Chahk @ chahk @beehaw.org

Posts

7

Comments

400

Joined

2 yr. ago

Also Samsung Note 7 was da bomb!

I'm still salty that we never got an epic Borg Vs. Jorg battle at the end of S3. They totally wasted whatever it was they were trying to set up with Jurati at the end of season 2.

Gru in Despicable Me.

Zangief in Wreck-it Ralph: "You are bad guy but this does not mean you are bad guy. ¯(ツ)/¯"

Despicable Me?

Nintendon't

Apple would rather maintain a completely different version of its operating systems for Europe...

Next time some apple fanboi tells me how Android is fragmented I'm gonna laugh in their face.

I've done my share of live concerts when I was younger. Saw Depeche Mode, The Rolling Stones, U2, Duran Duran, my wife dragged me to see NSYNC (never again), and we took our kid to see The Wiggles. These days I have no urge to see any band live. Part of it is me getting older (get off my lawn!) but mainly it's because the cost of concerts skyrocketed 'cause of TicketScamster.

If I could go back in time, I'd definitely want to see The Beatles. Also I'd love to have been in Helsinki in 2005 at the Nightwish's "End of an Era" concert.

My sister-in-law was born on Feb 29th. She celebrates on the 28th, and during leap year accepts congratulations on both days :)

Rewatching Parks & Rec episodes always cheers me up.

Looks like you can self-host OpenTalk too: https://gitlab.opencode.de/opentalk/ot-setup

Without even a little bit of sarcasm, I am genuinely happy for you. Hold on to this job for as long as you can, because people like that are incredibly rare.

In my 30+ year career in IT I've only managed to work for a place like that once. It was 20 years ago, and I was the sixth employee to be hired, and at our peak we were at about 30 people. The owner was a super nice guy who cared about every single one of his employees. I learned a lot from him and consider him to be a friend and a mentor. We weathered the 2008 financial downturn better than most, but eventually business started to dry up and the company was sold to a large competitor. The boss was relegated to a consultancy role, and eventually got pushed out altogether. I lasted another 3 years at that place, but it was never the same after the buyout. Everyone became just another cog in the machine. Every place I worked at before that or since was your typical corporate position where my manager's supervisor's boss doesn't even know I exist, much less care about me.

I consider the first 6 years in that company a highlight of my career, and keep in touch with that boss and others who worked there. So yes, treasure your time at a good workplace, and don't take for granted the personal connections you make there.

You mean Cortana which was a rebrand of Clippy.

Alrighty then. If corps want to train their AI on all the content they can scrape without worrying about copyright, then they can't complain when I torrent their shit without worrying about copyright too! Deal? Somehow I don't see them taking that deal.

The company doesn't care about you.

I wish more people would understand this.

Also, HR is there to protect the company, not you.

Yes, but is the PC actually loud?

Recently finished my very first play through of all 3 Mass Effect (Legendary Edition) games. Started Mass Effect: Andromeda, but for some reason it triggers horrible motion sickness after 30 minutes of playing. As in, "I need to have a barf bucket nearly, and then lie down for the rest of the day" kind of bad.

Undercook, overcook - straight to jail!

Open a 401k account, and start contributing to it. Funds permitting, try to max out your yearly contributions as much as current rules allow. Doubly so if your employer does any sort of matching. It's pre-tax, and you won't feel it per paycheck, but it adds up over the years.

Are you planning to use this only for media storage, or other tasks as well?

Many dedicated NAS boxes from the likes of Synology and QNAP come with low-powered CPUs that in addition to handling media storage can do many other useful things. For example - running various self-hosted apps like password managers, photo organizers, even office suites. Those do have many downsides as well. They use proprietary hardware and software, so you are at the mercy of the manufacturer if they suddenly decide that your NAS is too old for them to support. The CPUs in them are not as powerful as consumer-grade ones found in most desktops, and they don't usually come with a lot of RAM. They are also quite expensive for what they offer - for example, a very basic 4-bay enclosure with 2GB RAM and Realtek 4-core CPU costs $370, and that's without the cost of the disks. For that kind of money you can build a desktop from used server parts that will be ten times as powerful, and more versatile since it will be able to run any OS that you want. Granted, it will not be as small or power efficient.

If you just need a turn-key off-the-shelf solution, a prebuilt NAS may be the way to go. If you want to tinker with hardware and experiment with software however, self-built system with used parts may be better suited for you. Most homelabbers don't start off with a rack full of equipment, they grow their hardware organically. You have outgrown your external enclosure, so now you have several choices. For prebuilt NAS appliances Synology and QNAP are not the only choices; there are many other lesser known in this category - Asustor, Terramaster, Buffalo, to name a few. For building a server on your own I would recommend doing some research before going on a shopping spree - https://serverbuilds.net is an excellent resource.

That said, I'd echo others' answers. RAID is not backup. It offers some resiliency from disk failure, but that shouldn't replace a proper backup strategy. Synology offers various RAID levels, including their own take on it that allows for different sized drives. For self-built option there's UnRaid which handles resiliency differently, but requires an entire separate drive for parity.

In terms of hard drive choice, it all depends on how comfortable you are with possible data loss. If you back up your critical data (e.g. family photos, important documents) and don't care about downloaded media (you can always re-download it) then go ahead and use whatever - shucked, used, etc. If you absolutely cannot handle any data loss, then new drives made specifically for NAS appliances are the way to go. Enterprise level HDDs are an option also, but those mostly use SAS interface instead of SATA, and require specialized hardware (HBA adapters).

Two software developers walk into a bar...