You have to keep in mind the scenarios where it will be used. While truly fast charging does exist today (20 minutes or so for 80% charge), that is not widespread, nor is that the way it’s typically done. Level 3 (DC fast charging) is expensive (moreso than gas), potentially detrimental to the battery, and still usually not very fast (an hour at least). As such, you aren’t going to charge at your local gas station the same way you get a fill up today.

Most people use a level 2 charger, either at home or at work. This means it can sit for 8 hours to refuel. Many parking garages have this as well. Level 2 chargers deliver AC directly to the vehicle, meaning you don’t need a lot of infrastructure- just a 240v line and a billing system. This in turn means it’s cheap and relatively easy to install. Sometimes you’ll see these outside of Starbucks or a grocery store, but not especially often. You’ll get ~25 miles of range per hour charging using level 2. But even if you spend 2 hours drinking coffee, or buying groceries, you’ve only added 50 miles of range.

This is where level 3 comes in. It requires some pretty significant equipment (which is part of why they’re always broken), because it has to convert AC into high voltage DC. It also has to chill the cables internally, otherwise they’d quickly overheat from the electricity passing through. But this takes up space that’s probably not really available in the lot.

I am seeing fast chargers now being installed at travel centers/truck stops along major highways. It fits in nicely with regular stops on a road trip for food. I’m also seeing them being installed at most Walmarts, since that’s perfect for grocery shopping.

Around here, that last group has been from Electrify America, which does NOT require an app. They have a standard credit card reader.

Licensing and activation are separate, and only loosely related. If you are at anything resembling a large org, they don’t even use the HWID or OEM key- they will be using an internal KMS server.

It really sounds like you have way more permissions than you should have on a work device. You should’ve hit a wall even attempting to install Win11 (I can confirm that my work blocks this very effectively). I also question why you would want to do that at all. I’m also not sure you needed to do anything to activate- I believe 10 and 11 use the exact same HWID/keys/etc

Many private trackers, and even a few public ones, have a request forum. The private ones reward users that fill these requests, so they are often effective.

There are some very accessible private trackers (sometimes referred to as semi-private) that meet these requirements. Once you get set up, they can be very set-and-forget. Just avoid the forums.

Unless you’re on a self-hosted VPN (defeating the whole purpose), it’s not especially hard to identify VPN connections. All of the common ones are known, and many use IP ranges and reverse lookups that clearly identify the VPN/seedbox provider.

It’s a bit harder when you are connected to one that resolves to a residential-looking hostname. But again, unless it’s truly unique (defeating the purpose), simply sorting users by IP will reveal almost all of them.

Some trackers used to do this to weed out people with multiple accounts. Some of the big ones still actively detect and block (or punish) anyone connecting to their website with a VPN (torrent traffic is still generally allowed, though)

I think you mean LGA (Land Grid Array), meaning the pins are on the motherboard. Ball Grid Array (BGA) is used for embedded, non-removable CPUs.

The only thing I’ll add is that RAID is redundancy. Its purpose is to prevent downtime, not data loss.

If you aren’t concerned with downtime, RAID is the wrong solution.

TorrentLeech has open registration several times per year. Keep an eye on Opentrackers.org for any of these. Note that some are open, while others are open application. The latter means you must meet certain criteria to be accepted. Typically this is proof of your stats on other trackers, but sometimes it’s exclusively for refugees from one that failed.

Keep in mind that you will not ever find open registrations on an established, reputable tracker. They don’t need more users. They only recruit from lesser, more accessible trackers. You will need to start on these to establish yourself. There are plenty of guides on this, with most starting on RED or MAM.

If you aren’t on any of these, it’s not because they’re too hard to get into- it’s because you don’t want to put in the effort. Which is exactly what private trackers want to avoid.

Also, smaller doesn’t always mean bad. TorrentDB was a rising star, with regular open invites, right up until its collapse. Even the giants like PTP started from nothing. Getting in early is a perfectly viable strategy, especially if you help grow it.

The absolute easiest and simplest would be to modify your grub config to have a longer timer on the boot menu, effectively delaying them until the NAS is up.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best option- there are ways to make the actual boot process wait for mounts, or to stagger the WOL signals, or the solutions others have mentioned. But changing grub is quick and easy.

You’re overlooking a very common reason that people setup a homelab - practice for their careers. Many colleges offer a more legitimate setup for the same purpose, and a similar design. But if you’re choosing to learn AD from a free/cheap book instead of a multi-thousand dollar course, you still need a lab to absorb the information and really understand it.

Granted, AD is of limited value to learn these days, but it’s still a backbone for countless other tools that are highly relevant.

