Happened to a friend if mine.

Once it went to court his lawyer made the cop look like a tool.

Still cost him a bunch, just not an actual DUI.

Also had cops arrest a friend who was a passenger in a car, and tried to give him a DUI, too. The judge blasted that cop pretty bad.

I think the nerd/tinker space today is stuff like self-hosting, local storage, return from cloud.

Apps that don’t phone home to someone else’s server, keeping your contacts, calendar, shopping list, etc on your own stuff.

We could, if someone cared to put in the effort to make that happen.

Be that “someone” .

Come on baby…

Light. My. Fire.

So you must use a 12 hour clock for this, not a 24 hour?

Having worked in a restaurant kitchen boiling many eggs, there must be more to this.

This is the method we used, and every egg in the same boil would be different, so clearly this method has little to do with it.

You need to tell us more about this fake plastic egg!!

HP has been up and down.

Years ago they were great, then they were shit, then they were good again for a short while.

I wouldn’t touch 'em today, but I’m a laptop snob and only go for the pro lines in Dell or Lenovo anymore. I have friends who spec systems for companies, and those have the least issues and are more maintainable than others.

Take apart some laptops, and you’ll come to appreciate the pro lines from Dell and Lenovo. I inherited an HP laptop, it was challenging to open without breaking stuff, and little is replaceable - the opposite of my Dell and Lenovos.

486sx…man,brinfing back some memories

I’d look at getting a used SFF (Small Form Factor) desktop for a LOT less than that Ugreen. I paid less than $50 for mine - at that price I can run a second one when I’m ready.

I’m currently running an old Dell SFF as my server, I’ve had Proxmox on it with 5 drives internally (2.5") with the OS on the NVME.

Initially it had 4GB of ram and ran Proxmox with ZFS just fine (and those drives were various ages and sizes).

It idles at 18w, not much more than the 12w my Pi Zero W idled at, but way more powerful and capable.

One drive failure means an array is degraded until resilvering finishes (unless you have hot spare, at least then the array isn’t degraded and silvering a new drive isn’t as risky).

Resilvering is an intensive process that can push other drives to fail.

I have a ZFS system that takes the better part if a day (24 hours) to resilver a 4TB drive in an 8TB five-drive array (single parity) that’s about 70% full. When uts resilvering I have to be confident my other data stores don’t fail (I have the data locally on 2 other drives and a cloud backup).

“Two in RAID” only means 2 when the arrays on on different systems and the replication isn’t instant. Otherwise it only protects against hardware failures and not against you fucking up (ask me how I know…).

If the arrays are on 2 separate systems in the same place, they’ll protect against independent hardware failures without a common cause (a drive dies, etc), but not against common threats like fire or electrical spikes.

Also, how long does it take to return one of those systems to fully functioning with all the data of the other? This is a risk all of us seem to overlook at times.

If you’re storing “critical data”, you want to look at redundancy (ie backup) and not expecting a single store to not have issues. Drives will fail, and if they fail in a RAID the entire store is at risk until the array is restored. If you don’t have hot spares it’s at even more risk while it’s rebuilding. ZFS is less sensitive to this than traditional RAID, but even it can’t magically restore data from thin air.

The typical recommendation for backup is 3-2-1 or a variation: 3 backups on 2 types of media (local/remote/cloud suffices) at least 1 off-site..

The link above discusses the 3-2-1-1-0 which I think is good to understand as 0 refers to verified backups. Unverified backups are no backups at all. It’s not unusual in the SMB space to do a test restore of a percentage of files monthly (Enterprise has entire teams and automation around testing).

Fabuloso mixed at 1 Oz per gallon of water. Great for getting the scum off the tub, cleans everything but glass. It’s cheap as hell.

Vinegar & water for glass cleaner (with a drop of dish soap). Cleans better than store bought.

Occasionally I’ll use a specific toilet bowl cleaner when minerals start building up. I get the bottle that squirts up under the rim because that’s where mineral buildup starts.

But really, just about any light cleaner works for a bathroom, I’ve used everything. Just don’t use abrasives until you know exactly what you have for materials. Many baths are plastics these days, which are easily scratched by abrasives.

I just use vinegar and water with a drop of dish detergent in the spray bottle for mirrors. Learned it from my grandparents, and it works better than any “blue” glass cleaner for pennies.

I’d be surprised if it could do even a gig.

Of you ever feel like you can’t find the right screws or it just doesn’t hold back together well, just Goop the bastard back together.

So much stuff in my life is now Gooped together - I even Gooped some drives into a desktop that lacked enough mount points.

That stuff is magic in a tube.

And it runs fine in a VM.

I have 3 external DVD drives - VM’s were the only way to use all 3 on a single machine. Really reduces rip times when I have a stack of discs.

The only concern I see here is the external drive. My experience has been that powered off drives fail more often than constantly-on drives. So my external drives are always powered on, I just run a replication script to them on a schedule.

But you do have good coverage, so that’s a small risk.

For stuff like movies I simply use replication as my backup.

Since I share media with fruends/family, I act as the central repository and replicate to them on a schedule (Mom on Monday, Friend 1 on Tuesday, etc), so I have a few days to catch an error. It’s not perfect but I check those replication logs weekly.

I also have 2 local replicas of media, so I’m pretty safe.