the fact that this is the worst-merchandised franchise in the world is incredibly annoying

I can’t agree with this more. It’s insane the disparity between ST merch and Star Wars merch. It’s like Trek stuff is always the “Wish version” of what the people behind Star Wars are putting out. Lego is a good example, they’ve put out hundreds of Star Wars sets over decades while Star Trek is relegated to the shitty knockoff Lego-clone companies who think they can charge as much as Lego for what they offer.

I just buy a cheap jumbo pack from Amazon. They’re like 15 bucks and last for years which is good enough for me.

Generally because you’re buying cheaper ones that aren’t built as well. Heat destroys LEDs and the cheap bulbs generally use fewer individual LEDs running at higher power to produce a given output in lumens. More expensive bulbs use more LEDs at lower power to achieve the same light output so that they’re not constantly being overdriven and last much longer.

I’m not a fan of Tabasco so I wholeheartedly say “nay.” If we’re talking classic Sriracha or something less vinegary, then by all means “yea”.

I’ll just leave this here: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-not-at-all-sad-history-of-89890804/

R7 gang here. Let us keep the dream alive!

Curious what was the model of your drive failure? I have 6 years now on a bunch of 8TB WD Elements/EasyStore drives as well as some 10TB-14TB WD MyBook, Elements, and refurbished WD drives from serverpartdeals in the preceding years. Still no failures yet but I’m expecting one eventually.

I’m currently running mine on Windows and use SnapRAID and DrivePool as my defense against drive failures. I think I have 7 data drives and 2 parity at this point (totalling around 90TB). Beyond that I copy the Snapraid whatchamacallit to a separate backup drive along with my OS drive. This isn’t really a ‘backup’ but in the scenario where I have several failures and no way to restore, I still have radarr/sonarr keeping track of my library and a membership to several private trackers.

I wouldn’t worry too much about losing media files as most can just be downloaded again. I find it more beneficial to make use of all the storage space you can rather than trying to do a 1:1 backup, which gets pretty absurd once you start getting up there in movie/TV count.

Pretty sure this stuff already exists in some form. /r/datahoarder people would probably be able to steer you in the right direction though you may need to lay out several thousand for enough HDDs to hold it.

No, but an old sock full of batteries might.

I’m sure with a little late night cruise, you’ll have no trouble finding a cheap handy to pickup.

Huh? I asked a simple question.

Well, where do you think it goes once it’s taxed away at 100%?

Generational wealth is easily tackled by an inheritance tax. If my rights and living wishes as a dead person don’t matter with regard to my property, why should some random stranger be entitled to it either?

You can counteract this with a strict timeframe like 20 or 25 years. If I create something and die a year later, my copyright transfers to whomever and they can hold it for 19 more years. Seems fair all around.

I’d like to see government subsidies instead.

How would that really work in practice though? Would Disney get $100 million for making a movie while I only get $100 for making my own independent movie? It’d be really hard to assign a value to things without the associated system that we currently use.

You can still use one of these with the NAS as storage. A Synology doesn’t have a lot of horsepower to run programs directly on their hardware so if you plan on doing something like a media server you might encounter some issues. An optiplex (or any other PC) running Proxmox will let you run a bunch of different containers or VMs separately

You might look for a used Optiplex SFF or micro form factor PC. These can be purchased for around $100 in the US and have full fledged PC hardware which is capable of running most things. The downside here is less peripheral support for things like PCIE or internal storage.

I’ve been using Grafana and InfluxDB to maintain device history as it can store everything for as long as you want. You might look into it if this new change doesn’t give you what you’re looking for.

Seems reasonable on something dangerous like a toaster oven or pressure cooker that you obviously wouldn’t want to leave on and unattended. These lights use almost no power at all.