I don’t have this issue with proton either but I can’t imagine that’s the best solution. I can’t exactly tell my insurance or customer service at a company to whitelist my email.

Yeah agreed. What’s going on in my state of Pennsylvania is they’re reopening the Three Mile Island nuclear plant out near Harrisburg for the sole reason of powering Microsoft’s AI data centers. This will be Unit 1 which was closed in 2019. Unit 2 was the one that was permanently closed after the meltdown in 1979.

I’m all for nuclear power. I think it’s our best option for an alternative energy source. But the only reason they’re opening the plant again is because our grid can’t keep up with AI. I believe the data centers is the only thing the nuke plant will power.

I’ve also seen the scale of things in my work in terms of power demands. I’m an industrial electrical technician, and part of our business is the control panels for cooling the server racks for Amazon data centers. They just keep buying more more and more of them, projected til at least 2035 right now. All these big tech companies are totally revamping everything for AI. Like before a typical rack section might have drawn let’s say 1000 watts, now it’s more like 10,000 watts. Again, just for AI.

When I went to Australia, it was cheaper to get there by staying a few days in Tahiti. I got a cheap room, kind of like an air bnb, it hosted like 4 guest rooms with a very nice garden and the guy made a very good breakfast each day. I got a rental car and drove all around the island, went for a couple hikes, went to the public beaches, ate fresh seafood and very good french coffee and food. My roaming wasn’t working so I kinda just went at the whole thing blind. I couldn’t read anything because I don’t speak French, and directions were easy since there’s just one main road that goes around in a circle on the island. Driving a manual Suzuki Swift was fun as hell, way uhh “looser” of a car than I’m used to in the states.

Overall though, I had a great time in Tahiti. It’s beautiful and everyone there is very laid back and friendly. I saw a couple resorts there with private beaches and cruise ships and I could not imagine a worse way to experience French polynesia. I cannot understand the mindset of people on their honeymoons that are terrified to leave their perfectly curated hotel experience or whatever. When I travel I want to travel and see as much as I can of how things really are and how people live, eat, etc

I guess heads up, trades can really further destroy your body, but in a different way. I’ve worked one for about 10 years and I’m doing fine but some of the older guys absolutely have blown out their knees, backs, etc. Expect to be digging a trench or running up and down flights of steps for tools and materials, lifting the heavy shit etc when you start an apprenticeship.

Fortunately I’m at the point now where I do way less hands on work (for better or worse, I miss it sometimes) unless I’m in the field on industrial sites. Then it’s go go go, work 14 hours a day get it done and it’s heavy dirty hard electrician work, etc. But when I’m in the shop, all I do now is test our systems and do QA. So I feel way more like an inspector than I do a technician, despite that being in my job title. That’s also a love/hate relationship if I’m being honest haha, but it sure beats working at a desk all day.

I’m at the point in my career where I’ve turned down a promotion to a desk job multiple times for the simple fact that I can’t commit to cubicle life and want to be on my feet all day and physically looking and working on things to make sense of them. I also make way more money with overtime pay anyway. Maybe when I get into my 40’s I’ll consider making the jump.

I test and do QA on impossibly huge industrial electrical systems for things like steel mills. Some of them are 100 feet long, with individual cabinets all bayed together and fed from buswork which we fabricate ourselves. I also do some field work installing, repairing, etc.

However, the most boring part of my job by far is verifying bills of material during my QA portion. This involves physically looking at every part number of every part in the system (sometimes thousands of parts), and verifying it is the same number. Sometimes it takes days

Sure

I built it out of old PC parts when I upgraded my desktop. I wanted to go full AMD for both the CPU and GPU for the new build so I used the old mobo and got an Intel i3-10100 open box along with a few other random parts like a small nvme drive for a cache drive. I got four 8TB drives to start from a few places, one of them being Mac bid.

Then I found an absolutely massive heavy duty 48u server rack on Craigslist for like 50 bucks. I cut it in half with an angle grinder so it would fit under the steps and gave the other half to my fiance for his music production gear in our studio. I took din rail home from work and drilled & tapped holes in the rack to support it since the top frame was now missing. I put some din rail on the sides to mount my old NUCs and ran game servers on them for a while.

