• 11 Posts
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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I’m still on the trusting-the-banks: I have a lot of money in the largest banks in the US, and if they fail, we’re all fucked: if BoA and Chase and Citibank collapse, we’re all going to back to growing our own food on family plots and you’ll want a donkey and 10 acres more than anything else.

    To that end, I’m spending a lot of money on what amounts to chickens, seeds, canned/preserved food, and bullets.

    I mean, I may not need 5 years of seeds, and what’s close to a year’s worth of not-great-but-not-starving food stores, and enough ammo to clear out the 100 acre woods, buuuuut if you do need it, better you have it.


  • The problem is for people who have more than $500 to save somewhere: if I put half my assets in crypto, we’re talking north of $600,000.

    I do not trust a bunch of people who think computer-generated monkey pictures are neat with great big piles of money, and until they stop acting like a cross between the stupidest shit you’ve ever heard and a poverty-spec casino, it’s not gonna fucking happen.

    So yeah, I still trust the banking system more than I do putting it into even something like ETH or BTC, even if I’m doing self-custody, because I don’t trust a single player that’s involved will do anything other than immediately collapse if it reaches the point where crypto becomes more useful than real money and people start trying to pull usable money out of their portfolios.

    If I can’t pay my bills and buy food, then I might as well have just invested in shiny pebbles.








  • Mostly becasuse, well, I don’t like Android.

    I’ve tried it repeatedly over quite a number of years, starting with the G1, and every time I’ve used it, my general opinion was ‘this is fine I guess, but I’d rather have an iOS device instead’. Excepting the two OnePlus devices: those were utter shit. One I was pretty sure was going to catch fire, and one that actually did catch fire. No more crap from them, seriously.

    Will say the Nexus 9 tablet rates in the S-tier of all the tablets I’ve ever owned, though.

    And I’m deep in the Apple ecosystem otherwise: Mac, iPad, Watch, AirPods and so on.

    And, of course, I don’t think there’s a wearable smartwatch for android that integrates cellular stuff quite like the iPhone/Watch does in that it’ll share calls and messages on a single number. I know there’s a lot of stand-alone stuff, and a lot of non-cellular stuff, but the last time I looked there wasn’t really a seamless and cheap solution for leaving the phone at home and not losing any of the primary communication aspects of the phone.


  • Buy multiple drives, setup some sort of raid, setup some sort of backup. Then set up a 2nd backup.

    Done.

    All drives from all manufacturers are going to fail at more or less the same rate (see: backblaze’s stats) and trying to buy a specific thing to avoid the death which is coming for all drives is, mostly, futile: at the absolute best you might see a single specific model to avoid, but that doesn’t mean entire product lines are bad.

    I’m using some WD red drives which are pushing 8 years old, and some Seagate exos drives which are pushing 4, and so far no issues on any of the 7 drives.


  • Make sure, if you use hardware RAID, you know what happens if your controller dies.

    Is the data in a format you can access it easily? Do you need a specific raid controller to be able to read it in the future? How are you going to get a new controller if you need it?

    That’s a big reason why people nudge you to software raid: if you’re using md and doing a mirror, then that’ll work on any damn drive controller on earth that linux can talk to, and you don’t need to worry about how you’re getting your data back if a controller dies on you.





  • Like everything else on the internet, absolute shit I’m sorry to say.

    The spam problem exists there, and if it’s not spam, it’s more than likely a complete scam.

    I’ve quit trying to buy used stuff online outside of ebay (because, if nothing else, the level of interaction is much lower and if it’s a scam then you’ve got actual protections) and totally given up selling anything online anymore and just throw everything I don’t want away becasue I don’t want to deal with the headache of selling shit on these platforms.

    The last try was a computer on Facebook marketplace which did, eventaully, sell: after something like 60 people asked questions and 4 or 5 people flaked out. It was very much not worth the $150 or whatever.



  • I’m not sure where this “wants single-file variants” comes from.

    I was having issues with pirated audiobooks stopping playback, being unable to resume playback, and losing playback status and location all the damn time, though this was a while ago.

    The suggestion was to take these random audiobooks and condense them into one file, instead of the 15 tracks per disk, 20 disks per book mess they were, and sure enough that completely fixed the problem.

    If it’s no longer an issue, cool, but for a while playback from books in lots and lots and lots of parts was flaky as fuck.