I do it with my wife. For us, it’s a way of:

• Learning about the other’s day and what they do - whether that’s work or pleasure. I think that’s a big part of being in a relationship.
• If something’s happened that has made one of us happy/sad, sharing that helps us support the other. It also lets them know when there’s something going on that might affect our relationship. Even if they can’t help, it’s good to know there’s a problem so they don’t think it’s about them when I’m unduly quiet or down.
• As someone who sometimes doesn’t understand things obvious to others, it can be handy for a second opinion, or ask what they thought was meant. It also helps me post-process the day’s events and square them away.

If I didn’t have an SO, I’d probably do the same with my dog; although it might be a bit more one sided.

I work four days a week on a remote windows vm. It has everything I need, and I remote from /that/ onto whatever other vm I might need. I connect over a vpn using, well, anything. As you’ve pointed out, the local machine doesn’t need much in the way of specs, although in my case I have three monitors - all given over to the remote, and it’s a clean way to separate work’s environment and network from my own and it’s a very common work pattern. The hypervisor there is vmware, but that doesn’t matter.

But… Gaming is a different. There is latency over the conn, and audio/graphic lag would make FPS and gpu-heavy games particularly poor. I don’t know of a way to totally overcome that, although game-streaming services exist, so presumably it is possible.

We’re very keen on ours in England too. Re-enactments are a big community and some take a lot of trouble to be accurate. (Apart from Derek who forgets to take off his digital watch)

I think it has a genuine part to play in bringing history to life, especially when done in old castles where kids especially seem to really ‘get’ it. History is often taught very badly - dry, dull and boring - sitting in a classroom being spoken at with a long list of names and dates. Anything that makes it more interesting has to be good.

The alternative is burying history, isn’t it? And that’s a dark path to tread, my friend. A very dark path.

AI doesn’t produce anything new.

Many humans don’t, either.

Great tool. It’s also leveraged by pinchflat, where you add Youtube channels via a webui and it downloads their videos and adds them to Jellyfin.

It is a democracy, yes.

The government is elected to represent its people. Annoying to us as it is, a tiny percentage of people [1] signing an online petition does not represent the people. There are an awful lot who think this new law is a good thing. [2]

[1] Yes. Fight me on this. 404k signatures out of 70million population = 0.58% opposed this enough to sign it.

[2] Mostly parents imo, and people who don’t understand the significant fraud risk involved. Those who haven’t been impacted yet, and those who enjoy other people being upset. Yes, I think this is a stupid law and the methods used even worse, but that doesn’t stop a democracy being a democracy

so something like RAID 4, 5, 6, or 10 is a great start.

Sorry - whilst most of your advice is great, this is a bit misleading.

• RAID 4 is very rarely used. It’s not a particularly safe or efficient use of striping, and was replaced by 5 shortly after it was invented.

• RAID 5 itself is now strongly discouraged for large arrays. (Google, “don’t use raid 5 for large arrays” for literally millions of pages explaining this, but it basically boils down to; “If a drive fails, the chance of a second drive failing whilst rebuilding is very high”)

But 6 is good if you’ve got enough drives and 10 (1+0) is also a fairly well regarded method for arrays of equal-numbered arrays.

I’m confused that you’re talking of buying 20tb SSDs - you must be very rich. Spinny drives are more usually used in homelab archive RAIDs since they are more cost effective at large size and RAID offsets some of the slowness associated with them. I’m going to assume you meant HDDs not SSDs, but the advice applies to both if I’m wrong about that.

Yes, you will want to RAID them. That gives some protection against individual drive failure, and yes, absolutely that is a concern. Whilst the chance of drives failing these days is less than it was, they still do fail without warning, even when relatively new, and because of the bigger sizes, the consequences are greater.

The alternative to RAID is JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) which means lots of individual drives being presented, each with their true size, in multiple shares. Most folk don’t want that.

What RAID level you choose depends on:

1. How many drives you fit. 4+ is good, and “more smaller” is better than “fewer larger” for safety, although the compromise is an extra 10watts or so of power per drive.
2. Current best practice; Don’t use RAIDs 0 or 5 on large arrays. (0 means exponential increase of data loss. 5 is strongly discouraged due to rebuild times of large disks) 6 is good if you have enough disks. 1+0 (mirrored and striped) is reasonable, and the choice I made for mine.
3. The hardware you’re using. Whether a linux PC or a bespoke NAS tool. Whilst the RAID levels are similar, the tools used vary a lot.

