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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • 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.



  • I want a keyboard, but not one with little keys with small travel. Give me a real keyboard, with real (preferably buckling spring) switches, and good travel. It still needs to fit in my pocket though - which is why I suffer with a touch screen so often. Sure I have a nice 60% Bluetooth keyboard (Cherry switches are not ideal but a large step up from most keyboards) , but it doesn’t fit in my pocket and so I schelp it only when I expect to type a lot.







  • 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.





  • Viagra was developed as a promising heart disease treatment. In trials the side effects we all know of it for came apparent quickly and so they got it approved for that since it is very easy to prove it is helpful. However there is still good reason to believe that it is helpful for a lot of other things and everyone should take it. What isn’t known is if there is anyone who shouldn’t take it, what the best dosage is, and lots of other details - but studies are happening and I expect in 10 years it will be a regular treatment for a lot of people who don’t care about the side effects.




  • 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.