Welcome to inflation. If a price isn’t going up regularly someone is getting ripped off.

When my boss gives me a raise I always compare that to the yearly inflation rate - it has more than once turned what looks good into a loss for me. (I might accept it once in a while, but I’m looking for new jobs soon if they don’t fix)

What makes you think it is just one song? In the 1980s it was a mix tape that took the good tracks from several albums. With computers it is a playlist. Or more often it is a play random tracks from my large collection until I hit stop.

I do listen to just one song once in a while when that is all I have time for, or when some song comes to mind that I want to hear. However mostly it is a playlist that I created.

There are a few albums that are related collection and work best listened together, but most are just a bunch of songs and you can listen in any order.

Core or Scale? If running Core I’d say install plain FreeBSD on it. Even if scale I’d consider that in a full wipe - FreeBSD is great as a server and supports ZFS out of the box without problems.

Then grow a long beard (not optional, even if female) so you can be “the old guy who has seen it all”

There are two clipboards in X11 - but MMB pastes from the selection not the clipboard. I have never heard of the other clipboard being used for anything and I first heard of this more than 30 years ago. (I don’t know what wayland does about clipboards, butiit acts live X11)

Those are the easy way. You have to hide the excess hoses since you can’t cut to fit. They cost a lot more though to if you don’t mind the work you can save money getting the other kind (which requires an EPA certification - easy to get I’m told)

I would love to make a dashboard with something other than html. My house dashboard is slow, and I’m hoping that things can be better. Only time will tell.

until curl rewrites in electon and you don’t have enough ram to run it anymore

That is what I do - but there are a number of reasons it isn’t a good answer. Electric is a lot cheaper, and much better for the environment (My city is powered 100% via wind). However if I have to sit around waiting for my car to charge so I can move it on demand instead of doing those things I’m there to do the whole isn’t acceptable.

My city is full of level 2 chargers, and I get nasty messages when I use them because when my car is finally charged I’m in the middle of something else (I have a PHEV that only does level 2 charging, and I need a charge to get back home on electric only on the rare case I go downtown) Even with level 3 though, the time is long enough that you will need something else to do for that half an hour and nobody can plan that close. Most cars with level 3 charging have enough range that most people won’t need to charge on a normal day, but when you do you will need something to do in the mean time and if that something else isn’t about the time of a charge there is a problem.

inconsiderate people may leave their car plugged in for longer than needed.

This is a wrong take. It needs to be normal to leave your car plugged into a charger.

Cars take too long to charge for us to consider it reasonable for someone to stand next to their car waiting while it charges (even worse - as I write this the temperature is -17C, but even when things are nice). We need to expect that people will be doing something else while charging and only come out sometime latter to move their car. If someone is at work they can’t leave work until lunch time. If someone is at the symphony/theater it is impolite to leave when the car is done charging as it disturbs everyone else.

Of course if your car just as enough range to get back home so you don’t need to charge for normal trips that is better. However when someone needs a charger it should be considered normal to stay there for 6 hours, there needs to be enough to handle that. (obviously people making a road trip will disconnect as soon as the car is charged so they can continue on, but if you make the trip to a distance city for an event you may need to charge during the event to get back home).

The problem is “Evil” people who see rules now know what abuse they can get by with and they have incentive to find all the weird loopholes the the rest of us wouldn’t think of. I don’t know a good answer to this.

minis like the N100 when you are using it to do things has a lot more ability and uses a similar amount of watts (or can do a lot more for more for just a bit more watts). However when the box is just sitting there with the power on but otherwise doing nothing it uses more power than ARM based single board computers. So the real question is how much will they want to do when they are using it, and how often will that be. If they are watching movies/playing games for 16 hours a day the mini PC is the better answer and won’t really cost more energy to run. If they are leaving this on, but only using it for a couple hours per month than a device that uses less watts will save money.

NAS can be two different things.

NAS is just “network attached storage”: a computer that has a bunch of disks attached to your network. IF you put a single disk on your network and nfs/samba to share it you have created a simple NAS - I strongly recommend you put in more drives for redundancy, but that is all NAS is.

Often NAS is taken to mean not just the above, but a custom machine that does the above. The downside is these custom machines are often slow, and put weird hardware/software on them such that if the whole box breaks (as opposed to just a single disk failing which they are good at handling) you may not be able to recover anything. One variation of this you want more space and discover you can’t upgrade it at all. They are an easy way into NAS, but the downsides are such that I can’t recommend them anyway.

Many NAS work like that though. Hardware RAID always seems to work like that so if you get a fancy card that supports RAID you been make sure you have a good long term support contract that will be there for you when there are problems (if you are not paying hundreds of thousands per year you don’t have a good support contract)

Not all are that way. Many run ZFS which is great for this and you can replace broken hardware and recover. BTFS is commonly used as well, probably not as good as zfs but likely good enough.

I’ve been using fastmail for a long time for this now. I’ve been happy, not to expensive. I’m surprised they haven’t been recommended, normally when the question is asked there are a million fastmail recommendations

Changed my family dashboard from magic mirror to a home assistant dashboard. I’m missing some cute things, but the major functions work better, and I get some options that I didn’t before.

RaidZ1 is not the same as a mirror. I’m not sure if you are allowed to have Z1 with only 2 disks, but if you are you still shouldn’t because while it scales down that far it still does parity calculations and writes that to the second disk instead of just writing a copy of the data (the parity calculations probably result in the same data, but I doubt this is optimized)

ZFS snapshots are easy to settup. If you don’t notice that you deleted all the snapshots for a month you never will.

you still should have offsite backups for a fire, but the notion that raid isn’t backup is not really correct since for most people the situations that raid with snapshots isn’t enough protection will never occure and to the risk is acceptable. Plus raid is a lot easier to get right. For that matter if you have a backup but don’t have the password after the fire you don’t have a backup.

though if you rely on raid alone I’d want 3 disk redundancy.

Everything starts with what my family needs/uses. Jellyfin for media. Grocy to track which kid has done their chores. Home assistant to make a nice dashboard in the kitchen to see the family calendar (still on google) and the chores. I’ve tried a few other things, but those are the ones important to me.

I only have leagally owned movies. I’m technically violating some law but since I can show the judge the originals and they are not available outside myhome they won’t dare go after me - a jury won’t convict and even if one would I’m a perfect ‘normal man’ who proved the law is unjust. I won’t be as well known as Rosa Parks in history but I’d be a perfect story to rally around to get the las changed and they won’t risk that