[BlueOnyx:25649] Re: BlueOnyx 5211R development - progress report

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Dave,

> Patreon -> Paypal -> buy stuff direct or pay for services direct with 
> paypal. ;)

I already do, but that's mostly for software or services. Here in 
Colombia there is pretty much nobody that accepts Paypal. Likewise the 
local payment providers of similar make an model as Paypal don't accept 
foreign bank accounts or foreign credit cards as source of funding. All 
in all: The local money laundering regulations make any transfer into 
and out of the country a real chore with lots of red tape.

> For someone doing what you do, having a fairly reliable residual income 
> is really nice to depend upon. I don't know if your business is a full 
> on business or a hobby business, but a lot of hobby businesses do a lot 
> better when they have a patreon.

Solarspeed.net has been a fulltime business since 2002 and the four 
years before that I was part-timing it. A good chunk of my steady income 
is from regular support/maintenance contracts where I look after peoples 
servers or provide a certain number of work hours a month to perform 
on-call jobs or specialized tasks. As far as the BlueOnyx shop goes? It 
has it's seasonal ups and downs and that has pretty much always been the 
case.

But yeah: I might give the Patreon approach some further thoughts. Many 
thanks for bringing that up!

> Either way, as a long time user since the pre-Sun days (I have dozens of 
> Raq3/4/4i) it's nice to have them all switched off and be using a CM4 Pi 
> board with PCIe SSD in a Raq 4i case. I just want to work out a way to 
> make it run the original buttons and display and I'd release the 
> hardware (I do PCB design for a living)

Oooh, that sounds very intersting. Nice job giving these old severs a 
new breath of life!

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber