Buy multiple drives, setup some sort of raid, setup some sort of backup. Then set up a 2nd backup.

Done.

All drives from all manufacturers are going to fail at more or less the same rate (see: backblaze’s stats) and trying to buy a specific thing to avoid the death which is coming for all drives is, mostly, futile: at the absolute best you might see a single specific model to avoid, but that doesn’t mean entire product lines are bad.

I’m using some WD red drives which are pushing 8 years old, and some Seagate exos drives which are pushing 4, and so far no issues on any of the 7 drives.

Make sure, if you use hardware RAID, you know what happens if your controller dies.

Is the data in a format you can access it easily? Do you need a specific raid controller to be able to read it in the future? How are you going to get a new controller if you need it?

That’s a big reason why people nudge you to software raid: if you’re using md and doing a mirror, then that’ll work on any damn drive controller on earth that linux can talk to, and you don’t need to worry about how you’re getting your data back if a controller dies on you.

Well knowing Elon, he’s probably paying minimum wage and also forcing the guy to clean his toilets and bring him tendies.

And complaining the entire time about how the tendies doesn’t have enough honey mustard.

Ugh I always hated that phrase. Like, space age technology is ball point pens, Tang, and those MPET blankets you find in first aid kits. Oh and freeze dried ice cream.

It really really does not mean shit at this point.

Yeah. Those Durons were a stupidly good deal at the time since you could overclock the snot out of them and get a CPU on par with a top of the stack one for absolute pennies.

Unless they caught fire. But that mostly usually didn’t hapen all that often sometimes.

Like everything else on the internet, absolute shit I’m sorry to say.

The spam problem exists there, and if it’s not spam, it’s more than likely a complete scam.

I’ve quit trying to buy used stuff online outside of ebay (because, if nothing else, the level of interaction is much lower and if it’s a scam then you’ve got actual protections) and totally given up selling anything online anymore and just throw everything I don’t want away becasue I don’t want to deal with the headache of selling shit on these platforms.

The last try was a computer on Facebook marketplace which did, eventaully, sell: after something like 60 people asked questions and 4 or 5 people flaked out. It was very much not worth the $150 or whatever.

I’m using their T-Mobile rebrand, and it’s just as good as T-Mobile ever was, excepting you don’t get any 5G access.

Though, tbh, I don’t care, since I’m paying $5 a month for 500 minutes, 500 texts, and 500mb of data. 5G would be a total waste since, I mean, even the 4G stuff can eat all my data allocation in like 30 seconds anyways.

I’m not sure where this “wants single-file variants” comes from.

I was having issues with pirated audiobooks stopping playback, being unable to resume playback, and losing playback status and location all the damn time, though this was a while ago.

The suggestion was to take these random audiobooks and condense them into one file, instead of the 15 tracks per disk, 20 disks per book mess they were, and sure enough that completely fixed the problem.

If it’s no longer an issue, cool, but for a while playback from books in lots and lots and lots of parts was flaky as fuck.

Well, there’s one, but it requires dealing with an exceedingly shit company, so uh, not really?

I still strongly dislike a lot of the dynamics around them.

They’re still privacy nightmares, they’re still running black-box software that’s not auditable and doing who the fuck knows what in the basebands, and they’re still covered in sensors running apps that are trying to scrape every byte of that data to profile you and sell that data to anyone who asks.

But, ultimately, I was spending too much time trying to stand on a principle that wasn’t really doing anything (I still use computers, and the websites of most of the apps I was using before, and still having a huge amount of data ingested since I didn’t live in a cabin in the woods) other than making my own life more complicated and causing shit like missing invites to things because my phone just didn’t get the SMS, or resorted the arrival order, or failed to download a MMS message or whatever whereas everyone on a modern phone was like, fine.

So I won’t say I’m all-in, or that I like them, or that I’ve even changed my mind that they’re little spy rectangles that are making us all stupid, but uh, too much in modern life is making the assumption you have one to completely unplug without losing an awful lot.

