… That sounds interesting. Especially if it can go and fetch all of the installers for me to have a local repo of my own.

The deduping is a little difficult. Obv matching files are caught with regular dedupe tools, but I’ve been meaning to make a script to use fingerprinting (dejavu is the library I think?) to find matches. Problem is the fingerprints are about as big as the music files themselves.

“unsorted” folder contains input. “Music” folder has full library; any imports must go through beets. rsync to remote backups; one scripted/automatic, one manual & password-protected. Restores (needed once or twice) are done with beets import, but whatever flag that does “just import, don’t tag”

I never do. But you could look through the list for anything that sounds related to whatever you’re installing the package for, e.g. If you’re installing a generic image processor and there is an extension for PDFs and you happen to be trying to process some PDFs, then there you go. By extension you could also research every recommended package but that feels like one heck of a rabbit hole to go down.

… I have no idea but I would imagine there’s a large overlap with the vacuums

Some Canadian politicians made a fuss about it but walked that back. I don’t know of any actual national bans, and most people aren’t going to know what it is at a glance anyway. Worst I can think of is the trend of some politician events banning “flipper zeroes and raspberry pis” (which is also controversial/stupid) so maybe don’t take it with you if you’re business travel involves political rallies.

Yeah it started at $169

It has gone up $30, which isn’t so bad relatively.

Flipper zero.

At the very least it has built-in universal power, volume, channel, and maybe some other buttons. Now that I think about it though, I bet I could make a companion app so your phone acts like the TV remote and sends the signal over the flipper via Bluetooth.

Plus you can store your hotel key, garage remote, and who knows what else in it. It’s a really cool little tool to have.

Yeah (fully agree) but it would point out each of the hops the user goes through before reaching home, yes? I’m just trying to help visualize where all the bottlenecks could be

Apologies for the lack of detail but I want to make sure you know about the tool traceroute. The speed at which you connect depends on every node between your remote location and home, plus there will be some overhead with whatever vpn is involved.

At some point, you gotta just accept that things are gone and start hunting for the next radroach to eat. I guess the corpo speak for this is acceptable losses and/or risk management.

In the most extreme cases, the final backup of my most important files are on my phone. With all the compromises we’re forced to make there, I still refuse to buy one without an SD card slot, so I have swappable 1TB with me at all times. Importantly, it’s also not the Source of Truth, so if it’s lost I’m still recoverable, but if it’s the last piece of electronics above sea level at least I still have that.

But for power management, I just have some UPSes that sustain a graceful shutdown and that’s about it. If I’m on the lam, I would rather the 20TB of manga and anarchist zines be destroyed (read: crypto keys lost) than try to figure out how to carry it with me. Maybe the offsite backup strategy will finally get tested once I’ve established an alternate identity.

I love how, in the time it took me to tell that story, other people gave the same answer in a much more straightforward manner.

Okay, so… Mechanical drive failure sucks. You may not be completely out of luck, though.

First thing to try would be throwing it in a bag of rice and freezing it. The rice is just to help prevent condensation. In theory, the contraction from the freezing temperatures can help with some physical clearances or something like that.

Now… Definitely try that before this next step. In fact, try literally anything and everything you can before this next step. It is a stupid thing to do and I should probably be downvoted for even suggesting it.

But… I had an early iPod with a mechanical hard drive which I thought was dead. I was saving up money to send it off to be serviced because the warranty had expired. It was sitting on the top of my dresser. A friend came over and knocked it off, he picked it up and showed it to me, booting up and running just fine. Some months later it started clicking again. I weighed my options, and eventually I dropped it on the floor on purpose, picked it up and held the power button, and it came on without issue. Some time after that, My laptop hard drive started behaving similarly. Guess what? Removed the drive, banged it against my knee or something, stuck it back in the computer, runs without issue.

I am still not explicitly suggesting this. Those platters inside are made of glass and there is a very, very small gap between the surface where the data is stored and the needles which are doing the reading / writing. You cannot do this carefully enough to ensure that you won’t shatter a platter or ram a needle into the metal substrate. But if you have nothing to lose… maybe some concussive engineering can help.

Got access to a 3d printer?

If not, how do you feel about cardboard?

I’m sure you can find a keyboard for cheap/free, either USB or Bluetooth. Electrically, I feel like the only thing you’re missing is battery management, to which there are several options available for the pi.

I can talk plenty of shit about Apple and MacOS, but I did neither in my previous post. If your use case is not Linux then stick with not-Linux.

If your talking about giving up on Asahi because Apple isn’t playing nice … Yeah, I wouldn’t hold your breath on that one. The reason Linux worked on m1 and m2 is because Apple didn’t care, not because they wanted to be compatible; and now that their hardware is incompatible, they still don’t care.

Framework is also good. I think some other companies also treat Linux as a first class citizen. Even Dell will sell Linux supported laptops, or at least has before.

Personally, the idea of “extending the life” by installing Linux is foreign to me because I immediately put Linux on any hardware I get anyway. Treating Linux as the goal instead of the last resort makes for a much more acclimated environment.

How old we talking? I personally wouldn’t go further back than 2000 series rtx. A friend has had good luck with Intel GPUs for ‘cheap’.

No, you absolutely cannot scale horizontally for speed. VRAM is king, with local RAM being swappable with major speed penalties. SSD is even slower than that and all those are orders of magnitude faster than ant Ethernet you’ll be connecting boxes together with. That’s not to say clustering isn’t an option, just that speed is going to be worse the more you scale out like that.

I’ve heard that yes this is safe, though I’ve only done this with automotive stuff personally