• 15 Posts
  • 169 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • The last I read, de minimis still applied. I didn’t know until now that was done with.

    As an avid collector of vinyl records: FUCK! I’ve got no problem sending $50 to a European artist who’s selling a limited run of records out of their living room. Hell, if it’s an artist I really like, I’ll spend $70. I’m not about to spend $70 and the artist get half of it.

    Spending ludicrous amounts of cash of 12-inch pieces of plastic is totally fine with me, but I want my money going to the artist who’s making the music I love, not a government I voted against.







  • I generally buy almost everything online, but clothes are one exception to that. I generally have 1 or 2 brands of clothes I normally purchase, but even within those two brands, size can vary quite a bit, especially after they’ve been washed a few times.

    I can buy two different size 36 pants from my favorite brand, and after washing, one fits comfortably, and the other only fits if I leave them unbuttoned. Being able to test them in-person at least gives me a general idea of if they’re still going to fit after they go through the dryer.


  • You got an incredible deal on your tape drive. For LTO8 drives, I’m seeing “for parts only” drives sold for around $500. I’d be willing to throw away $100 or $200 on the possibility that I could repair a drive; $500 is a bit too much. It looks like LTO6 is more around what my budget would be.; it would require a much larger number of tapes, but not excessively so.

    I remember when BD-R was a reasonable solution for backup. There’s no way that’s true now. It really seems like hard drive capacity has far outpaced removable media. If most people are streaming everything, those of us who actually want to save their data locally are really the minority these days. There’s just not as much of a compelling reason for companies to develop cheap high-capacity removable discs.

    I’m sure I’ll invest in a tape backup solution eventually, but for now, at least I have ZFS with paranoid RAIDZ.


  • What kind of tape drive are you using? My array isn’t as large as yours (120tb physical), but it’s big enough that my only real options for backup are tape or a whole secondary array for just backup.

    Based on what I’ve seen, my options are a prohibitively large number tapes with an older LTO standard or prohibitively expensive tapes with a newer LTO standard.

    My current backup strategy consists of automated backups to Backblaze B2 for the really important stuff like personal documents or projects and hoping my ZFS array doesn’t fail for everything else.




  • I understand the need for security in a corporate setting. When my brand new company laptop has so much nannyware that it’s slower out of the box than my 20-year-old netbook that I dug out of a box in the attic, something is very wrong, though.

    I firmly believe that IT departments come up with new ideas for “hardening” their default OS installation and implement them in a vacuum. You end up with a barely-usable machine because every single IT person with a “good idea” has infected it with their software package of choice, and nobody is considering the cumulative effect.


  • This really highlights part of the beauty of open source code, though. You usually have plenty of options for large well-maintained projects. If an obscure, abandoned project fits your needs better, you’re free to inspect the code, modify it as you see fit, and use it.

    On the other hand, when Windows 10 goes end-of-life, I have no option to fork it and use it as a custom project. I can switch to Windows 11 (zero chance of this happening), use an outdated version of Windows 10, or convert to Linux.





  • This makes me wonder why the point of this was. What does China gain by severing a communications cable? Traffic is just going to be re-routed over other links, so all they’re really doing is marginally slowing down internet connectivity in the region.

    Is this just a way to send a message that they’re willing do damage communication infrastructure?