I have a rack mounted UPS on the bottom, the NAS above it in a rosewill case that can take up to like 16 spinning drives I think. I have a 10gb/s fiber connection for loading steam games as fast as the disk can spin. Games really don’t have many loading screens nowadays so it works great for storing smaller games that load you in once or twice. The real complicated massive games I still store on my NVME on my desktop.

On top I have my networking equipment. Eventually I’m going to get a full router and NVR with cameras to watch things like birds and the front entrance. I also have a pi-hole.

I have a KVM setup that easily lets me navigate my desktop from the living room and play games in there. It works great. I mounted a remote start button on my living room wall, so now I can turn my PC on, login, press a keybind in hyprland that runs a script I wrote. This will turn off both PC monitors, change sound over, and launch emulationstation-DE which is a front end for all of the emulators, steam games, pirated games, whatever. So now the desktop is doing all the heavy lifting in terms of its CPU/GPU for the game, storing the game on my NAS in the basement, and broadcasting it in 4K / 60 FPS in my living room while I use a controller with zero latency. All on Linux. If 15 year old me who was using Ubuntu could see my setup now he’d geek out. A side note is I love Arch Linux now, and never want to use anything else. But it took me a while to find my way.

This turned into a bit of a tangent about my homelab as a whole, but the OS for the NAS I use is unRAID. The flexibility is unparalleled. You can throw whatever random drives you find in it and they’re protected so long as they’re the same size or smaller than the parity drive. On the NAS itself I run an *arr stack, Plex, a torrent client, etc. I also use it to download YT videos and have a private collection of things like concerts. Quite a few people use my Plex. My parents are even on it now and they’re getting into their 70s.

Really though, the NAS is primarily storage first and foremost. But it’s been chugging along for years and is pretty crucial in doing a lot.

I learned a ton about Linux building a few servers. A simple NAS can be a great starting point.

I have my NAS mounted as an NFS format. Since I use Linux on my desktop and server, the storage pool integrates seamlessly into things like my file browser and terminal. And don’t underestimate having “basically unlimited” storage capabilities. I have thousands of old games stored on my NAS, I play them via emulators or on steam.

PEX has a lifespan of 50+ years. Copper pipes have a lifespan of about 70. Both are permanent solutions.

They have pros and cons. Both can freeze, but only copper pipes will actually burst. PEX never will. PEX offers way better flexibility and less joints, and easier connections (you literally just crimp it).

It’s your house but I wouldn’t be so quick to knock PEX. I did a whole new bathroom with it. Only thing I’d say to stay far far away from is CPVC. Avoid that shit like the plague as it’s basically a ticking time bomb

Very rarely, but I have a few times.

C’mon C’mon starring Joaquin Phoenix and a 12 year old kid made my ball my eyes out.

I could not get fable 2 to launch at all on xenia on Arch. I didn’tolk further into it yet though, honestly I’m not sure if I can get any game to launch

Saw some very loud bands and DJs in venues way too small a few years ago right after covid. I’ve had tinnitus ever since. It sucks, but I only really hear it late at night when I’m going to bed and there’s no noise. Factory life means I’m working around loud noises all day, but this current shop I’m working at is miles better than the one I worked at for 7 years.

What’s odd is I never got it pre-covid and I definitely used to push my luck even more back then. Maybe getting covid a few times changed something, my friend’s brother just permanently has tinnitus from getting covid.

There was one night in particular though that I still remember, my ears were ringing the day after. Usually they’d tone down by the 12 hour mark. The second day, I was like oh shit this is probably permanent. It was, that was in 2021. I definitely sulked in my feelings a bit after that, and now I wear ear protection to every concert. It’s just not worth it to damage my ears further.

This may not be the answer you’re looking for but Plex finally added the feature to set subtitles to be on if the audio is not in English. Previously you had to turn subtitles on for every episode individually, couldn’t even do it per show.

Are you sure you set your qbittorrent up correctly? You need to bind your network interface so it only works when connected to your VPN. It’s possible it started using your regular network if your VPN went down or maybe even if it was a higher speed, I’m not sure.

