Doubletwist

Loved the Dreamcast. Other than the lack of DVD player, I still think it was better than the PS2.

Quite a few games that were released on both consoles looked better and played more smoothly on the Dreamcast than they did on the supposedly more powerful PS2. Dave Mirra BMX is one that immediately comes to mind. It was way better on the Dreamcast.

I have the same issue with Keepass2Android. I think the issue is with Android itself rather than the password app.

I use proxmox mail gateway (PMG) for my homelab, configured to relay through my Gmail domain using smtp auth.

I’ve also used PMG at the enterprise level. Never had an issue with it.

It’s postfix underneath.

The only stuff, that’s popular, that I have no opinion on is Babylon 5, mainly because I have not watched any of it

I highly recommend you watch it. Just keep in mind the first season (esp the first half) is tough, some bad dialog and acting. But it has important character and setting development.

The end of season 1 things get better, and by the first few episodes of season 2 you’ll be hooked.

At the end of the day, I bet you’ll acknowledge that B5 has BOTH some of the worst writing/acting you’ll see in a TV show, AND some of the best writing/acting you’ll ever see anywhere.

I just learned that Max streams the MotoGP races live. Thankfully we have Max as part of our can phone plan.

Biggest problem I see is its inability to embed images and other multimedia.

That’s one of its best features as far as I’m concerned, and one of the reasons I still use it every day.

Y’all must be doing something wrong because HW raid has been hot garbage for at least 20years. I’ve been using software raid (mdadm, ZFS) since before 2000 and have never had a problem that could be attributed to the software raid itself, while I’ve had all kinds of horrible things go wrong with HW raid. And that holds true not just at home but professionally with enterprise level systems as a SysAdmin.

With the exception of the (now rare) bare metal windows server, or the most basic boot drive mirroring for VMware (with important datastores on NAS/SAN which are using software raid underneath, with at most some limited HW assisted accelerators) , hardly anyone has trusted hardware raid for decades.

$500k/mo isn’t really even all that much in cloud costs. I did some work for a large company and just the PoC/development account for our project alone was $100k/mo.

Not only could it do full motion video, but it could, on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX CPU, rotate an OpenGL cube on any axis with a different video running on all six sides, and do so smoothly and without any lag or video stuttering. It was incredible what they were able to do back then. Hell I’m not entirely convinced Windows could pull that off now!

I still have a (pirated) copy of this. I loved this utility back in the day. Except when it showed me that my 40MB MFM hard drive was about the same speed as a parallel port Zip drive.

What qualifies as “basic necessities”?

I’m not sure minimum wage has ever been enough for most people to afford an apartment on their own.

Certainly in the early 90s, even in a low cost of living area, I was working 2 jobs (one part time but a bit over minimum wage) in order to share a 500sqft, 1br apartment with a friend.

And part of the problem with trying to set a level of basic necessities (or a ‘living wage’) is that you have to account for a TON of external factors.

For example, nobody is building affordable, reasonably sized apartments or houses any more. They only want to build 2000sqft+ houses, or 1000+sqft apartments with all the trimmings and amenities. That certainly raises the cost of living.

By way of comparison, my grandparents raised 3 kids in a 998sqft 2-story duplex. It’s wasn’t large but it was a good family neighborhood with a park across the street. And they had 1 smallish (for the era) car. So why does everyone need a bajillion square feet and 2 cars, including a massive SUV to raise their 1 or 2 kids these days? (2 cars I get with both parents working these days, but the trucks and SUVs I see many low income families driving is ridiculous).

And is it fair for the minimum wage to have to be set to a rate that subsidizes the builders who choose to only build that bigger, more expensive housing.

We definitely need changes in the way this is all handled, but it’s not a simple thing. To truly solve the issue will require significant changes in our social structure and philosophy.

I like Futurama. But I can’t stand Lower Decks. I don’t know what it is, I just find it annoying and wildly unfunny.

I’m pretty sure you can make them set the modem/router to bridge mode and run your own router. If it’s cable, you can also buy your own non-router cable modem, then use whatever router you like behind it.

I’ve been using option 1 for many many years. It lets me keep control of the encryption, and it’s accessible just about anywhere.

UPSes aren’t meant to keep things running for long periods of time.

If you’re trying to keep things on for hours, you need a generator. Then the UPS just needs to keep things running until the generator comes online.

I suspect it’ll be a lot cheaper to get a small generator than it would be to buy enough UPS and batteries to run things for multiple hours.

Mostly in a state of stability at the moment.

I recently migrated off of a pair of ESXi servers, and consolidated down to just put my VMs on my TrueNAS Scale server, primarily to save power and generation so that I would only be running two servers instead of four. It’s not as fancy or flexible, but the VMs run and do what I need.

So now my lab consists of:

• 1 Dell R620 w/8x 1TB HDD in RAIDZ2 - backups (backuppc)
• 1 Dell R620 w/8x 2TB SSD in RAIDZ2 + JBOD w/16x 3TB HDD in 2xRAIDZ2 pool - NAS + VMs for Plex, k8s, ansible/terraform, etc. (TrueNAS Scale)
• Unifi UDMPro + 3APs
• Unifi 10Gb Aggregation Switch
• Unifi 24-port POE switch standard

I then have another pair of R620s, plus 2 more JBOD trays and disks as cold spares. I may run the servers some during the winter, but it’s too hot in the garage closet in the summer to run them all without additional cooling.

Even as someone who has disliked MS since the mid-90s, I am willing to admit they have made some good products. The Intellimouse 2.0 was one of the best mice I’ve ever used. It was my main mouse for something like a decade, and even now, almost 25 years later, it still works as a backup mouse when I need it for something in my homelab.

The problem isn’t 4k vs 1080p. I have a separate library for my 4k items which isn’t accessible remotely.

The problem is twofold:

1. My uplink speeds suck, so often a 1080p file can’t stream remotely without being transcoded down to 720p.

2. Almost everything I have is encoded to x265, and many Roku devices don’t support that, thus causing media to be transcoded even locally. (The device I use for 4k stuff does but other TVs in the house currently use devices such don’t)

Also, I’m not just running this on a raspberry pi with a single disc. I have over 1500 movies, and 200 TV series already taking up over 30 terabytes on a RAIDZ2 server. So it’s not just a simple matter of throwing an " extra fifty bucks" at it.

Frankly, with everything that’s running in my home lab, the added electricity in CPU power to transcode is barely a rounding error.

Is it possible for me to arrange things so that nothing ever needs to transcode? Sure, but it would be far more trouble and cost than it’s worth at this time.

Not everyone has the same needs or restrictions.

That’s assuming you can afford the storage to store multiple copies of your media.