old computer that I had that I didn't use anymore, an old laptop, and it is running all the time. So it's always... online, and it's doing a very small amount of things. It's mostly serving, functioning, it's mostly functioning as storage space for various things and runs a couple of little tasks on my network. It is not connected to the greater internet. It has internet access itself as a computer, but you could not connect to my home server, for example, because you're not on my Wi-Fi. You have to be on my Wi-Fi network in order to connect. So it's a little bit different than a true web server or something that's connecting things. But it functions as like a little node, a little airport, if you will, inside my house. So a good example is that I have a program running on there called Loot, which is a reading tool that I really like to use for reading in foreign languages. And I could just go to a website address, like on my computer basically, that shows loot that is on it. I also have a form of loot on my computer that I actually learn with, but like I have this other one for other languages or whatever that I can access from my computer, from my laptop, from my phone, from whatever, because it's not running on my computer, it's running on my home server. And so you might start to see sort of the functionality of this. It's really nice to have something that's always going that you can access from all of your different devices regardless of like what your computer is doing. And so the biggest thing that I actually use it for is movies. So I put movies on my home server and then I can watch them from my TV. I have my TV connected to my home server because they're on the same network, the same Wi-Fi, and I could watch movies from there. That is the main thing I use my home server for. Occasionally other little things, but that is the main one. And what it allows me to do is to take movies from my computer that I use every day, send it to my server, and immediately it's going to show up on my phone, on my TV, also on my computer. And then I can delete the movie from my computer, right? And so that it's only on my server. You can do that with music, movies, basically whatever, even just files if you want to store files on your server, that you can also do, which I might actually do in the future, which I'll talk about, but I'm slowly running out of time. I quickly want to talk about the movie thing since that is why I'm so happy with my home server. So, I typically don't buy movies. I download them from the internet, which is technically illegal, but I do it for one main reason. It is the fastest and easiest way to get the movies that I want to watch. There are so many services out there that charge you so much money and don't have that many things that it's a problem if I want to watch a movie on a service because it's like, okay, this movie came out in 2004. I want to watch it now. I see that it's available on Netflix in Poland, but I don't live in Poland. I live in the US or I live in Mexico, but I pay in the US. So like there's all of these different things that make it a nightmare for me to find a movie that I want to watch. And so I just don't even bother. I just download it and put it on my server and watch it because it is so much faster. Yesterday, I wanted to watch a movie, and so it took me, I don't know, like a minute or two to find it and download it. It took a little longer to download, but then I went back and started making dinner, and then I came back and it was already downloaded, and I put it on my home server, which also took a minute to transfer. But like, I don't have to be there and watch it transfer. I did a couple of things, and then basically, one minute of my time, maybe two minutes, I had the movie ready to watch. That is, to me, an amazing deal because I don't have to fiddle around with so many different services and I can watch the movies that I want to watch. If there was a service that let me just do that and I could pay for it and it was legal, I would do that. I'm not downloading it because I want it to be free, I'm downloading it because it's the easiest option. And I also do the same thing with books as well, because getting a book that I can download and read on my own devices is a huge pain. There's something called DRM that we can talk about in the future, but it's just, it's so annoying to get rid of if I want to read my book that I bought on like Loot, for example, the thing I just mentioned. And so I just download them because it's easier and faster, and I'm not just going to mess around with these difficult services that are going to make my life harder if I pay. So I just kind of end up not doing it. But yeah. Anyways, that rant aside, the other really common and useful thing for a home server is storage, right? So you probably pay for some kind of cloud storage. I pay for Google and Apple, I think. I don't pay that much. It's probably like three bucks a month. But that is an amount of money that I'm paying every single month for just storage space. And that is on the cloud. It's cloud storage. What you can do if you're sort of technical is basically set that up yourself. You do have to buy things to do that, right? So like storage space isn't free where that's why they charge you a monthly amount. But if I buy my own storage space and put it in my on my home server, it is then free, like I don't have to keep paying for it. And I can be sure that it's gonna be like there for me, like I know what it is, I can look at it, I can quantify it, I can see how much space I have. Oh, excuse me. And I'm also sure that nothing is going to be deleted. because one of the issues with large cloud services like that is they might just lose your data if a physical building has a fire or something gets unplugged or breaks, or they just make a mistake. There's a lot of reasons why a cloud service might accidentally lose your data, which is not really their fault. There's just a lot of stuff going on, and I'm not really gonna blame them. They probably could do a better job, but, Um, like there's also just a certain level of, of risk of basically giving all of your files over to another person that take, take, take care of. Right. And so if you are really worried about your files, your photos, your, your videos or whatever, one of the best options is to just make a relatively complicated storage system yourself, which can be pretty expensive if you're doing it really big and fancy, but like a simple version doesn't have to cost that much money. Um, it does take more time. and that sort of thing but it can be a fantastic option and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to get a storage solution for my server in the next couple years when I want to have more local storage just because it's also more convenient in many ways. Not in all ways which is why I still pay for it because it is very convenient just to have that. But yeah, so anyways, that's my talk on home servers and why I have one and really like it. I hope that you enjoyed. I don't necessarily recommend that you set up a home server unless it sounds interesting to you. It is pretty easy if you're already pretty technical. If you are not technical, I hope that you enjoyed this and have a nice rest of your day and think that this was at least interesting to listen to. But that is everything that I have for you. I hope that you have a fantastic rest of your afternoon wherever you are in the world or morning or night maybe. And I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode of A Daily Dose of English. Bye.
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