Notes:

• Also, be realistic about the space you need. Don’t over-size. Plan for 3-5 years growth, by then you’ll be wanting to change because of speed changes or drive failure.
• Some raid types slow down writing of data, some speed it up. Most are much faster at READing data.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels gives some explanation of the types.
• Google for “RAID CALCULATOR” for lots of free websites that allow you to see what space different sized drives give you with different RAID levels.
• Do not omit a strong backup strategy. RAID only protects against some types of hardware failure. A lightning strike, fire, rogue bios or software update, the host dying with an incompatible raid system. Buy disks for backups that aren’t in your RAID. (Good branded USB 3 disk and caddies are sensible). Automate backups if you can. Backup only what’s not easily replaceable.
• I wrote some thoughts on backups here.

If there’s no errors on the host, that points more strongly at a problem with the drives, their power, or the usb cable, imo.

What you have, @basketugly, is a keenness to learn. Hold onto that, it’ll pay you dividends throughout your life.

I’m guessing here because you didn’t give the exact error message you’re seeing - but two external SSD’s - should be fine for almost anything - PROVIDED they have sufficient power. Check the power needs of the enclosure and drive, and then what your S12/13 is supplying to the USB ports. You might need an additional power supply or powered hub that gives them enough beef.

Or the USB lead itself is pants - that’s definitely a possibility.

No. The older I get, the more things I realise that I know nothing about. You might learn one thing, but that knowledge leads you to three more things that you didn’t even knew existed. Ignorance is exponential that way.

I do miss those childhood years when you thought your parents had all the answers and all you had to do was to ask.

And I miss the teenage years when I knew everything and all the answers were absolute black and white.

I believe in my own ignorance.

I think this is something that many of us only learn with age, and reminders of how short life actually is.

Saving money for a rainy day is sensible, but you can get really locked into that mentality to the point where you don’t actually realise the roof’s leaking because you didn’t keep on top of the repairs.

I don’t know what prosody is, but my go-to for hosting anything behind a cgnat that needs incoming connections is to use cloudflare tunnel. Free, reliable, lightweight.

You have no local network access to it at all? (WOL will work across the subnet, you don’t need to connect directly to it)

If genuinely not (and I’d be surprised if that is the case) add another nic of any sort (cheap) for WOL, or use something like Switchbot?

You would need a third device monitoring both for this edge case. Once the server has been told to shut down, it’s going to shut down.

The third device (also on the UPS, like an Rpi or ESP) can then check for power availability through the UPS and whatever logic you want to apply, can then use wake on lan to the server to power it up once it shuts down.

You need to make your own plan about what’s important to you. Don’t waste time backing up stuff you can quickly download again - like docker images. Just know where the stuff is that you care about (such as any mounted volumes in docker with your own data on) and back that up, and make everything automated. If you do it manually, chances are you’ll gradually stop doing them.

I wrote some things about properly backing up data that may be of use.

are we just amusing ourselves until death?

Yes, exactly that. There is nothing afterwards, and the fact that we’re clinging to the surface of a rock flying through an infinite universe where we could be wiped out any second and never be able to do anything about it does rather make everything seem rather pointless.

And whilst you could be depressed about that, there’s still a lot of pretty awesome things to do that amusing with. Nature is beautiful. The world and its geology is beautiful. Evolution is beautiful. Science is beautiful. Maths is beautiful (if you have the sort of mind that appreciates it). Learning about these things and experiencing them is beautiful. And so on. Even most people all over the world are pretty good most of the time, despite what some other people want you to believe.

And honestly, accepting there’s no greater purpose is remarkably freeing. When something happens, it’s just bad luck. It’s not some greater power punishing you, it’s not because you did something wrong (within reason - getting hit by a bus because you crossed the road without looking is really pushing the concept).

I use AHK a lot at work, and my favourite is a macro that prints the date and my initials. I’m an admin and I use that thing dozens or hundreds of times a day when editing code, configs and notes.

Eg: # Changed in line with CVEnnnn - 20240713DD

You could do it for free. Take the guts out of your old PC, leave the HDD’s in there and the existing PSU. Extend the sata cables through to your MiniPC.

If the PSU won’t fire up, then there’s a couple of pins in the main block you can jumper - or fit a momentary switch to - to act as a switch.

The old PSU will still be reasonable efficient, since power is not wasted except as heat, and it shouldn’t get hot running just the hdd’s. 3.5 hdd’s use around 8-20watt each, depending on spindle speed, so at most it’s 100w at startup, but probably settle down to ~40 for the drives.

Or - yes, those things you linked will work too, but they’re basically doing the same job as the above.