Bags

I have a Dell XPS 13 9315, which is roughly the same size as the 11" air (actually slightly smaller), and I absolutely adore it. I didn’t get the highest-end because I didn’t need it, but it’s available with some decent processors and up to 32Gb RAM. It just sucks that everything is soldered to the board and non-upgradeable, and it has only 2 USB C ports, but that’s the price you pay for the size. The battery life is actually astounding, too, I am constantly amazed how long it lasts. The new XPS13 has the weird square flat keys and no border around the touchpad, I’m really glad I got the model I did because the new ones look like a pain to actually use.

Like I can actually do a little bit of light Solidworks on it if I’m not near my desktop, which blew me away. It plays the indie games I like, too, so it basically just does everything I need.

My winter project is to install Linux on it and get it all working the way I want.

I will try and dig through my e-reader to find it, but it was a while ago so I might have purged the file.

On a completely unrelated note, just this week I finished up the last of Greg Egan’s works, I’ve been binging all his stuff. If you haven’t read any of his stuff I highly recommend it. They were all so good, but Diaspora and the Orthogonal Trilogy were my standout faves. the Orthogonal Trilogy is so unbelievably deeply technically detailed, it kept me glued to the pages and pages of equations, even if the characters were a little dry. It’s all about the universe-building in that one. Egan has an entire website with a massive amount of additional information and details about the physics of that universe.

Hah, I guess I wasn’t thinking far enough into the Trekkiverse.

I had recently read a book that had replicator-like technology but the matter stream was a luxury that not everyone could afford to connect to, it was laid out as an analog to the internet or other services like that, so that’s where my mind went. I can’t for the life of me remember which book that was…

I’ll put on my best Keiko voice and disappointed stare.

“But Miles, where do you think the matter replicators get their matter from? And where does the power to run them come from? Until there is a complete and total change in human philosophy regarding the accumulation of wealth, any required resource will become the new vehicle of capitalistic control.”

Many years ago Nokia made a couple prototypes of an official Star Trek communicator phone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3EN05faZVU

I would do some seriously regrettable things to have one of these that works with modern networks.

I’ve been weaning myself off video content altogether, which I feel is the most surefire way to avoid AI video.

I feel like I’m going to turn into such a paranoid tin-foil-hat nutcase and just trust nothing I don’t see with my own eyes… I mean I would be ok with that, it just sounds miserable.

I’ve actually taken note of my navigational skills over the last couple years… I grew up in one state, and then a few years after graduating college, moved to a different state. When I was growing up, phone navigation didn’t really exist as it does now, cars didn’t have built-in navigation, and standalone navigation devices were slow and not all that great (at least the ones I could afford).

I find that when I return home, even 10 years later, I am able to navigate all the places I used to go unaided with ease, back-roads, niche routes, able to travel for hours without getting “lost”.

When I moved, though, I had very recently gotten my first smartphone, and google maps was very convenient to “learn” the new area. I ended up just continuing to use navigation since it was convenient. I’ve found that beyond the major main routes, I don’t have the same kind of “built-in” navigational skill that I do for my original home-turf. I never really learned the area.

I am moving towards a smart-phone-less life, and I’ve been able to let go of a lot, but GPS navigation remains a sticking point. I need to start training myself to navigate unaided in my current area.

Costco bought RAC in a stunning buyout in 2437 after Costco’s CEO Harambe Memelord Disney Jr. offered RAC’s CEO Squiggy John John John John Johnson a 2-for 1 deluxe latte coupon and an extra big-ass fry.

They run a custom vendor-locked distro named QTS, so they’re not really as easy to modify as a normal system, I don’t think you can even install programs like that.

I’ll definitely bookmark it though if I ever get around to building my own solution, thanks!

I have no idea if it’s a QNAP-wide issue, or just some specific models, I haven’t bothered to do that much research. I’m guessing that the discs WOULD spin down if you have that option selected if they weren’t constantly being pinged a couple times a minute. That constant pinging is the part I can’t seem to track down.

An excerpt from a post I was reading while researching this sums it up prettt well: “700 posts about spindown/sleep/standby not working in the QNAP HDD Spin Down Forum. No one seems to be able to resolve it. Qnap clearly couldn’t care less.”

The only solution that I’ve found that seems to work is to install some other operating system on it, which kind of defeats the purpose of buying a turn-key NAS, and is slightly outside my comfort zone right now. I just ordered a kill-a-watt, so I’ll see how much power it’s taking with/without drives and go from there if it’s worth my time to dive into an OS swap, or building a custom rig.

If you can figure out how to get a qnap to spin down its disks, please let me know lol. I’ve been searching for months and haven’t found a reliable solution. I basically only need to access it once a day at MOST, so having the disks spinning away for like 99% of their life sucking down power is something I’d like to avoid. The problem seems to be that even with a perfectly clean slate, no services running, the system set up in their own RAID0 SSD pool, the HDD’s, even with 0 bytes of data on them, are being pinged for access at least once a minute. I’m assuming it’s some log being written to, but it’s not anything visible in the file system, and I haven’t been able to find any solution online, lots of people seem to have the same issue.

I’m tempted more and more every day to just grab one of those low-power embedded ITX boards and build up a custom rig. Other than the disk spinning constantly, the TS-462 does everything I need perfectly.