What do you mean by “last”? I know it’s a common term, but when you dig deeper, you’ll see why it doesn’t really make sense. For this discussion, I’m assuming you mean “How long until I need to buy a newer model?”

First, consider the reasons you might have for buying a newer model. The first is hardware failure. Second is obsolescence - the device cannot keep up with newer needs, such as speed, capacity, or interface. The third is insecurity/unsupported from the vendor.

The last one is easy enough to check from a vendor’s product lifecycle page. I’ll assume this isn’t what you’re concerned about. Up next is obsolescence. Obviously it meets your needs today, but only you can predict your future needs. Maybe it’s fine for a single 1080p* stream today, and that’s all you use it for. It will continue to serve that purpose forever. But if your household grows and suddenly you need 3x 4k streams, it might not keep up. Or maybe you’ll only need that single 1080p stream for the next 20 years. Maybe you’ll hit drive capacity limits, or maybe you won’t. We can’t answer any of that for you.

That leaves hardware failure. But electronics don’t wear out (mechanical drives do, to an extent, but you asked about the NAS). They don’t really have an expected life span in the same way as a car battery or an appliance. Instead, they have a failure rate. XX% fail in a given time frame. Even if we assume a bathtub curve (which is a very bold assumption), the point where failures climb is going to be very unclear. The odds are actually very good that it will keep working well beyond that.

Also of note, very few electronics fail before they are obsolete.

*Technically it’s about bitrate, but let’s just ignore that detail for simplicity. We’ll assume that 4k uses 4x as much space as 1080p

TL;DR: It could fail at any moment from the day it was manufactured, or it could outlast all of us. Prepare for that scenario with a decent backup strategy, but don’t actually replace it until needed.

That the market buying internal drives is generally willing to pay more for the product vs the people buying an external drive? Because cost of the parts (AKA Bill of Materials, or BOM) is only a small part of what determines the price on the shelf.

The fact the WD has a whole thing about refusing to honor the warranty (likely in violation of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act) should tell you what you really need to know.

TL;DR: It’s about the warez “scene”, specifically about music pre-releases. A decent read, but one you may have seen before.

Are they obfuscated in any way? Depending on your client, you may not be able to see the names and subjects. But if you didn’t have the NZB, is there any real chance you could find it otherwise?

First, a massive amount of content is removed. You won’t find a lot of popular, unencrypted content these days on usenet. It’s all encrypted and obfuscated now to avoid the bots

Speaking of bots, I don’t think you realize how much of this process is automated, or how wide of a net is being used. The media corporations all have enormous collected libraries of material. It gets posted constantly to all sorts of places. This includes public torrents, public usenet, YouTube, PornHub (yes, really, even for non-porn), Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, GNUtella, DDL sites…

The list goes on and on. Each one gets scanned for millions of potentially infringing items, often daily. No actual people are doing those steps.

Now, throw in things like private torrents, encrypted usenet posts, invite-only DDL, listings that use ‘3’ instead ‘e’ or those other character subscriptions… These require actual humans to process. Humans that cost money, and a considerable amount of it. As a business, you have to show a return on investment. Fighting piracy, even at its theoretical best, doesn’t increase revenues by a lot.

You mention revenue and breaking even, but you left out an important detail. Your time is free. They don’t have to pay $10/month, they have to pay $10/month + $20/hour for someone to deal with it. And most pirates of that level will just find another method.

But would you let him put a chip inside your head, potentially controlling your thoughts and access to information?

Careful with this- since MLC just means multi, I’ve seen drives marketed as “3-bit MLC”, i.e. TLC

That was my line of thinking. However, my subdomain.chickenkiller.com frequently (but but universally) resolves to the IP of regular chickenkiller.com. I don’t believe it’s an issue with my config, since my previous domains (not run by josh) worked just fine until they folded.

Each domain is run independently. Unfortunately, I have the worst luck in choosing them. The past 3 I’ve used have folded, and the one I’m on now (by an established operator) isn’t reliable. Most endpoints fail to resolve the subdomain DNS, instead returning the parent IP.

You know how you need to test any backup solution? This is the same. Have anyone that you’re expecting to do this run through the process entirely from your documentation. If they can’t, adjust the doc/process until they can. Then include that with your will, or with other documents people will be looking through in the event of your death.

First, the copyright notice doesn’t really do much. Any copyright status, licensing, etc apply whether or not there’s a notice.

Second, if you created it, you have full control on how you license it. You can even use multiple licenses. It’s common to have GPL (or similar) for personal use, and commercial use being licensed separately for a fee.

If you didn’t create it (other contributors did), then each contribution is owned and copyrighted by each contributor. Presumably they have licensed their works under the GPL.

Do you have a specific reason to even include a copyright notice?