It’s just endless little things:

• How do you do TOTP 2fa on a dumb phone? You really can’t.
• I have to keep two copies of my media library, because the smart devices can play flac, and the dumb devices can’t
• I also have to keep two copies of my audiobook library: the smart devices play from audiobookshelf, which wants single-file variants, and the dumb devices need to be split into small chunks
• Zero access to any of the home automation stuff on the dumb devices
• Dumb phones are limited to SMS and MMS, and that dramatically impacts your integration with people on smart devices using iMessage or RCS, and you’re basically that guy with the shit that’s fucking everything up for everyone else
• Calendar sync? Nope.
• Contact sync? Also nope.
• E-mail? Good luck with that - if you’re expecting something important, carry your laptop.
• Wifi hotspot? Not on the phone I had, so nevermind about carrying your laptop, won’t do you any good.
• Voice mail? Sure, but good lord is ye olde dial-a-thing-and-hit-7-wait-no-8-damnit-i-mean-6 voicemail shit. Visual voicemail is 10000% less horrible

Edit: Also:

• T9 texting. I kinda got okay again at it but would not say it’s preferred anymore

And on and on and on. None of those are dealbreakers on their own, but it’s always something that either you can’t do, or can’t quite do right, or is actively a problem for everyone else you’re interacting with and you just… end up with so many little annoyances you’re not sure doing this makes any sense.

Hah was coming here to say basically this: if you’re always tired after sleeping, go get a sleep study. If you do have sleep apnea, absolutely nothing short of medical intervention will make a meaningful difference, and it’s an easy place to start.

Seriously, when did The Verge get a paywall?

Wokelax, Wokeachu, Wokevee, Wokemander…

So have you looked at using a N95 filter in a respirator?

I don’t know if that’ll work for you, but they certainly stay in place much better than any mask, and there’s a wide variety of them that have the filter in various locations so maybe that’d be a better option?

You look a little bit Fallout while wearing them, but they’re super comfortable for hours (because that’s how people who wear them use them), cheap to replace the filter when the time comes, and they seal spectacularly well and are easy to fit.

I’d support that: the new excuses as to why a suspect escaped would be fantastic.

“Well, I would have caught him but my car died for some reason and I couldn’t get out.”

“Well, I would have caught him but I hit a bump and half my car fell off.”

“Well, I would have caught him, but my car caught fire and killed my partner.”

“Well, I would haved caught him but it was raining so my bumper fell off and punctured my tire.”

Question: how is LinkedIn useful to you?

For me it’s just a non-stop swarm of recruiters from India who want me to kindly listen to their offer of a job that pays less than I’d make picking up garbage, utter sociopaths dredging up some psychotic hustle culture nonsense, and previous people I’ve worked with/for asking for favors, which of course means free.

Is it somehow more useful for an actual business?

I wouldn’t argue with the dude; he’s got a clear case of bad-faith-itis. What you did was bad, so you shouldn’t have done it, but no I won’t tell you how to fix it.

The absolute best you could have done is cross-posted to a Mastodon/Bluesky/whatever account as well, but you can’t just always go around yanking the rug out underneath communities especially if you’re in a position where it’s not just lazy shitposting and worthless commentary.

…that said, you have moved anything you can to being posted somewhere in tandem riiiiiiight?

As with all things email, they probably really wanted to make sure that the mails were delivered and thus were using a commercial MTA to ensure that.

I’d wager, even at 20 or 30 or 40k a year, that’s way less than it’d cost to host infra and have at least two if not three engineers available 24/7 to maintain critical infra.

Looking at my mail, over the years I’ve gotten a couple hundred email from them around certificates and expirations (and other things), and if you assume there’s a couple million sites using these certs, I could easily see how you’d end up in a situation where this could scale in cost very very slowly, until it’s suddenly a major drain.

I’m just hopeful enough that ‘If you do this, you stand a very very good chance of completely destroying a national monument.’ is enough to get at least a few of the less-nutty Republicans to balk.

If nothing else, we love our monuments and symbols, and destroying one to put his face on it is proooobbbbaaaallllllly too far, still.