KVMs usually jump from 2 inputs to 4. Ones that do 4 inputs and 4 monitors exist but you’re entering “enquire for price” territory.

Why do you need so many laptops/screens?

To me I’d consider Linux not standardized since anything outside the kernel can be swapped out. Want a GUI? There are competing standards, X vs Wayland, with multiple implementations with different feature sets. Want audio? There’s ALSA or OSS, then on top of those there is pulse audio, or jack, or pipewire. Multiple desktop environments, which don’t just change the look and feel but also how apps need to be written. Heck there are even multiple C/POSIX libraries that can be used.

It certainly can be a strength for flexibility, and distros attempt to create a stable and reliable setup of one set of systems.

I once had a coworker that used a mini PC instead of a laptop for work. Being lighter, and more powerful worked well for him.

My understanding is that each brand will contract out the design and manufacturing, with potentially totally different factories and people involved. So the same brand will have models that are built totally differently, in terms of quality and ethics. This happens from the cheapest no name products to big western brands. Make sure to check reviews for the specific model, and not blanket trust one brand to be ‘good’. Notebook check and robtech on youtube do mini PC reviews.

I feel you on the ethics side, and unfortunately it’s pretty difficult to ever avoid. You can try buying second hand, at least save something from landfill and get a bargain.

ZFS doesn’t have fsck because it already does the equivalent during import, reads and scrubs. Since it’s CoW and transaction based, it can rollback to a good state after power loss. So not only does it automatically check and fix things, it’s less likely to have a problem from power loss in the first place. I’ve used it on a home NAS for 10 years, survived many power outages without a UPS. Of course things can go terribly wrong and you end up with an unrecoverable dataset, and a UPS isn’t a bad idea for any computer if you want reliability.

Totally agree about mainline kernel inclusion, just makes everything easier and ZFS will always be a weird add-on in Linux.

I’m moving house this week and unearthed my galaxy invader 1000 handheld. Had to play a couple rounds on the spot! Apparently from 1980.

Didn’t YouTube remove the feature in 2020?

The only problem I run into is sites that use Bluetooth or USB APIs to talk to a local device. Both Firefox and Safari don’t implement them due to security concerns.

My partner worked for a local council. They reset your password every 90 days which prevented you from logging in via the VPN remotely. To fix it you’d call IT and they’ll demand you tell them your current password and new password so they can change it themselves on your behalf.

Even worse, requesting a work iphone meant filling out an IT support ticket. So that IT could set up your phone for you, the ticket demanded your work domain username and password, along with your personal apple account username and password.

It was meant in jest, I should have contrasted plain text / cipher text to be more clear. Though it’s a similar kind of extenstion to email technology that they are advocating against.

These folks want to read their emails in their terminal email client, and for you to cater to their limitations. If you use tuta and send them an email, tuta just emails them a link to view the message on tuta’s webapp. I’d say this anti-HTML group aren’t fans of that.

Not to argue semantics, but I would consider encryption in general is a change in message formatting. The client needs to change how the bytes are interpreted. It adds complexity, and clients may not support it, their exact arguments against HTML.

Thank god we have crypto bros like Sigma G and Sina_21st to get the inside scoop on the Chinese rural bank loan crisis.

To be fair, these folks are advocating for plain text emails, not surprising they are against encrypted emails.

I’ve been using my Sennheiser HD 598 s for over 10 years. I’d recommend anything the same shape/size: being large over ears means it doesn’t touch or squeeze your ears at all. Being open backed and velvet padded stop my ears getting hot and sweaty. Being wired saves weight, prevents lag/quality concerns and isn’t too big a deal in a stationary gaming situation.

I do need to use an external mic for chatting, which is not ideal if you’re gonna be always in voice chats when gaming. Dedicated gaming headsets tend to not sound as good for the same price, but can’t deny the convenience.

Here is a recent rundown of recommendations by audiophile youtubers for gaming headphones might be worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIwgVzSiZ68

I used to do the same. But some clients nowadays have IPv6 only nodes that I need to connect to, so I’ve had to enable v6.

With AWS now charging for v4 addresses, the need to at least running dual stack might pick up.

IPv6 isn’t just larger addresses, it was meant to totally remove the need for layer 2 / MAC addresses, bus networks, DHCP, and broadcasts. Since the plan was to get rid of the 12 byte ethernet header, the 24 byte increase in IP addresses would only be a 12 byte increase in header at the end of the day. WiFi wouldn’t need three MAC addresses in every packet. IPv6 only achieves it’s true potential with a complete switch over.

I personally don’t think that can ever happen. The opportunity to switch everyone over is absolutely long gone. IPv6 isn’t an extension of v4 or a compatible replacement, like ASCII to UTF-8. It’s more like X to Wayland. The protocol authors went “This is a mess we gotta rethink this from scratch”. But there’s so much already relying on the old protocol, and replacing it with something that doesn’t perfectly match features is difficult for little reward for users.

The increase in IPv6 nodes has mostly been due to mobile networks. The tragedy is they actually still mostly use layer 2 and bridge networking. IPv4 nor v6 can handle maintaining connections while addresses change. So they set it up so that you keep the same IP address as you travel and move between different towers. This is done with massive virtual layer 2 LANs across towers, with the IP routing happening at a central datacentre. IPv6 is simply used for the larger addresses, and none of the network/protocol simplifications it promised can be used.

Bitlocker getting circumvented on Windows 10 because the recovery partition is too small

What’s this about?

I’ve dabbled in a couple recently, xTTS v2 in Coqui sounds pretty good and is pretty quick. Especially if you use one of the built in voices. Has a weird “only for non commercial use” licence if that bothers you.

A lot of desktop motherboards have a slot for a M.2 WiFi card like that AX200. Usually though they already come with a card anyway. You can often also use the same ssd/HDDs going from laptop to desktop. CPU, RAM, and GPUs are different sizes and connectors though, and won’t be transferrable.

Main thing for choosing a mac is the personal preference for the OS / interface. Its not totally better than Windows, there’s pros and cons. You have to really want it to pay for the overpriced hardware. Even second hand they retain a lot resale value.

They can be a bit finicky. Make sure they are lined up then use a bit of pressure to click in. Careful they don’t move out of alignment when pressing down. People sometimes rip the sockets off when detaching, it’s quite a snug fit.

I found it easier to connect them on a flat table before screwing in the card.

Main thing is the lug width. You could get a few straps on the smaller side and they’ll fit inside bigger lugs, just not look ideal.

Something that can be worth buying in person, even a mall key/watch repair stall would have a variety of types and sizes on hand and can find you something suitable on the spot.

Huh annoying. You can run zdb -C TheMass To get more info about the pool and the disks in it. Might list enough disk detail to give you confidence it’s using the layout you want.

For me identifying disks usually ends up being unplugging them one by one and checking which shows OFFLINE. Could be worth the trouble to know for sure its specifying and using the disks.

In any case a good time to setup a backup for anything you can’t replace.