When I need to run something that I can’t or won’t run at home, I usually spin up a machine at Hetzner. Cheap, reliable, and setup is fast. The server auction can give you a pretty nice hardware stack at a low cost, and you can cancel at any time.
However, the cases were I use hosting providers are becoming fewer and fewer, as I’m in the final stages of rebuilding my “homelab” the way I want it. If only those UPS batteries could arrive soon…
Anything made to be run from battery can work fine without one. Worst case scenario requires you to spoof some I²C communication to properly emulate a battery, but most devices and batteries are far dumber than that. DC is DC, and sometimes you just need to graft something on top for the other pins.
Source: My old laptops charging circuit failed, so I soldered the charger onto the battery pins instead. Then I replaced the actual battery with an Adafruit Itsybitsy 32u4 (because that what I happened to have available) that emulated the battery status of “Charging, nothing to see here, move along” and sent it via I²C
The DOJ get paid very handsomely for the feces feast they are hired to endure.
Remember that Flock isn’t the only company with this exact business model. Cities ditching Flock is moving to their competitors instead.
And Microsoft certainly never did this…
Note to self: Get around to wiring my UPS onto my management network for monitoring and graceful shutdown of non-essential stuff.