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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • That is the problem when any forum/community gets “large” - to make it possible to find anything in the noise they have to be extremely strict about a narrow topic and killing anything not in that narrow topic. This in turn makes the mods look like jerks. Don’t read the above as saying the mods are not jerks, or defending them. Often they are jerks even when they don’t have to be.

    What we need is a way to select everyone into smaller groups of random people who know something but don’t overlap. I sometimes want a couple doctors to discuss some deep issue near me, but 1000 would be too many. I sometimes want to talk fishing with a few people. There are millions of other topics someone can get in depth in and my life is better when I hear a few of those conversations - but all million is overwhelming. I don’t know how to do this though - there are too many “anti-vaxer” types in the world that sound like they know something about a topic when you don’t know anything about it: but they are worse than nothing.




  • minis like the N100 when you are using it to do things has a lot more ability and uses a similar amount of watts (or can do a lot more for more for just a bit more watts). However when the box is just sitting there with the power on but otherwise doing nothing it uses more power than ARM based single board computers. So the real question is how much will they want to do when they are using it, and how often will that be. If they are watching movies/playing games for 16 hours a day the mini PC is the better answer and won’t really cost more energy to run. If they are leaving this on, but only using it for a couple hours per month than a device that uses less watts will save money.



  • NAS can be two different things.

    NAS is just “network attached storage”: a computer that has a bunch of disks attached to your network. IF you put a single disk on your network and nfs/samba to share it you have created a simple NAS - I strongly recommend you put in more drives for redundancy, but that is all NAS is.

    Often NAS is taken to mean not just the above, but a custom machine that does the above. The downside is these custom machines are often slow, and put weird hardware/software on them such that if the whole box breaks (as opposed to just a single disk failing which they are good at handling) you may not be able to recover anything. One variation of this you want more space and discover you can’t upgrade it at all. They are an easy way into NAS, but the downsides are such that I can’t recommend them anyway.


  • Many NAS work like that though. Hardware RAID always seems to work like that so if you get a fancy card that supports RAID you been make sure you have a good long term support contract that will be there for you when there are problems (if you are not paying hundreds of thousands per year you don’t have a good support contract)

    Not all are that way. Many run ZFS which is great for this and you can replace broken hardware and recover. BTFS is commonly used as well, probably not as good as zfs but likely good enough.




  • RaidZ1 is not the same as a mirror. I’m not sure if you are allowed to have Z1 with only 2 disks, but if you are you still shouldn’t because while it scales down that far it still does parity calculations and writes that to the second disk instead of just writing a copy of the data (the parity calculations probably result in the same data, but I doubt this is optimized)


  • ZFS snapshots are easy to settup. If you don’t notice that you deleted all the snapshots for a month you never will.

    you still should have offsite backups for a fire, but the notion that raid isn’t backup is not really correct since for most people the situations that raid with snapshots isn’t enough protection will never occure and to the risk is acceptable. Plus raid is a lot easier to get right. For that matter if you have a backup but don’t have the password after the fire you don’t have a backup.

    though if you rely on raid alone I’d want 3 disk redundancy.




  • I only have leagally owned movies. I’m technically violating some law but since I can show the judge the originals and they are not available outside myhome they won’t dare go after me - a jury won’t convict and even if one would I’m a perfect ‘normal man’ who proved the law is unjust. I won’t be as well known as Rosa Parks in history but I’d be a perfect story to rally around to get the las changed and they won’t risk that



  • Yes. However as others have already said odds are you don’t have the right devices. Still if you really work at it everything exists. Start by selecting one of the few TVs that support it, then get a good HDMI cable, make sure you have a video card that supports it, with drivers for the OS (you might have to write them yourself), then just setup networking. This would be an interesting hack, I’d love to see someone get it working and show their setup, but it is otherwise useless and will be a lot of work.