I know for mine, I noticed a couple times that all my torrents stopped seeding. I pay for mullvad annually so sometimes I forget when I need to resubscribe. But it’s a good piece of mind that if my VPN isn’t active, qbittorrent won’t seed or leech a single thing.

Try disabling your VPN on that device and see if you can still download Linux ISOs.

I’ve never once heard anyone call it tomato sauce in my neck of the woods in america. It’s always been ketchup.

I live in Pittsburgh however, Heinz is headquartered here and the factory is still operational downtown. Hell, the Steelers football field was called Heinz Field and had giant ketchup bottles by the scoreboards up until a couple years ago.

Must be a regional thing.

Do people actually put all these meaningless buzz words? I wouldn’t put any of this crap because they are all just the base standard of having a professional career except adding way too much fluff.

When I touched up my resume in 2023 (last time I looked for a job) I honestly was struggling to compact as much technical skills and experience as I could and even had to leave some stuff out. The only point that was this type of stuff I put on there was like “maintained own schedule and communication via email” even though my current job requires a lot of emails and “office level” work now.

This might be anecdotal and specific to my field to be honest. I’m an industrial electrician with 10 years experience. But to be fair, I applied to 12 places in 2023 (I was picky about applying), got 3 interviews, one was no offer, the other pay was too low, third I accepted

A few suggestions:

Going from a 4 bay to a 6 bay is not that big of a jump. Especially if you are already at 95% full, you’re gonna fill up those other two drives quick. I used to have a 4 bay little off-brand NAS I found on eBay. I sold it and upgraded to a 14 bay rosewill 4U rack-mounted chassis. For parts I just repurposed some old PC parts and bought a few open box ones. The chassis is like $139 but I suggest getting better rails as the rosewill ones can be kinda crappy. You’d be amazed how quickly storage can fill up and accumulate, so plan for the future.

I also glanced at the NAS you listed, and it’s $1000. You can build something way more customizable with way more storage capabilities for like 1/3 of the cost of that. Was there a reason you wanted to go with this one? Generally it seems to be selling the software that comes with it, and “AI” which… I’m not sure what the idea of that is with it being a data storage device.

Which brings me to my next point, I would highly suggest unRAID for an operating system. Reason being is you said that the idea of constantly adding to your pool and being flexible with sizes and different types of drives appeals to you. This is unRAID’s bread and butter. Throw one large drive in there as your parity, and whatever other random drives you want (different sizes, brands, whatever) are your pool and they are all protected in case of a failure.

It may be controversial in a FOSS sense, but unRAID does have a one-time license fee. I paid like $80 four years ago. Worth it for how easy and configurable the software is, but it’s still Linux at its core so if you want to get your hands dirty all it takes is one click and you’re in the shell or spinning up VM’s and of course docker for your “core” software. Just don’t overspend on a crazy M.2 SSD for your cache disk or a high capacity one. I promise you don’t need the best one to load Plex thumbnails .001 seconds faster. Whether this is better than the prepackaged Zima OS is up to you.

You may want to check out the fish shell. The auto-complete is the only way I want to use the terminal nowadays.

I played the HD version on a PS3 emulator and honestly didn’t notice that much of a difference from the PS2 game with upscaled resolution.

I think the point of this post, which I agree with, is that the PS2 version that is available via emulators or on the PS store currently is good enough as it is and the series doesn’t need revived at all.

Sort of in the same vein is that I tried playing MGS1 twin snakes which is the gamecube remake of the PS1 game. Maybe it’s nostalgia of the original being my favorite game of all time, but it just didn’t hit the same for me as the original. It’s just about the closest thing to what a modern “remake” would look like, except I guess with the graphics of how the new remastered snake eater game looks instead of the GC graphics.

It sucks that people might skip timeless classics like these because they’re not remastered with updated graphics.

Working with your hands and tools. It’s amazing how far it can take you and how much money you can make and/or save by DIY’ing things around your home with some basic skills. Like there are people that will pay $100 for something easy like mounting a TV when it’s a few minutes of finding studs and screwing down the bracket.

Then as things progress and you get more comfortable, you can start helping friends and doing side work. I’ve been doing industrial electrical for 10 years now, I’m gonna be re-wiring a whole house from the ground up in July

There are a ton of great things in this, wow