Exactly. A lot of people seem to think that different = worse, or that not supporting the same software means it supports less software. I couldn’t move to Windows right now because there is a ton of stuff I use Linux for that Windows has no alternative, or the alternatives are terrible. It works both ways.

BentoPDF is for editing PDFs, Paperless is for organizing PDFs. Think GIMP vs Immich.

Do not split a RAID array across drives in separate USB enclosures.

Doing RAID on USB drives is alright, as long as they’re all in the same enclosure and use a single USB interface. If you split an array between drives with separate USB interfaces, you will face corruption and rebuild issues when one of the controllers has a hiccup or comes up slower/faster than the other, which WILL happen. If you need to run a RAID array on USB-connected drives, use a 2-bay USB-connected DAS. I’ve used the QNAP TR-002 in the past, it works fine, just set it to individual mode.

The better option since we’re just talking about a mirror, is to run on one drive primarily, and occasionally sync your data to the other for a backup.

Shut off and leave your phone at home, buy a pay-as-you-go to bring with you for emergency contact/coordination

4-bay DAS with a handful of big HDDs in RAIDZ1. Load it up, then store it in your office at work or at a friend or family member’s house. Retrieve, update, and scrub somewhere between once every few weeks to once every few months, depending on how often your critical data is changing.

Yes, because the argument was never “we’ll have fusion in 20 years”, it’s always been “we COULD have fusion in 20 years IF research was properly funded”. It’s never been properly funded, hence it’s always 20 years away.

It’s a bit like my boss coming to ask me how long it would take to do project X. I tell him 6 months after we get funding. We don’t get funding. 6 months later he comes and asks me how long it would take to do project X. I tell him 6 months after we get funding. Queue shocked Pikachu face that the estimate is still 6 months, 6 months later.

Notifications will go a long way toward helping with that. Check all assumptions, check all exit codes, notify and stop if anything is amiss. I also have my backup script notify on success, with the time it took to back up and the size and delta size (versus the previous backup) of the resulting backup. 99% of errors get caught by the checks and I get a failure notification. But just in case something silently goes wrong, the size of the backup (too big or too small) is another obvious indicator that something went wrong.

Anyone who would sign up for a porn website using their .gov email address deserves to have it leaked

From what I’ve read about the issue middle mouse click to paste overwrites normal expected behaviour in some applications

Applications can override the behavior. I have several applications I use on a daily basis that use the middle mouse for panning and they work fine. If other applications don’t, that’s their own fault. Forcing users to disable a useful feature system-wide so a couple lazy applications can get away with buggy code is not a reasonable solution.

I only use a few applications where middle click panning makes sense, and it works fine, middle click paste has no effect. If some applications don’t handle panning properly, that’s a bug in those applications. Why on earth should we disable a useful feature system-wide so a couple buggy applications can get away with shoddy code?

No, middle click paste has nothing to do with middle mouse scroll, or middle click open-in-new-window. They’re independent functions, and all 3 can work together just fine. Disabling middle click paste has absolutely no upside that I can think of. Unless they’re going to replace middle click paste with something more useful, I don’t understand this push.

These modern app devs can pry my ncurses TUIs from my cold dead fingers

It’s happening at a lot of companies. Last year our C-suite cancelled some big IR&D projects (where we were designing real products that could actually be built and sold) in order to dump $300k/mo into renting a cloud AI infrastructure that none of the employees want or use.

Depends on what you’re buying. Wiredzone and Provantage are solid for enterprise/workstation gear, and for anything storage or camera related B&H is my go-to.

I agree with everything you’ve said here. The App Store is an absolute abomination, even when you search for the exact name of the app you’re looking for it’s several pages down in the results. The App Store is as bad as Google Search now, nothing but ads and garbage, and now they want to make it even worse? I honestly don’t even see how they can add more ads, like physically how? The App Store landing pages and search results are nothing but ads already.

You do realize this happens to people on Android as well, right? Google shuts down accounts for random inexplicable reasons all the time, and when that happens the user loses all of their apps purchased through Google’s store. What are you suggesting he do differently? Other than just…not have a smart phone or paid apps on it?

Thanks! BentoPDF is fantastic, I never knew something like this existed.

I have a todo list where I keep track of services I might be interested in one day, I read your post a few hours ago and added Bento to my list, thinking I might get around to it in a few days/weeks/months. Then out of nowhere 15 minutes ago I randomly needed to crop and split a PDF and realized I didn’t have anything to do it. I fired Bento up and was done in under a minute.

Samsung doesn’t actually make dimms as far as I know

They do both. This is what I have in my server, for example:

https://semiconductor.samsung.com/dram/module/rdimm/m321r8ga0eb2-ccp/

Disagree. Their priorities are backwards.

Company A releases a product, it runs closed-source proprietary firmware on-board, and it can’t be updated by the user even if bugs or compatibility issues are found later on in the product’s life cycle.

Company B releases a product, it runs closed-source proprietary firmware on-board, but it can be updated by the user if bugs or compatibility issues are found later on in the product’s life cycle.

According to the FSF, product A gets the stamp of approval, product B doesn’t. That makes no sense.

I use node_exporter + VictoriaMetrics + Grafana for network-wide system monitoring. node_exporter also has provisions to include text files placed in a directory you specify, as long as they’re written out in the right format. I use that capability on my systems to include some custom metrics, including CPU and memory usage of the top 5 processes on the system, for exactly this reason.

The resulting file looks like:

# HELP cpu_usage CPU usage for top processes in %
# TYPE cpu_usage gauge
cpu_usage{process="/usr/bin/dockerd",pid="187613"} 1.8
cpu_usage{process="/usr/local/bin/python3",pid="190047"} 1.4
cpu_usage{process="/usr/bin/cadvisor",pid="188999"} 1.0
cpu_usage{process="/opt/mealie/bin/python3",pid="190114"} 0.9
cpu_usage{process="/opt/java/openjdk/bin/java",pid="190080"} 0.9

# HELP mem_usage Memory usage for top processes in %
# TYPE mem_usage gauge
mem_usage{process="/usr/local/bin/python3",pid="190047"} 3.0
mem_usage{process="/usr/bin/Xvfb",pid="196573"} 2.4
mem_usage{process="/usr/bin/Xvfb",pid="193606"} 2.4
mem_usage{process="next-server",pid="194634"} 1.2
mem_usage{process="/opt/mealie/bin/python3",pid="190114"} 1.2

And it gets scraped every 15 seconds for all of my systems. The result looks like this for CPU and memory. Pretty boring most of the time, but it can be very valuable to see what was going on with the active processes in the moments leading up to a problem.