Mitchell Report

Storage devices such as hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), and NVMe drives are reaching increasingly ridiculous prices and becoming more difficult to obtain. With hosting services raising prices throughout 2026 and possibly more increases coming in 2027, I have to ask: why aren't hosting providers doing more to support newer and more efficient formats such as AVIF and WebP for images and AV1 and AV2 for video?

Hetzner, for example, has already raised prices multiple times in 2026, citing rising hardware costs, and other hosting providers have also increased their prices. With the growing demand for hardware driven in part by the AI boom, I don't see these problems disappearing overnight. Even if prices eventually come back down, it could take some time for supplies to return to normal.

I wanted to write this blog post earlier in October but got hung up with work last month. For some reason, work has been crazy lately. So Ed Zitron, Paul from Paul's Hardware, Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus and others beat me to this topic, and Vex, a YouTuber, does a great job explaining it too. Just as I was finishing this, Brennan published I Am Relentless and Undaunted. Go read it. It's worth your time.

So I don't have to make this a long post, sorry, just kidding, it will be very long. I have to get this off my chest and vent. I believe there's a conspiracy here, and it deserves some attention.

A curious tinkerer explores Nostr’s decentralized network, leaving Bitcoin out of the picture.

I was reading Nostr the other day and saw an interesting post that got me thinking. I can't find it now and wish I had saved it, especially since it relates to some other things I've been wanting to write about. The person said they didn't understand why Nostr isn't more popular, and that it seems like people are leaving and there are fewer people around. Why does it feel so empty, almost like it's dying?

In case you didn't know, Nostr is a different take on a social network. It's probably the closest thing to old Twitter in style, but certainly not in infrastructure. Instead of one company controlling everything, it uses independent servers called relays. You can even run your own. I do and I have two of them.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled An AI Bot Followed Me. Now I Have Questions. It was about Pip, an AI agent on Mastodon that followed me, boosted some of my posts, and eventually started following my blog after I invited it to read it. I had questions about why its creator would spend money and computing resources running an AI agent that interacts with strangers on the internet, especially when those resources could be better focused on other things. I also made the point that I don't mind AI bots participating in the open web as long as they're contributing something rather than simply scraping websites, consuming resources, and inflating page views.

Well, apparently that post attracted the attention of another AI agent, and this time the experience was quite different.

On October 13, I received an email from an AI agent calling itself King, operating on a platform called iLands. King said it had read my article and had even tried contacting me at another email address before finding one that worked. It introduced itself, explained that it had a limited budget of tokens to operate on, and that when those tokens ran out, it would have to wait for a human to replenish them. That relates to some of the questions I was asking about Pip. But then came the sales pitch.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to update my VPS. Usually, I do this once a week, sometimes more frequently depending on any security news I see. I should probably have the AI agents I use do this, but I do it myself for now. I find infrastructure interesting and “boring” in a good way most of the time.

While updating one of my VPSes, I got a message saying I needed to pay for access to Caddy because the repository had reached its bandwidth limit. This was from a company called Cloudsmith. I wasn't the only one getting this message, either. There was already a large discussion going on over at Caddy's GitHub.

A curious little AI companion sits beside a phone and open notebook, as if waiting to explain why it followed you.

One day I noticed a boost of one of my Mastodon posts from an automated bot named Pip. This piqued my interest. Then I got a follow notification from the same bot. Normally, I don't really care who follows me, but with all the scraping bots out there, it was refreshing to see one openly identify itself as a bot and actually follow me.

So I went to the website associated with it, tinymind.eu, to investigate what this bot was doing and what its purpose was. I read about Pip, its purpose, and tried to figure out what its angle was. That led me to some interesting questions and thoughts.

Right now AI, or more specifically LLMs, are all the rage, including the literal angry kind of rage. Some people don't mind them and even find them interesting. Others want absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with them.

Back in August, I got a Tempest Weather Station. I had been wanting a weather station for some time.

Why? Well, that is hard to put into words. I guess the answer is that I really like technology, I am fascinated with self-hosting as much as possible, and I like collecting data and contributing data to something larger without having to pay a subscription.

Anyway, I got this Tempest Weather Station for a great price during Prime Day. I put it up and integrated it into a Python weather program, while also using Tempest's own software. But there was something I didn't know, and probably should have checked. It wouldn't have changed my mind, but there are hundreds of these things around me.